Book Reviews

started to shore up what is euphe mistically called the free wor ld, but surely, on the basis of what the Paddocks have learned by the most careful sort of digging,the money would have done every body much more good if it had been left in the pockets of Ameri cans at home to buy bananas, cof fee, oil, rubber or whatever else the "undeveloped" countries have to sell. William Paddock and his wife make a team. They are both B.S.'s from Iowa State University, which means that they have farming in their bones. An authority on corn, William once headed Guatemala's corn improvement program, work ing with the U.S. mission in Gua temala itself with interludes at an Iowa State University experiment station. His wife, a home eco nomics instructor, spent some time as a Care volunteer distributing food in rural Honduras and as a ghetto social service worker in Guatemala. They knew something of the world of foreign aid from the inside before they started a 25,OOO-mile trip through Mexico 441 442 THE FREEMAN July and Central America to inspect programs which the administrators of development organizations con sidered especially effective. In the course of a year of wandering in the field away from capital cities in Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador and Mexico, the Paddocks not only held more than two hundred pre arranged interviews but also talked with everybody they ran across, from government officials and merchants to peasants, doc tors, lawyers and Indian chiefs.

What they took in through their eyes and ears startled them. Once in a while they hit upon a develop ment that had had effective re sults, but when some actual good resulted it was usually in a quite unforeseen way. Normally, how ever, the proj ects, whether they were undergirded by the Peace Corps, the Inter-American Devel opment Bank, AID (the Agency for International Development), or even the Rockefeller Founda tion, suffered from a lack of carry through, inability to preserve meaningful records, and a tunnel vision that would disgrace a mole. The Rubber Fiasco It was at Los Brillantes, a "model" station near Chocola in Guatemala, that the Paddocks first learned about the pattern of for eign aid. The Paddocks knew from a previous stay in Guatemala that rubber seedlings had been distrib uted to the Chocola area farmers over a five-year period. Some 27, 000 acres had been planted to rub ber. But, to the Paddocks' amaze ment, the whole proj ect had trailed off into nothing. The reason: no continuity. The farmers, so the lone remaining U.S. expert told the Paddocks, were only inter ested in planting rubber as long as AID provided money on easy terms. When the original loans were used up (one farmer re ceived $884,000), the project went dead. What the Paddocks couldn't figure out was why the news of the collapse of the rubber experi ment hadn't yet reached AID headquarters in Washington.

Thirty minutes down the road from the scene of the rubber fiasco the Paddocks visited some beauti ful buildings at Chocola which had once housed the local direc tors of the U.S. International Co operation Administration, AID's predecessor. The chairs, type writers, desk and furniture were still there, but human activity had apparently ceased. Chocola, so the Paddocks surmised, was another illustration of the big tragic shortcoming in our development work. AID had no memory of what its predecessor agency had done. The law of politics is that when ever there is a new foreign aid program, or a new set of admin1974 WE DON'T KNOW HOW 443 istrators, the old .slate is wiped clean. A long-time AID friend told the Paddocks, "Every morning we wake up and laboriously reinvent the wheel." Saving the Seed Corn So it went in other areas in Guatemala. Deane Hinton, a U.S. AID mission director stationed at the Embassy, told the Paddocks that the local agricultural school at Barcenas had the most effective AID program in the country. The Paddocks went and had a look. In the meantime Deane Hinton moved on to Santiago in Chile to head up a different program. Mr. Pad dock didn't have the heart to write him that he had found Iowa corn seed sitting in a storeroom at the Barcenas experiment station where it had been put in storage ten years ago. A faithful Guate malan was keeping the seed col lection intact, "just in case some day someone wants to use it."

In Washington Jack Hood Vaughn, Sargent Shriver's suc cessor as head of the Peace Corps, told Mr. Paddock about the legen dary exploits of one James Port man in EI Salvador. Portman, according to the reports, had rev olutionized the little nation's to mato industry. He had shown the farmers how to mulch their rows for moisture conservation. He had introduced contour terracing. He had started tomato, pineapple, watermelon and banana clubs. He had showed the girls how to can pickles. He had given haircuts to demonstrate a sure way of dis couraging lice. But when the Pad docks visited the scene of Port man's supposed triumphs, they found no evidence of a tomato in dustry. A few townspeople did re call that Portman had planted some tomatoes in a church gar den, and had had a second garden elsewhere. He had used cow dung as fertilizer. But when a store keeper asked Portman how to get rid of insects that were devouring his tomatoes on the stem, Port man had said he "did not know anything about tomatoes, only corn."

