Vol. 6.6, June 1974

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME VI, NO. 6	JUNE, 1974	US-ISSN0047-4517

REFLECTIONS ON THE MIDDLE EAST

1. And so we are to be subjected to a long round of rodomontade on the Kissinger “miracle” in the Middle East. President Tricky, a desperate man clutching at straws, is trying to save his neck by taking credit for Achieving a Lasting Peace in the Middle East. The Establishment press, which has always had a soft spot for Kissinger and is at any rate incapable of rising above superficiality in its foreign coverage, goes along with the hoopla. Besides, as inveterate pro-statists, they would love to say something good about the American government these days, and this is it. Politicians everywhere, their eyes fixed inveterately on the present and immediate future, shout hosannahs; and Arabs and Zionists alike kiss (literally!) and cosset Kissinger while lining up at the American trough. There hasn’t been such a lavish and repellent display of international adoration since Nixon’s trip to Peking.

2. And make no mistake about the lining up at the trough; for whatever short-run benefits Kissinger has achieved by the cease-fire agreements have been gained strictly at the expense of Uncle Sap, the American taxpayer. Already we hear of literally hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid that will be poured into the coffers of every state in the Middle East, Arabs and Israel alike. The most lucrative occupation in the world right now is to get yourself a sheikhdom somewhere in the Middle East and to get on line for American handouts. More ominous is Kissinger’s “secret” commitment to Israel (reported in the New York Times) to back her in any reprisals directed against Palestinian guerrilla activity.

3. The current political situation in the Middle East should put the quietus once and for all to the right-wing and Establishment line that the Arab governments are mere puppets of “Soviet expansionism.” In particular, Egypt and Syria have long been supposed to be Soviet puppets, so that the silly season is again here for the American press, which has actually been talking about the “miraculous” changeover of Egypt and Syria from Soviet puppetry to a “pro-American” stance. Yet the press doesn’t draw the obvious lesson that the notion of Egypt or Syria or any other Arab country as a “tool of Moscow” was always Cold War hogwash.

4. In fact, Soviet foreign policy, once again as for so many decades, has shown itself to be dedicated to one overriding goal: peace, or detente, with the United States at virtually any price; ever since the days of Stalin, the Soviets have been willing to sell any and every one of their allies down the river at the drop of a hat. They have done it to a roster of allies too long to cite: Yugoslavia and the Chinese Communists (the origin of their respective breaks with Moscow); the Greek Communists, the French and Italian Communists, and on and on. Reliable reports indicate that the reason for the final capitulation of Syrian president Hafez el-Assad to the cease-fire was that Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, anxious to avoid endangering the detente by angering Kissinger, flatly told Syria that it would withdraw Russia’s support to the Syrian forces in any further conflict. And so Russia became a supine collaborator in its own replacement by the United States as the leading force in the Arab world.

5. To unravel the complex tangle of Middle East politics, and to understand what is going on, one must keep one’s eye on the central and leading issue: the rights of the dispossessed Palestinians. A brief history of the situation is in order to untangle the web. After Israel displaced and ejected the Palestinians in the 1948 war, the demoralized Palestinians relied upon the contiguous Arab states to accomplish their goal of recapturing their homes, lands, and properties. That reliance was aided by the characteristic braggadoccio of the Arab states, whose rulers talked frequently and grandiloquently about “driving the Zionists into the sea.” After a generation of nothing happening, the proof of the pudding was the 1967 war, in which Israel easily seized an enormous amount of Arab territory, including Arab Jerusalem and the West Bank of Palestine which had been grabbed by Jordan in 1948, the Gaza Strip of Palestine which had similarly been appropriated by Egypt, and the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, belonging to Egypt and Syria respectively. There thus emerged two sets of grievances: that of the Palestinians, including their original dispossession plus the further expulsions and military occupation by Israel; and the new grievances of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, which wanted back their pre-1967 territories.

The Palestinians now began to see that they could no longer rely on the other Arab states to advance their interests; and so there developed a variety of fedayeen, or Palestine guerrilla groups, devoted to final victory by carrying the war to Israel and the occupied zones. Since the Arab States now had grievances of their own, and since the fedayeen were highly popular throughout the Arab world, the Arab States formed a tentative and uneasy alliance with the Palestinians.

