MELINDA CAMBER PORTER
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have been able to resist the fascination with totalitarian ideologies.
For instance in the Soviet Union some poets-Mandelstam.
Some in Nazi Germany also. But Western intellectuals have been
rather free of repression. So they have loved dictators in a sort of
frivolous way, don't you think?
MCP:
There are some unpleasant examples of people like Ezra
Pound-
OP:
Ezra Pound was a great poet who was more or less Fascist. On
the other side, Neruda was a Stalinist, as were Bertold Brecht and
many others. Even intelligent people who were not Stalinists:
Jean-Paul Sartre, who tried some kind of strange communism.
He was full of hate for his own civilization and felt great love for
the Third World. I mean, Utopian thinking took the form of self–
hate . This is important. But Americans have more than political
interests. Therefore, they cannot allow, as I understand it, Nica–
ragua to become a basis for active revolutions . I had a friend, a
Greek friend, a former Marxist , who said Russians don't want
war, they want victory. I think that only by the nonintervention of
Russia, Cuba and America in Central America, could the Central
Americans solve their problems. I should like to see this problem
resolved, by a united and democratic confederation of Central
American countries - without getting Leninism, Marxism or this
kind of thing into Mexico and South America. I don't know if this
is possible, but it should be the goal. There is another issue to
which we cannot close our eyes. This fight is not only a geographi–
cal fight, it's a fight that's very important to a writer like me. Rus–
sian students have hope; and I think it is a shame that Western in–
tellectuals were accomplices of Stalin in the twenties and thirties
and forties without knowing that Stalin was killing writers. For
me, this cooperation of the Western intellectuals with the Soviet
Union presents one of the most important problems of our times .
MCP:
Is your view unpopular in Central America?
OP:
It's especially unpopular in Mexico . But I have never been pop–
ular and I have never looked for popularity.