In checking the whole thing out, the Paddocks learned that Port man was liked· in EI Salvador be cause he was "young and attrac tive." But Portman himself had written: "Do not believe every thing you read about James J. Portman and EI Salvador. R. Sar gent Shriver in the early days was a little too eager as far as public relations were concerned." Some Good Results The Paddocks did find good things on their 25,OOO-mile trip. They found a boom in Monterrey. The reason: three local families had made good use of their cap444 THE FREEMAN July ital, amassed out of a transport business that had made good con nections with the railroad to Texas. At San Pedro, in Hon duras, there was prosperity. The reason: the United Fruit Com pany paid an average daily wage of $4.97, which stimulated worker training in the whole area. United Fruit is called EI Pulpo, meaning the Octopus, but it does know how to grow bananas. The company brings in thirty-five per cent of Honduras's foreign exchange, so, as the Paddocks put it, "one-third of Honduras's share of the twen tieth century is paid for by com pany acti vity."

If EI Pulpo had been broken up into small plots when the first winds of "land reform" began to blow, who would have heard of San Pedro, or even of Honduras itself? The Paddocks tremble to think of it. The Paddocks looked into the Rockefeller Foundation, which has sustained Dr. Norman Borlaug's experiments with rust-resistant wheat in northwest Mexico. This wheat, along with "miracle" rice, is credited with setting the so called Green Revolution in motion. The Paddocks give Borlaug's p1ant research good marks, but they give even better marks to the Mexicans for learning how to ap ply irrigation and fertilizer to their wheat acres. The "green revolution" is un deniably worth having, but the Paddocks worry about its advan tages being eaten up by rocketing population growth. They sadly conclude that it will take a lot of EI Pulpos to support the new mil lions that continue to encroach on the limits of the food supply all through Mexico and Central America. What is particularly ominous is that EI Pulpos, being capitalist in organization and mo tivation, aren't liked. The masses, bemused, don't know their best friends.

~ LEFTISM (FROM DE SADE AND MARX TO HITLER AND MARCUSE) by Erik von Kueh nelt-Leddihn (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1974, 653 pp., $12.95) Reviewed by Allan C. Brownfeld THE TEACHERS of poJitical science used to tell their classes that po Iitical philosophies ran along a straight line from left to right, that Nazism and Fascism occu pied the far right portion of the spectrum and Communism the far left. Happily, most teachers of polit ical science have finally moved away from that simplistic, and false, notion. As for the rest, a reading of the recently published 1971,- OTHER BOOKS 445 volume, Leftism (From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse) by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, should - as the common phrase of the day has it - expand their con sciousness. Dr. Kuehnelt-Leddihn is an Austrian scholar who reads twen ty languages and has taught at many universities, including Beaumont College in England, the Georgetown Graduate School of Foreign Service, and who, during the period when the Nazis occu pied his country, was head of the History Department at St. Peter's College in New Jersey. His book is lengthy and learned, but not beyond the general reader's com prehension.

What he has done in this vol ume is range across the centuries to show the links between the per version of de Sade, the revolu tionary mystique of Marcuse and the brutalities of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. The purpose of the book, writes the author, "is to show the character of leftism and to what extent and in what way the vast majority of the leftist ideologies now dominating or threatening most of the modern world are competitors,- not enemies." He makes a powerful case, for example, that Hitlerism was a movement of the' left, not the right. "At heart Mussolini was always a socialist," he writes. "Hitler, on the other hand, had never formally belonged to the Socialist Party, although he had drunk from almost the same ideo logical sources. His Weltanschau ung too had been largely fathered by the image of the national so cialist laborites." He notes that official utterances declared that Nazism stood firmly on the left, and reveals. Hitler's Hgenuinely leftist turn of mind," showing that the economic order under the Nazis was thoroughly socialistic, and reminds the reader that be sides the Jews, the groups most hated by the Nazi leaders were royalty and nobility.

The difference between the "left" and the "right" is essen tially related to their divergent views of the nature of man and the state. It is a common characteristic of the left - socialists (national and international), as well as more moderate welfare-staters and 20th century liberals, according to the author, to view man as "Individ ual subject to the will of the ma jority. He is a mere number of the democratic process who can be added or subtracted. He is em bodied and personified by the "lea der" or by a delegate. The indi vidual is nothing, the 'People' everything. The individual is a mere fragment of the 'collective masses'." Those on the right, to the contrary, view man as "A per446 THE FREEMAN July son with an intransferable des tiny, unique, created in the image of God ... endowed with an im mortal soul." More simply put, the left views man as a means to some other end, the right views man as an end 'in himself. All leftist ideas, from the most extreme to the more moderate, reject individual ism and urge collectivism.