The goal of the Arab States was to get their pre-1967 land back. What was the political goal of the Palestinians? The political goal, as implied by the goal of allowing the displaced Palestinians to get their homes and lands back, was, to be sure, the liquidation of the state of Israel and its replacement by a state of Palestine, in which, all the Palestinian groups agree, all Jewish, Moslem, and Christian citizens would enjoy equal civil and religious liberty. Contrary to Zionist claims, the “destruction of the state of Israel” in the minds of the Palestinians does not imply the destruction of the individual Jews living in Israel. While the Palestinians all agree on the principle of equal civil rights, there is a split among these groups, for some of the militants advocate a transition period of “dezionizing” Palestine, which might imply placing the Jews of Palestine into a period of second-class tutelage. At any rate, even if the Jews were to attain immediate full citizenship in a new Palestine, the necessity of their giving up the seized lands would put them back into that tiny percentage of pre-1947 Palestinian territory which was purchased by the Zionists on a truly voluntary basis, and from the Arab peasants themselves and not their Turkish or other feudal overseers.

Unfortunately, as in the case of Northern Ireland, no group on either the Arab or Zionist side seems to have advocated a new partition, in which the state of Israel would be confined to its truly and voluntarily purchased land area. Certainly, at least at this point, there is no sign whatever of any group in Israel accepting such an arrangement.

At any rate, the Palestinian guerrilla groups grew into a formidable force until those fateful weeks in September, 1970, known from then on among the Arabs as “Black September”, when King Hussein of Jordan turned upon the fedayeen, who were mainly based in Jordanian territory, and massacred them wholesale. The fedayeen almost did not recover from the blow.

Here we must understand the unique role of Jordan in the Arab world. Ever since its creation after World War I, Jordan has been ruled by the Hashemite monarchy (first by King Abdullah, now by King Hussein), which was virtually a creature of British imperialism. The formidable Jordanian army, consisting of Bedouin nomads from eastern Jordan, was staffed, trained, and commanded by British officers. The majority of Jordanians are now urban and agricultural Palestinians, who, however, have no voice in the Hashemite dictatorship, whose army still consists of Bedouins from the Eastern desert. One of the earliest grounds for the splits among the fedayeen was the relationship of the Palestinian movement, first to Jordan and the Hashemite monarchy, and ultimately to the other Arab States. The leading guerrilla group, Al Fatah, headed by Yasir Arafat, took the seemingly sensible line that the only real fight was with Israel, and therefore that it was senseless to take on the Arab states as well. But while seemingly sensible, this ignored the major differences of goals and structures between the Arab States and especially Jordan on the one hand, and the Palestinians on the other. One would have thought that Black September would have taught Al Fatah a lesson, but it really did not; the only lesson was narrowly confined to total hostility to Jordan, which even Al Fatah agrees to. But Al Fatah continues to put its trust in “princes”, now especially Egypt and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union.

6. Why did Egypt launch the October War (which it did, by the way, without notifying Syria), and why did it gain great early victories, only to fumble and begin to lose? From his and Egypt’s point of view, Anwar el-Sadat’s launching of the war was a brilliant tactical masterstroke. The fedayeen, almost miraculously, had recovered from Black September and had begun to draw attention to its cause through dramatic incursions and “terror” tactics. But that cause could only win, at best, after a very long and protracted struggle. Meanwhile, nothing was happening on the Egyptian front. Israel was sitting on its 1967 conquests and showed no signs of budging. Indeed, why should it? So when was Egypt going to get its territory back, and when was it going to be able to reopen the Suez Canal? The UN was a hopeless debating club. Something dramatic had to be done to get the Middle East off dead center. Hence the launching of the war, which did indeed get the Middle East off dead center, gained foreign aid and the forthcoming Geneva conference, and pushed Israel a bit back from the Suez Canal. The gain in Arab morale, after a generation of unbroken and disastrous defeats, was of course enormous.

The surprise attack, and the massive weaponry, accounted for the early Egyptian victories; but why the later setbacks? The setback can be traced to the Egyptian decision to stop after the early gains and consolidate, instead of taking advantage of the early demoralization of the Israeli army by launching mobile and lightning thrusts deep into the Sinai. By stopping and holding, Egypt granted precious time to Israel to allow her to regroup, bring up reinforcements, and to engage in her own flexible and lightning tank tactics which had become famous in the 1967 war. Thus Israel could cross the Suez Canal, and surround large chunks of the Egyptian Army on the east bank of the Suez.

