Word: kelman
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This critique of Communism usually centers around two factors: the great extent to which individual freedom is limited in these nations and their lower standards of living. Although most progressive anti-Communists place greater emphasis on the absence of personal liberty, Kelman reverses the priorities. About 80 per cent of the book's analysis is devoted to recounting the economic woes of East Germany: the food tastes horrible, slacks come in off-blue but not deep blue. The poor East Germans don't even have suntan lotion...
These perceptions are interesting and perhaps even true, although Kelman's botched explanation of the Harvard strike renders suspect anything else he attempts to interpret. What is particularly galling is not the analysis itself, but its central focus in Kelman's political view. Rabid anti-Communism analytically divides the globe into the Free World/Communist Bloc opposition Kelman's elders have seemingly abandoned. Because the Communist enemy is so evil for Kelman, it follows that America must be virtuous, in small ways as well as substantial ones. Witness: Kelman enters an East German supermart and the place looks dull. "I longed...
THIS IS INDEED SAD, but when Kelman turns to political analysis, his version of America approximates a high school civics lesson. He explains to an attentive East German that America has problems: unemployment, medical care, urban planning, and something called "the Negro problem." "But," he explains optimistically, "we can talk about our problems, and put pressure on the government to solve them." One wonders what the victims of "the Negro problem," whose rebellions in the late sixties dwarfed the famous 1953 East German riots to which Kelman insistently refers, would say about that...
This kind of specious comparative analysis underlies the analytical parts of the book. Kelman evidently sees himself as a modern Tocqueville, journeying to what he describes as the Communist future in East Germany to warn Americans that they are better off with what they have--nice consumer goods in large quantities, and, incidentally, text-book freedom. When Kelman crosses over to West Germany, he ritually cements his warm relationship with America by self-consciously buying a Coca-Cola...
...hazy analysis in Behind the Berlin Wall would be faulty from any source, but coming from a professed socialist, it is particularly embarrassing. While Kelman was playing spy in East Germany in 1971, his freedom-loving homeland was sending waves of bombers over Laos and much of Vietnam, attempting to annihilate both a people and a just revolution. The American prosperity Kelman lauded, as usual, was getting new infusions from the Third World, while citizens attempting to 'pressure their government' to end the Vietnam aggression often found themselves in jails. Working people in Detroit and Cleveland trudged...