JEFFREY HERF
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Generally we simply did not think very much about consequences
but to the extent that we did, we all thought a North Vietnamese vic–
tory was preferable to continuation of the war.
If
North Vietnamese domination had led to anything remotely
decent , I'm quite sure there would be a host of American leftists
rushing to take credit for the great event. Instead history after 1975
confirmed the worst fears of Americans who supported the war: a
bloodbath did take place in Cambodia - and not because peasants
outraged by American bombings took it out on their countrymen; an
Asian Gulag was established in Vietnam; a war with China soon fol–
lowed; the Soviet Union acquired a vital strategic asset in Cam Ran
Bay ; and the boat people made poignantly clear what we had refused
to believe for a decade, namely that thousands of Vietnamese citizens
really did not want to live under a Communist dictatorship. We con–
tinuously minimized and even ridiculed the idea that a disaster could
follow from our good intentions and a Communist victory. When
the disaster happened , our supposedly critical generation shut up .
That is perhaps good taste, but hardly the moral high ground we
said we always inhabited .
In the 1970s, I mulled over the 1960s with other contributors to
Telos
and
New German Critique,
hoping with them to sustain a "non–
authoritarian" and democratic left. I read Solzhenitsyn and pondered
the link between the romanticism of the young Georg Lukacs and his
subsequent attraction to communism, visited dissidents in Hungary,
observed West German leftists misplacing guilt over the Holocaust
by turning against Israel, wrote a doctorate thesis about Weimar and
Nazi Germany, and concluded that the Frankfurt School thinkers
were nowhere near as close to the truth as I had once thought. These
reevaluations took a very long time and were difficult , for I was giv–
ing up a great deal.
The enduring value of the 1970s for me, and I think for many
veterans of the 1960s, was that I learned again to value intellectual
life and to respect ideas and scholarship. I learned that anti-intellec–
tualism in politics is almost always the prelude to utopian and then
totalitarian excesses, and that the Marxist and neo-Marxist ideas we
thought to be so daring in 1968 were more often rehashes of what
was daring in the late nineteenth century or in the 1920s in Central
Europe.
If
it was an anti-authoritarian left we wanted, it already
existed. Its name was social democracy, and its most recent battle
against totalitarianism was the Cold War. The authoritarianism it
had in mind, especially after 1917, was called communism. Anti-