So we come then to the critical military puzzle: why did Egypt stop at the point of a massive victory, and allow Israel to recoup? There seem to be two answers. One is that Sadat was not interested in a massive victory; all he wanted was short-run gains, which could be used to force Israel into a peace conference. Second is the sort of strategy and tactics employed by Sadat throughout. We know that the massive Soviet air and military aid was almost all in defensive rather than offensive weapons, thus effectively preventing Egypt from undertaking an all-out offensive. But even more important is the fact, that under Soviet military advice, Sadat adopted the sort of military strategy and tactics that the Soviets had learned on the Eastern front in World War II: namely, massive and slow advance, covering territory and then consolidating that territory. It is the sort of strategy suitable for massive, ground-churning inter-State warfare. But to win militarily in the Middle Eastern situation, Sadat would have had to engage in very different strategy and tactics: i.e., in guerrilla warfare, which would have meant a kind of war suitable to insurrections by native populations against a State. Guerrilla warfare means (a) arming the native Arab population, so that the Arab populace could engage in massive aid to the soldiers, could have been—in the famous phrase of Che Guevara—the “water” in which the “fish” of the soldiery would have swum; (b) heavy reliance on Palestinian fedayeen to be that “fish” instead of on Egyptian State troops; and (c) emphasis on the tactics of mobility, flexibility, tank thrusts, and lightning-fast encirclement behind the Israeli lines. This strategy would have meant pressing on and encircling the demoralized Israeli troops in the early stages of the October war.

But to fight such a war, Sadat would have had to be prepared to fight a guerrilla war, for Palestinian aims. But Sadat’s attitude toward the Palestinians and their aims has always been one of wary distrust, for what he is interested in is not a Palestinian insurrection but the advance of the territorial aims of the Egyptian State. It is safe to conclude that Sadat would rather lose, or at least stalemate, an orthodox inter-State war, than win a Palestinian guerrilla war against Israel.

An orthodox military rebuttal to the idea of guerrilla tactics in the Sinai peninsula is that, in that uninhabited desert, there is no native Arab population to form the water for the soldierly fish. But what this rebuttal neglects are the great military lessons of the Montgomery-Rommel tank warfare in the North African desert in World War IV. For, in such a case, the desert itself can be the friendly “water”, and can be used as the base and medium for lightning fast tank raids and encirclements. Certainly there is no unfriendly population there to tip off the opposing army.

This guerrilla vs. inter-State theme is confirmed when we look at the Syrian theater of war. For how do we explain the fact that while Egypt fell into dire straits fairly soon, and hence was happy to conclude a ceasefire rather quickly, that Syria was never really defeated, and that while it lost some territory in the Mt. Hermon salient, it continued to fight on stubbornly until the June cease-fire? I think we can conclude that the basic reason was, that in contrast to the Egyptians having nothing militarily to do with the fedayeen, Syria rather heavily used and supported its own favored wing of the Palestinian guerrillas, the As Saiqa. Syria’s partial devotion to guerrilla warfare may well account for the military differences in the Syrian and Egyptian outcomes.

7. So what now? Syria, deserted by all the other Arab States (except for Libya, which is far from the scene, and Iraq, also not contiguous to Israel and which has its hands full in its massive counter-revolutionary war to suppress the Kurds), and pressured finally by Russia, at last agreed to a cease-fire. In doing so, el-Assad gained a short-run tactical victory, since Syria regained the Mt. Hermon salient, plus a wafer-thin slice of the Golan Heights, including (an empty gesture) the ghost town of El Quneitra. But for those gains, Syria, in another “secret” agreement undertook to suppress any Palestinian guerrilla activity emanating from Syrian territory. Once again, Palestinian interests were sacrificed for the territorial goals of the Syrian state.

All this has thrown the Palestinian movement into a mighty dither, and indeed their choices now are extremely difficult. The majority of the Palestinians, headed by the leading guerrilla group Al Fatha, but also including the Syrian-oriented As Saiqa and the Maoist Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), headed by Nayef Hawatmeh, appear ready to accept a “mini”-Palestinian state in the pre-1967 areas of the West Bank of the Jordan and the Gaza Strip—and, in effect, to accept in return the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. The minority of Palestinian’ militants, including only the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), headed by Dr. George Habesh, and the tiny Iraq-oriented Arab Liberation Front, is opposed to any mini-Palestinian state as either implicitly or explicitly recognizing, for the first time, the legitimacy of the post-1947 State of Israel. At the June meeting of the Palestinian National Council, the overall Congress of the Palestinian movement, the majority view was ratified. This, of course, places the Palestinian majority in line with the interest of the Arab states, who also want restoration of the status quo ante 1967. The only exception is Jordan, which would lose the West Bank, but the other Arab States are prepared to jettison Jordanian territorial interests; no wing of the Palestinians would accept a return to Jordanian rule over the West Bank.