What the left has done since its modern creation at the time of the French Revolution is, writes Dr. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, to exploit "the envy . . . among the masses, cou pled with the denigration of indi viduals, but more frequently of classes, races, nations or religious communities. . . . The history of the Western world since the end of the 18th century cannot be written without this fact con stantly in mind. All leftist 'isms' harp on this theme, Le., on the privilege of groups, minority groups, to be sure, who are ob jects of envy and at the same time subjects of intellectual-moral in feriorities. . . . They ought to conform to the rest, become iden tical with 'the people,' renounce their privileges . . ." Such forced conformity has taken different forms. Hitler killed Jews. Stalin killed land lords. The French Revolutionaries insisted that all Frenchmen have a common language and the J acobin clubs began a crusade against all languages but French - Provencal, Breton, German, Flemish, Basque.

"We get a hint," writes the au thor, "that the French Revolution was not only a forerunner but an ideological steppingstone to the slow growth of Nazi ideas." The totalitarian attitude of the left is clearly found within the French Revolution. The speech of Saint-J ust on October 10, 1793, for example: "You have to punish not only traitors, but even those who are indifferent: you have to punish whoever behaves in the Republic in a passive spirit and does nothing for her, because ever since the French people has mani fested their will, everything out side of the sovereign is an enemy." Similarly, Robespierre spoke of "collective liberty" and on Febru ary 7, 1794, said that, "The Gov ernment of the Revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny." Looking back at the Reign of Terror in France, at the Nazis, the Fascists and the Communists, the author declares that, "The all powerful state is a creation of the leftist mentality .. : two wishes of the leftist find their fulfillment, the extension of government and the dependence of the person upon the state which controls his destiny from the cradle to the grave. Every movement of the 1974 OTHER BOOKS 447 citizen, his birth and his death, his ma.rriage and his income, his illness and his education . . . ev erything is to be a matter of knowledge to the state."

All of these tyrannies, the au thor writes, have come about in the name of the collective "will of the people." He quotes Salvador de Madariaga who said that West ern civilization rests on two deaths - the death of Socrates and the death of Christ. He notes that, "Indeed the crucifixion was also a democratic event. When Our Lord was brought before Pilate a.nd told him· that He had come as a witness to Truth, the gov ernor, a true agnostic, asked Him, 'What is truth ?' And without waiting for an answer, he passed Him by and consulted 'the peo ple.' The vox populi condemned Our Lord to death as it had Socra tes more than three centuries ear lier." What most Americans forget, Dr. Kuehnelt-Leddihn believes, is that democracy and freedom do not necessarily go hand in hand. Democracy rests on two pillars: majority rule and political equal ity. Freedom, however, has nothing to do with democracy itself. The repression of 49 per cent by 51 per cent. or of 1 per cent by 99 per cent "is most regrettable, but it is not 'undemocratic'." Liberals, in the classical sense" correctly understood this point. Liberalism did not answer the question, as democracy does, "Who should rule?" but, "How should rule be exercised?" The reply is, "Regard less of who rules . . . government should be exercised in such a way that each citizen enjoys the great est possible amount of liberty."

Dr. Kuehnelt-Leddihn believes that the U.S. Constitution was "a serious attempt to establish a mixed government with demo cratic, aristocratic, and monarchi cal elements, a government of checks and balances." He quotes a, letter from John Adams in which he insisted that democracy would inevitably evolve into olig archy and oligarchy into despot ism, a. notion he shared with Plato and Aristotle. The fact is that tyranny came to Germany through the demo cratic process. By July, 1932, Dr. Kuehnelt-Leddihn notes, the twc big totalitarian parties, the Nazh and the Communists, held 31! seats in the Reichstag out of 60 - an absolute majority whic' proves that more than half of a Germans emphatically rej ecb parliamentary democracy. TJ: means that the democratic repu lic uncompromisingly demand by Wilson was the basis of tJ slavery in Germany, the dl through which tyranny entel Hitler declared that, "Ther( 448 THE FREEMAN July more that unites us than divide3 us from Bolshevism . . . above all the genuine revolutionary men tality. I was always aware of this and I have given the order that one should admit former Com munists to the party immediately."

Goebbels had stated unequiv ocally that he "paid homage to the French Revolution for all the possibilities of life and develop ment which it had brought to the people. In this sense, if you like, I am a democrat." Dr. Kuehnelt-Leddhin under stands that total power, whether in the hands of one man or a majority, is an evil and that freedom has always been lost as a result of it. The real business of those who seek to learn from the past is to diffuse power so that no matter who rules, individual free dom can be preserved. The Western world, however, seems to be moving away from its traditional belief in individ ualism, and more and more looks to the state as the answer to all problems, making a false god of politics. For those who are inter ested in considering where a trip down that path will lead, this book will be a valuable road map. HANDSOME BLUE LEATHERlEX FREEMAN BINDERS $2.50 each ORDER FROM: THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL 24, NO.8. AUGUST 1974 What Are You Worried About? Ralph Bradford 451 The fate of our nation depends upon you and me and how we use our talents.