Democrat

One Earth, Four or Five Worlds: Reflections on Contemporary History.
by Octavio Paz.
Translated by Helen R. Lane. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 224 pp. $14.95.

The Mexican poet and thinker Octavio Paz has distinguished himself for decades not only by his intelligence and eloquence but by the breadth of his interests. In addition to his poetic works, he has brought out two volumes of philosophical and sociological reflections on Mexico; he has written regularly on contemporary philosophical and literary themes; and he has been a frequent commentator on politics. In this volume of political essays, he examines the current state of global affairs, particularly as it pertains to Latin America.

Two positions separate Paz from the general run of Latin American intellectuals. He is hostile to the Soviet Union and to those who ally themselves with it; and, though often a critic of the United States, he is a friendly and generous critic.

Paz’s opposition to the Soviet Union is deep and substantial. It has none of that incantatory quality one so frequently observes among those who criticize the Soviet Union and then go on to other matters as if its presence in global affairs were without consequence. Paz sees the Soviet Union as totalitarian and expansionist. Although he hopes and believes that war with it can be averted, he does not think that the Soviet Union will ever accept a definitive international settlement. In a wonderfully precise formulation he states:

The Russians do not want war but neither do they desire peace—what they seek is victory. Russian policy is consistent, persevering, astute, and unyielding.

Nor does Paz believe that Communism improves with travel. Unlike those apologists who discover a moral and political distance between the Communist party of the Soviet Union and Communist parties throughout the world, Paz argues that all Communist parties share a political vision that is hostile to democracy and to freedom. European Communists, he contends, will not have broken with their past until they cease to regard the Soviet Union as a socialist nation and begin to practice internal democracy in their own parties. “They must,” he insists, “begin by practicing democracy at home and denouncing tyrants wherever they may be, in Chile, or in Vietnam, in Cuba or in Iran.” And Paz has this to say of the Sandinistas:

In the midst of a bloody civil war, El Salvador held elections. . . . If political freedom is not a luxury for El Salvador but a vital concern of its people, why is it not an equally vital concern of the people of Nicaragua?

If this uncompromising anti-Communism is not often evident among Latin American intellectuals—it is, after all, not that common among our own intellectuals—Paz’s willingness to defend Western democracies, including the United States, has to be viewed as a singular act of courage. That is why his criticisms of American policies, which are clearly made in good faith and are not generated by reflexive anti-Americanism, deserve to be weighed carefully.

One curious quality of Paz’s brief against American foreign policy is that it seems to lack a coherent foundation. Often, his criticisms seem to issue from what would in the United States be a clearly conservative position. Thus, he finds American policy to be wavering, inconsistent, and subject to the ever-changing currents of domestic politics. In other words, our conduct of foreign affairs is inhibited by our democratic institutions. Alhough he is constant in his support for democracy, Paz, like Henry Kissinger, believes that a central issue for the government of the United States is “to find, within the plurality and diversity of wills and interests, a unity of purpose and a unity of action.”

Another “conservative” aspect of Paz’s thought can be seen in his condemnation of liberal and left-wing intellectuals for their failure to appreciate the awful nature of Communist regimes. He speaks of the “naiveté bordering on complicity of liberals.” Although he has a certain moral sympathy for the critics of the Vietnamese war, he nevertheless savages them for their failure to understand the political and human consequences of a Communist victory. There was no excuse, he writes, for liberals to have been

so surprised at the outcome of the conflict: the installation of a military-bureaucratic dictatorship in Vietnam, the mass murders under Pol Pot, the occupation of Cambodia and Laos by Vietnamese troops, the punitive expedition by the Chinese, and, in recent days, the hostilities between Vietnam and Thailand. And today, confronted by the situation in Central America, liberals mouth the same simplistic nonsense.

But if statements like these would seem to assign Paz to the political Right, with equal frequency he voices criticisms which flow from a social-democratic position. The United States, Paz charges, has acted wrongly and destructively in Latin America. It has pursued its interests short-sightedly. It has obstructed modernization, favored dictatorships, and corrupted political institutions. In short, the United States has been an enemy of democracy and equality.

These are familiar arguments, the points upon which, for decades, the debate over the ends and means of American foreign policy has turned. What makes Paz’s presentation fascinating is that he offers in support of his position an intriguing analysis that is as useful to the case he is attacking as it is to his own.

Since their independence, Paz observes, Latin American nations have universally recognized democracy as the only legitimate form of government. Even dictators at the head of stable, long-standing regimes have presented themselves as transient interruptions of a legitimate democratic tradition. Nor does Paz take such protestations as evidence of hypocrisy or cynicism. Dictatorship in Latin America can never present itself as anything other than an expedient, for it cannot evoke the citizens’ deepest loyalties.