The road to a long-range peace agreement in the Middle East, however, is scarcely clear-cut, to say the least. For Israel has shown no signs of accepting the idea of a mini-State; in fact, it has not yet even recognized the existence of the Palestinians. The Geneva peace conference, originally intended for this summer, will not be convened before the end of this year, if then.

8. And yet, having said that, we must also note that Israel has just experienced its first significant political change since its inception in 1947. Since its founding, Israel has been governed by a coalition headed by the Labor (Mapai) Party, led first by David Ben-Gurion, then by Levi Eshkol, and lately by Golda Meir. The actual leadership of the Mapai, and hence of the Israeli government, however, has been for all these years in the hands of the Gush clique, headed by Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir, and including the aforementioned premiers. Old-line and European-born, the Gush has always taken the position that the Palestinian Arabs do not exist, that they are either “South Syrians” or “West Jordanians” or just plain non-people. If we adopt the Israeli practice of considering the “left”-“right” spectrum of Israeli politics as signifying “dove”-“hawk” on the Arab question, then the Gush has always been strongly to the right of center, hard-line opponents of negotiations with the Arabs, and apt to adopt military solutions to political problems.

Over a decade ago, the Mapai, to maintain its rule, was forced to merge with several other parties, including the Mapam and the Achdut Avodah, forming the Labor Alignment Party which still governs Israel. But the old parties still exist as recognizable factions within the greater Labor Alignment. Both the Mapam and the Achdut Avodah were considerably more “dovish”, hence to the “left” of, the Mapai and the Gush. The Mapam, the erstwhile pro-Soviet party, however, and originally the major representative of the (voluntary) communist kibbutzim, has largely faded away, probably in accordance with the dwindling importance of the kibbutzim in Israeli life. This left the Achdut Avodah, headed by Vice-Premier Yigal Allon, as the major “left-wing” force within the Labor Alignment. Meanwhile, there grew up on the right-wing of the latter party the Rafi faction, a highly hawkish group led by the charismatic leader of the 1967 conquest, General Moshe Dayan. Also included in the Meir coalition along with the Labor Alignment, was the National Religious Party, the major party of Orthodox Jewry, which, because of its crucial balance-of-power role in the Parliament (Knesset) has been able to impose a rigid Orthodox theocracy on a largely non-Orthodox, if not atheist, country. In foreign affairs, the NRP advocates the maximum territorial extent of Biblical Judaism.

The seemingly eternal role of the Gush was shaken irretrievably by the enormous shock of the October war. For the first time, the Israeli military suffered severe losses, and the much vaunted Israeli intelligence services were taken completely by surprise. The Israeli arrogance and illusion of invincibility was shattered beyond repair by the initial losses. As Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan’s political goose was completely cooked, and Golda Meir, after hanging on desperately to power, was finally forced to retire and thereby to accept the responsibility for the quasi-defeat at the hands of the Arabs.

The crucial question of Israeli politics then became: who would succeed Mrs. Meir? There ensued a fierce and highly important struggle for succession between Shimon Peres, the Interior Minister under Meir, and the leader of the Rafi faction after Dayan; and General Yitzhak Rabin, a member of the Achdut Avodah faction. The fight was close and dirty, but Rabin finally won, helped by the fact that, as a late-comer to politics, he had not been an actual member of the Achdut Avodah party before the merger of the 1960’s. The result was the final defeat of the Gush, with not only Mrs. Meir, but also General Dayan, Pinhas Sapir, and Foreign Minister Abba Eban, leaving the Cabinet and retiring to the back benches. Israel is now under the control of the Rabin-Allon (still Deputy Premier and now Foreign Minister Achdut Avodah action.

On the “dove-hawk” spectrum, the Achdut Avodah faction may be termed “slightly to the left of center,” Mr. Rabin, Israel’s first native-born (sabra) Premier, at least recognizes the existence of the Palestinians, and his “dovish” hand is strengthened by the fact that the NRP is no longer in the governing coalition, being replaced by the much more dovish Civil Rights Party, headed by Mrs. Shulamit Aloni, who is anathema to the Gush and to the groups further right in Israel. But, in the traditional center-izing role of party politics, Mr. Rabin, with a wafer-thin majority in the Knesset, has been at least initially forced to take a line on the Arabs almost as hawkish as Mrs. Meir’s, in order to block any major right-wing defections from the Labor Alignment. Indeed, within the mainstream of Israeli politics, only Mrs. Aloni’s CRP calls clearly for the return of Israel to the 1967 borders—i.e. only the CRP takes a position which could lead to a general peace agreement. The only more dovish groups than the CRP in Israel are’ a few tiny anti-Zionist groupings, the major one being the Marxist party, the Matzpen.

