To the Editor:

Jean-François Revel’s discussion of democracy [“Can the Democracies Survive?,” June] bears closely upon current experience in Britain. Here the “blame” industry (described years ago in slightly different terms by Joseph Schumpeter) is in flourishing condition. Its main focus is in the media, among a certain coterie of journalists, figures like Paul Foot or the egregious Christopher Hitchens, whose shallow and often inaccurate material aims at destroying the special British-American relationship.

But the “blame” business is not very new, and politically it is less dangerous than many think. A consistent feature of Western democracy has been the ability to contain and tolerate an amazing quantity of double-standard propaganda. More than one study has shown that the public is very skeptical about what it is told by the media and by politicians of whatever persuasion.

Nonetheless, it is astonishing to see Mr. Revel’s assertion that there is no longer a political challenge to democratic institutions from within. In Britain, at any rate, a very serious challenge exists, though not in the melodramatic form so popular in fiction and in prophetic essays like The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek, in which whole populations are terrified and/or brainwashed into a dumb tractability. The species is not yet quite that passive, at least not in the West of Europe and the United States.

The challenge in Britain takes a messier form, a gradual curdling of the body politic into mutually hostile and uninhibited pressure groups, based mainly on trade unions, “anti” organizations of one kind or another, and ethnic (i.e., “black”) associations. These groupings engage in a zero-sum competition for so-called “rights”—really privileges—which are to be enforced by the administrative apparatus of government. The current miners’ strike is the most spectacular example of this activity, with the miners’ union demanding, in effect, sovereignty over and above Parliament itself, and attempting to enforce this demand with nothing less than a form of Putsch. This might be nothing more than a law-and-order problem, except for the support which the miners’ left-wing fascist leader Arthur Scar-gill has in the Labor party and in a certain element of the community at large. Encouraged by this support, the miners have engaged in mob violence, personal brutality, arson, and other criminal acts, all reported in great detail. This has a serious effect on the morale of the electorate which goes far beyond “blame” propaganda. It is also worthy of note that a vital democratic institution, the press, has been repeatedly (and with impunity) censored by print unions who support Scargill, and that newspapers which refused to accede to this censorship have been shut down—all with encouragement and approval from the Labor Left.

I do want to mention another aspect of Mr. Revel’s piece, however, because it sticks out as a surprising flaw in what is generally a useful and apposite discusion. This is his apparent assumption that the populations under left-wing tyrannies, and in Soviet Russia in particular, would, given half a chance, overthrow their governments and replace them with something like our own. I dealt with this briefly in my article on George Orwell in COMMENTARY last year [“Orwell in Perspective,” March 1983]. It seems to me a prima-facie bit of wishful thinking to say that the Soviet system is sustained only by the repressive action of a small elite. This ignores the complex and powerful factor of nationalism, the fact that the political timbre and sensibility of Russia and the Soviet Union are not like ours, and the further fact that the dissident movement itself is badly fractured, often with respect to the most fundamental ideas of what should be done in the Soviet Union. There are examples, like Poland, which lend some credence to Mr. Revel’s assertion. But to overgeneralize from these to the point of caricature cannot help much in dealing with the Soviet Union—nor with those who, à I’envers et contre tout, find it an attractive example for their own politics.

Herb Greer
Manchester, England

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Jean-François Revel writes:

I don’t think I said in my article that all internal threats had disappeared from the democracies. As a citizen of France and an observer of Italy, I know what it means to have a strong Communist party at home. Moreover, I devote many pages in my book, How Democracies Perish (which has just been published in English by Double-day), to the question of modern terrorism, which is one of the main threats to democracy today, as can be seen in Spain, Peru, and elsewhere. What I did say in the piece is that compared to the prewar period, the overall situation is better now, at least in Western Europe, where for the first time since 1922 there is not a single dictatorship.

I never assumed that all people living under Communist rule would automatically choose freedom if they were given the choice. On the contrary, I maintain throughout my book that democracy is a very exceptional and fragile phenomenon, which we should not take for granted. But it is only fair to stress that people living under Communist rule are never given a choice, so I feel that none of us has the right to say for certain how they would decide if they were free to choose their government.

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