LIFE IN A TOTALITARIAN SOCIETY

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I hardly expected from The Crimson anything better than Dun Swanson's crude hatchet job on my book, Behind The Berlin Wall. But minimal standards of journalistic honesty might at least have led Swanson to mention some of the book's major themes and findings, so the reader could judge for himself whether, as he argues, the Left should refrain from citicizing regimes like the East German one too loudly.

In Behind The Berlin Wall, I attempted to find out what everyday life was like for the average person in a totalitarian society. Above all, I sought to see how people themselves reacted to their condition. Thus the bulk of the book consists of conversations with East Germans, young and old, workers and students. In his contemptuous descriptions of my criticisms of the lack of consumer products in East Germany, Swanson doesn't even mention that this lack was an obsessive concern of East German people, which came up again and again in conversations as representative of the contempt the East German rulers showed for their people.

Swanson's review ritualistically recounts that I found a short supply of "freedom of speech, assembly, and the press." By not going in to further details about what this means for the ordinary person, he is able to make a bizarre comparison between the degree of freedom in East Germany and in America. Why didn't he tell the readers about some of the specific examples of lack of free speech mentioned in the book? Like a university student sent to jail for several years for holding up a lonely banner reading "Russians Our of Germany." Or another student expelled from University, without even written charges or a hearing, for asking a professor why they couldn't read a certain book. Or two ninth graders arrested by policemen in the middle of a class after saying that there was too much one-sided criticism of West Germany in their lessons.

The ultimate dishonesty of Swanson's review lies in his not even mentioning the statement I heard, and reported, time and again during my stay in East Germany: that the vast majority of the East German people feel such hatred for the oppressive and unsuccessful system they live in that they would leave the country were they not prevented by an ugly wall and by mined frontiers with automatically triggered weapons that leave nothing to humanitarian doubts on the part of machine-gun armed border guards.

Should one clam up about such a system? The Communist nations are the most dangerous, because most powerful, threat to freedom and progress in the world today, and it would be immoral--to use a word with The Crimson likes--to keep silent. As a socialist, I feel as well that the reality of the Communist states is the most effective argument against socialism, and that therefore democratic socialists must clearly demonstrate that their vision of the future has nothing to do with totalitarianism. Steven Kelman '70