Any dovishness within Israel would be further stifled by the fact that the major opposition to the Labor Alignment is the far more hawkish grouping, the Likud, headed by the fiery ultra-hawk, Menachem Beigin, long-time leader of the “extreme rightist” Herat party. The Herut, the dominant faction within the Likud, is the child of the long-time World Zionist-Revisionist movement, dedicated above all things to military conquest of the maximal territory of Biblical Jewry, “on both sides of the Jordan”. On domestic matters, Herut is state corporatist, in contrast to the laborite socialism of the Labor Alignment; thus, the predecessor of Beigin, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Zionist-Revisionism, expressed admiration for the corporate state of Mussolini. The other major faction within the Likud is the Liberal Party, oriented to the General Zionist movement within the United States, which is devoted to some form of free enterprise on domestic matters, but which is almost as anti-Arab as the Herut. There is unfortunately no faction within Israel that is both dovish and pro-free enterprise.

8. Finally, even in the unlikely event that Israel should come to accept the idea of a mini-Palestinian state, there would still be almost insuperable problems to solve. For the Palestinians would accept nothing less than a fully independent mini-Palestine State, whereas Israel would accept nothing more than a demilitarized Palestinian state (while Israel, of course, remained armed to the teeth) with UN supervision and Israeli right of inspection. And so, despite the hoopla, the confusion, and the considerable and significant political changes throughout the Middle East, the long-run prospect is still for protracted conflict with no end in sight.

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Obit Note

The police have now disclosed that Phillip Willkie, subject of an RIP in our April issue, committed suicide.

European Politics

By Leonard P. Liggio

There has been a single theme in the foreign policy philosophy of the Nixon Administration; it was re-emphasized in a recent headline datelined Key Biscayne, Fla., May 27: NIXON FEARS NEW ISOLATIONISM. The immediate task of the president was to gain support for the most massive military budget yet put forward. The long-term aspect concerned America’s domination over Europe. This had been undermined by French president De Gaulle, and was not repaired during the term of Georges Pompidou. Pompidou had taken the lead in insisting that European unity could be based only upon opposition to United States domination of Europe. He expressed this strongly last December at the Common Market summit meeting in Copenhagen. It was restated by French foreign minister Michel Jobert in his strong exchange last February in Washington with Henry Kissinger. It was reexpressed that month when French finance minister Valery Giscard d’Estaing abruptly decided to float the franc—always a threat to American monetary policies—rather than borrow money from international sources in order to artificially maintain the franc. These policies had led Kissinger on March 21 to repeat Nixon’s constant warnings about the growth of neo-isolationism in America.

Thus, the recent presidential elections in France were of considerable importance to the Nixon administration. If there was a basic aspect to the election it might be said to have been the issue of principle. Giscard has a non-political image. He has been an economic expert, no more and no less. Mitterand, on the other hand, had a particularly political image. He became head of the Socialist party even though he had not been a member of that party, in order to run for president against De Gaulle in 1965 (he did better than expected with 45% of the vote). Mitterand had been the disciple in the 1950s, of Rene Pleven, a center politician and member of almost every cabinet, who always seemed to want what the U.S. wanted in military and foreign policy. Pleven and Mitterand fought against the program of the French right-wing which was for reconciliation with Russia. Mitterand served in many French cabinets of the Fourth Republic and his major disagreement with the Fifth Republic of De Gaulle was that he never again was called into the cabinet. Like so many of the center politicians, against who Gaullist politics was based, Mitterand has slept in more than one political bed. But, in politics as elsewhere, there is a large body of support for monogamy. Giscard benefited from not having been involved in the swapping of French parliamentary politics.

Giscard’s economic policies are not great. He invented the value-added tax; he has used price controls; he thinks in Keynesian terms; there is a bias in his politics toward inflation to aid business undertakings rather than toward the deflation favored by the saving population. Giscard was supported by the planners and reformers. Giscard appointed several of them to his new cabinet. In addition to the technocrats, he appointed four center party leaders to the cabinet, including Jean Lecanuet and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. One of Giscard’s objectives in appointing the centrists, in addition to their support for him in the election, is to try to create a more middle-of-the-road image. The election was one of the closest—Giscard, 50 plus percent; Mitterand, 49 plus. If Mitterand had relied only on Socialist and Communist support, there would have been no contest. The Fourth Republic had a six-sided politics—Communists, Socialists, Radicals, Catholics, Gaullists and the Independents (which was led by Giscard’s mentor, Antoine Pinay, a no-nonsense hard money advocate who initiated the sound financial base of the Gaullist period on which Giscard could play with his newer economic policies). De Gaulle’s majorities were based on the latter three groups plus many of the former voters for the Radicals. In the meantime, a lot of older voters had died and a lot of the newer voters without any memory of Mitterand’s earlier role as politician viewed him as the non-political candidate against those who have been in office for the past decade and a half, like Giscard.