Here, in Paz’s judgment, is where Fidel Castro has accomplished his greatest transformation in Latin American politics. It was Castro, Paz believes, who not only brought totalitarianism to the Americas, not only introduced Soviet arms and Soviet policies into the area, and not only serves as a vehicle for Communist expansion, but who for the first time has convinced large numbers of Latin Americans of the possibility of a legitimate government other than democracy. Castro substituted a revolutionary for a democratic legitimacy.

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Thus, Paz contends, there are now two political systems, democracy and Communism, competing for the loyalties of the peoples of Latin America. Dictatorships are simply not in the running. For this reason, he asserts, the United States is deluding itself whenever it perceives in a dictatorship a bulwark against Communism. In fact, dictatorships actually increase the opportunities for Communism by replacing the only kind of government, democracy, that can effectively contend with the Communists:

The supposed historical justification of dictatorships is collapsing: by doing away with democratic rule, they pave the way for totalitarian attack. . . . The only effective defense against totalitarianism is democratic legitimacy.

In his conclusion, Paz thus joins with the position taken by liberals in the United States over the last twenty years. It is interesting to note, however, that this analysis also offers unintended support to the position associated in the United States with Jeane Kirkpatrick. Like her, Paz accepts the critical distinction between traditional dictatorships and modern totalitarian systems. If Mrs. Kirkpatrick’s argument turns in part on the question of which kind of government is more likely to evolve into a democracy, Paz’s analysis suggests that dictatorships in Latin America have already conceded the issue. “None of our dictators,” he writes, “not even the most brazen of them, has ever denied the historical legitimacy of democracy.” Moreover, Paz implicitly agrees with Mrs. Kirkpatrick that Communist governments are inevitably going to attempt to export their system. They will become, in his words, “armed agents of an imperial power.”

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There is, however, an unrealistic air to Paz’s discussion, with its implicit suggestion that if only the United States stopped supporting dictatorships, we would be surrounded by democracies. The facts often are other than we would like them to be. The question usually posed to our government is what kind of relations we will have with governments that are not to our liking. The alternative, for us, is isolation. If we cannot help friendly governments to become democratic, we can at least help them to preserve their independence in the hope of better days for them and for us.

The irony is that following Paz’s advice would require us to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries on a scale that would confirm the demonic visions of America’s most bitter critics. Moreover, once one gets down to real cases, it turns out that it is not democracies that we are asked to support. Paz, for instance, charges that our hostile policies toward Castro drove him into the arms of the Soviet Union. Let us assume for argument’s sake that this is true (although solid historical evidence disproves it). Whatever Castro was at the beginning of his reign, he was not a democrat. And so, in effect what Paz suggests is that we should have supported a dictatorial regime in order to prevent the spread of Soviet power. That is to say, we should have pursued precisely the kind of policy for which we are regularly attacked when the dictatorships in question are of the right-wing variety. One can compile a fairly interesting list of instances in the last thirty years in which liberal opinion castigated the United States for supporting dictators and offered as alternatives such figures as Castro, Khomeini, Ortega.

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Similar problems arise when one turns to the social and economic side of Paz’s criticism. Here as elsewhere Paz evinces sympathy for the American system and respect for what it has accomplished. But the United States, he says, has not done what it could to create a more equitable distribution of wealth among nations:

Since U.S. plutocracy . . . admittedly created abundance, it is able to lessen and lighten the burden of unjust differences between individuals and classes. But it has done so by shifting the most scandalous inequalities from the national scene to the international: the underdeveloped countries. . . . Money not only oppresses, it also corrupts. And it corrupts rich and poor alike.

Perhaps the gentlest response to this is that the money which corrupts and oppresses is also the source of the abundance that creates the conditions for economic equity. And as for the “shifting” of inequality to the international scene, one would have thought that the voluminous and definitive writings of P.T. Bauer on the economics of development, buttressed by such acute analysts of the Latin American scene as Carlos Rangel and Luis Burstin, would have once and for all dispelled this notion as the myth that it is.

Paz, at least, does not claim that Communism does better. He points out that before Castro, Cuba was criticized for its dependence on the sugar crops and on the United States. Now Cuba depends on sugar and the Soviet Union. As Paz rightly concludes “‘socialism’ has not enabled Cuba to change its economy: what has changed is its dependence.” He might have added that the depth of its present dependence would have been unimaginable to anyone in pre-Castro Cuba.

But all in all one does not wish to carp. In economics as in politics, Paz’s intellectual honesty generally leads him away from the formulas which have been adopted so blithely in North and South America. His very criticisms reveal the narrow range of alternatives in which our foreign policy must operate. His testimony confirms the gravity of the issues that occupy us in Central America and the Caribbean. One can only guess at the depths of isolation he must experience, and one only wishes that all our critics had his integrity.

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