Thus, in addition to the Socialist and Communist votes, Mitterand was supported by a lot of centrists. If he had been elected, Mitterand would have appointed the extreme centrist and pro-American mayor of Marseilles, Gaston Defferre, as prime minister. In fact, there might have been a lot of old politician faces of the pro-American heyday back in the cabinet had Mitterand won. Even the few possible Communist cabinet members might have fitted in by not being pro-Soviet. During the election, the Soviet ambassador made a public call on Giscard—no doubt to discuss some pressing aspect of French investment in the Soviet Union that could not wait the few days until the election was over. Doubtless it never crossed the Soviet ambassador’s mind that this highlighted the image of Giscard as a strong advocate of detente with the Soviet Union. However, the French Communist press denounced the action and protested the Soviet Union’s interference in French domestic politics. Once more, a local Communist movement was sacrificed to broader Soviet foreign policy objectives.

Giscard’s foreign policy is likely to be less publicly anti-American than Pompidou’s but more directed to building up France’s relations with Europe and Russia. The new foreign minister, Jean Sauvagnargues, was the recent ambassador to Germany, who in the nineteen thirties studied German culture “when there was a surge in French interest in German romanticism and a fascination with the rise of Hitler.” He entered the diplomatic service during the Vichy regime of Marshal Petain. He has had long experience in the Arab and African worlds. The new prime minister, Jacques Chirac, was a brain truster for Pompidou and then chief aide to Giscard at finance, and more recently, agriculture and interior minister; his father-in-law is the director general of the foreign ministry and major contributor to De Gaulle’s foreign policy. Chirac was a new Gaullist of the Pompidou variety rather than an old Gaullist. He will take a leading role in trying to split the new from the old Gaullists to form a new coalition around Giscard. The new finance minister, Jean-Pierre Fourcade had been an aide to Giscard at the finance ministry. The most important member of the cabinet will be the minister of state and interior minister (in charge of police), Michel Poniatowski, a leader of Giscard’s Independents and a cousin of Giscard’s wife. Poniatowski is a descendant of the family of the last king of Poland; one nephew of that king became a French marshal, dying at the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig in 1813, and another nephew, the grand treasurer of Lithuania, was the father of a senator of France under Napoleon III and was the ancestor of the present Michel.

Pompidou before his death was attempting to create a new political alignment of Giscard’s Independents, the younger Gaullists such as Chirac, and the reform center. Pompidou had removed Jacques Chaban-Delmas as prime minister so that he would not be the heir of Pompidou. Chaban-Delmas had led the Gaullists in the nineteen fifties during De Gaulle’s retirement and had been Gaullist speaker of the national assembly under De Gaulle. Chaban-Delmas has been mayor of Bordeaux for twenty-five years and was allied with the Gaullist party bosses led by Alexandre Sanguinetti. In the recent election, Chaban-Delmas received only about fifteen per cent of the vote. It was not surprising that Sanguinetti not only warned Chirac against causing defections in parliament from Gaullism, but pressed the new cabinet to push the Gaullist concept of worker participation in industrial management which was a major policy since De Gaulle issued his 1947 call. Sanguinetti said that the Gaullists would pay more attention to the workers and cause workers to press the unions toward Gaullist “corporatist” notions rather than socialist ones. The Gaullists did have voting support among the industrial workers, but in this election that disappeared. The Catholic labor federation supported Mitterand and joined the Socialist and Communist federations in the Cartel des Gauches. The industrial northeast, a stronghold of Gaullist worker votes, went over to Mitterand as early as the May 5 vote.

Pierre Gaxotte, in Le Figaro (May 11), recalled May 5 as the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Louis XV—the Well-Beloved (in many ways)—which ushered in the short-lived finance ministry of Turgot. However, May 5’s election (first round) represented the loss of the Gaullist strongholds—Paris and the north-east. The other old Gaullist centers—the East and the West—went for Giscard. Gaullist and general right-wing strength has been centered in the northern half of France; the agricultural south has tended to be left-wing-Socialist and Communist (the Communists have massive peasant support in France). Northern France was the old center of feudal law and administrative government; while southern France was the center of civil law and representative institutions. These divisions seemed to have continued in the present political situation.

Chaban-Delmas thus gained strength in the formerly non-Gaullist center, the south-west, around Chaban’s center of power, Bordeaux. But, in the second round election on May 19, this area shifted to the left again. Similarly, the votes of former cabinet member, Jean Royer, the mayor of Tours, shifted to Mitterand in the second round, even though Royer ran as an anti-inflation but even more as an anti-pornographic candidate representing the puritan wing of Catholicism. The poor showing of this campaign paralleled the events surrounding the vote to repeal the new law in Italy permitting divorce. The voters approved the new divorce law by a 3-2 vote. The new law was opposed by the Catholic hierarchy led by the Pope himself (including removal of Catholic spokesmen favoring non-church interference in civil matters such as the abbot of the historic monastery of St-Paul’s Outside the Walls). The Communists and Socialists were joined by the right-wing Italian Liberals and the center Republican’s in supporting the law while the Christian Democrats were allied with the new Fascist party. Italian senate president and former prime minister Fanfani led the Christian Democratic faction that wanted to repeal the law as a step to his returning to power. As he is left-wing on domestic matters and pro-American on foreign affairs his defeat is a major step to an improvement in Italy’s politics—strong anti-inflationary monetary policy which will reduce reliance on the U.S. economically and a more neutralist foreign policy. Italy’s long-standing favorable relations with the Arab oil countries and its mergence as a refining, storage and petro-chemical center increased Italy’s independence from the United States.

Portugal, which has been a keystone of American military power, experienced a total overturn in its politics which should cause it to end its special military ties with the United States and become part of the widening European bloc which Kissinger sees as defining itself in opposition to the United States. The revolution resulted directly from the desire of major elements of Portugal to direct its attentions to concentrating upon Europe, and to experience a modernization of the economy in a capitalist direction. Until now, Portugal has been a strong support for U.S. policy regarding NATO; Portugal’s main interest has been its wars to maintain colonialism in Africa and its alliance with South Africa. Like South Africa, Portuguese colonies had large numbers of European settlers who prefer to be bureaucrats ruling over millions of Africans rather than establishing themselves as a European state in the portions of Africa which they settled and which were not settled by African peoples. Instead of being satisfied with settlement of a small area which was totally European, they preferred rule over a huge native population. The colonialism and monopoly enterprises of the previous regime are being dismantled by the revolution which was led by General Antonio de Spinola, the new president, who was removed from the army in February for publishing, “Portugal and the Future,” in which he called for a Lusitanian Community of Portugal and its former colonies, similar to the British Commonwealth. The African revolts had started in December 1960 in Angola (inspired by the revolt and independence in the Congo in that summer in which the BaKongo people of the lower Congo and northern Angola had taken the lead), and in Guinea-Bissau in West Africa. The guerilla war in Guinea was led by the late Amilcar Cabral who was assassinated last fall. The war was based on the stateless Balante people against the pro-Portuguese feudal Fula emirs. Cabral had advocated a future government which would be without a capital and without bureaucratic departments attempting to run people’s lives from a central government. Cabral in his book, Revolution in Guinea, challenged the established Marxist notions of revolution and of society in liberated Guinea. The Portuguese government is composed of liberals, socialists and Communists (a Communist party totally controlled by Moscow and thus extremely moderate; the Communist cabinet members’ role is to maintain low wage rates among the workers on the model of the Soviet Union.)

Outside of Europe, the revolution of the Kurds of northern Iraq is worthy of note. The revolt has been going on for about two decades, and at times was well covered by the New York Times Middle East correspondent who periodically would take a couple of months to cross through the Turkish mountains to reach Kurdistan. There are about two and a half million Kurds in Iraq and about six million in eastern Turkey and north-western Iran. The leader of the Kurds is Mullah Mustafa Barzani. The Kurds were promised independence by the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, one of the post-World War I peace treaties. This treaty gave public recognition to the secret Anglo-French Skyes-Picot Agreement of 1916 whereby France was to receive Syria and England Iraq, from the Ottoman Empire. The Agreement had to do with hoped for petroleum resources which had been feared would fall to German possession in 1914 through the Berlin to Bagdad concession. The important area, the vilayet of Mosul, was a known petroleum reserve and England wanted it. Although the war in Mesopotamia had ended in November 1918 with English forces (Indian troops) sixty miles south of Mosul, English forces gradually moved to and beyond the city. In 1923 as one of the seventeen agreements signed at Lausanne, Turkey agreed to what amounted to English control over Mosul while nothing was said about carrying out the treaty of Sevres’ provision for an independent Kurdistan (which would have included Mosul). Under the English imposed Hashemite family the Kurds’ struggle continued. After the establishment of the Iraq Ba’athist regime in the nineteen sixties, recognition of Kurdish autonomy seemed possible. The Ba’ath, which also rules in Syria, is a complex political philosophy founded by a Syrian Christian on the basis of French Catholic social theory. But, the Iraq Ba’ath did not live up to their agreements and the conflict continues in and around the petroleum center of Mosul. (For a really valuable explanation of Middle East politics and American policy in that area, read Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations; Copeland, a pr man in Cairo for decades, was involved in more crucial diplomatic activities than a thousand ordinary overseas ad men; it is a first-hand deep-cover overview).

Meanwhile, India has exploded an atomic weapon. A very strong criticism was issued by the Gandhi Peace Foundation secretary, Radha Krishna: “The economic costs of this program are unimaginable. There is also the likelihood of it adding to our monstrous inflation. When the country’s economic situation is one of great stress, on account of gross underutilization of industrial capacity and available resources including human resources, the search for a new source of energy of doubtful immediate use, does not exactly square up with our national priorities . . . Is prestige not synonymous with the assertion of our national ideals—no begging for food, our entire people sweating it out in the task of national reconstruction and very friendly relations between the countries in the subcontinent?” Asher Brynes, author of We Give To Conquer, dealing with foreign aid, noted in The Nation (June 8, 1974) that Nobel Peace Prize winner and Rockefeller Foundation spokesman, Dr. Norman Borlaug, had chewed out Indian bureaucrats. Echoing what Milton Friedman had said about foreign aid in India in the 1950’s, Borlaug demonstrated the complete failure of bureaucracy. Since foreign grain is either given by the U.S. to the Indian government when it behaves or is purchased by government agencies, there is no room for private enterprise. The government officials did not buy wheat for reserve stocks, and then flooded the American commodity markets on a panic basis driving up the price two or three times. No oil reserves were undertaken by the government monopolies so the grain regions of India will not be able to produce full yields due to absence of oil for the massive irrigation pump system and of synthetic fertilizers.

For Tuccille

By Roger Lea MacBride

I hear

That in New York this year

The Democrats will select Reid, Samuels or Carey

None of whom to us is the least bit scary.

Libertarians think them the absurdest.

I hear

That in New York this year

The Republicans will choose incumbent Malcolm Wilson

Who if re-elected promises the state to tilt some.

Libertarians’ greeting: a cold blast.

I hear

That in New York this year

The Conservative choice is a surprise: Wilson, Malcolm

Who to a majority may prove less than walcome.

Libertarians need a fistful of aspirin.

I hear

That in New York this year

The Marxist parties will struggle to get on the ballot

Some strange exemplar—maybe this time a shallot?

Libertarians would rather run up Mt. Everest.

When we put it all together, what have we got?
I submit to you a hell of a lot.

The absurdest: Too silly.

A cold blast: Too chilly.

A fistful of aspirin: Too pilly.

A run up Mt. Everest: Too hilly.

All four points agree, you see.
In 1974 it’s Jerome Tuccille!!

Note by Roger Lea MacBride:

The common law copyright in the above has been hastily assigned to Joey Rothbard. While of course I hope that large sums will flow into her coffers as a result of requests to reprint, candor prompts me to admit that the major motive was to protect myself from potentially damaging law suits.

Reply from Joey Rothbard:

Since my taste in poetry is as low as my taste in music, I am tickled to have the copyright, and am eagerly awaiting the large sums.

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. dir. by Michael Cimino. With Clint Eastwood.

First, I have to report, as a dyed-in-the-wool Clint Eastwood fan, that this picture is a total disaster. It is not Clint Eastwood’s fault; he struggles manfully through the role. The fault is strictly Cimino’s, may he retire for the rest of his life to television. Eastwood is cast as the hero of a crime caper to recover buried loot, for which both another set of crooks and the police are chasing him. It sounds interesting, but it isn’t, largely because action disappears into the twin killers of any good action-suspense movie: a lot of witless horseplay, interspersed with much moping and “tragedy.”

Walking Tall. dir. by Phil Karlson, with Joe Don Baker.

Walking Tall, on the other hand, is an authentic hero picture, and a smashing success. For weeks, I was put off by news of its “underground” success, and ad comparisons to one of the turkeys of all time, Billy Jack. But the two, rest assured, are as different as day and night. Walking Tall is not only expertly directed and acted, but the plot is truly heroic, and is, as most everyone knows, the true story of Buford Pusser, first as citizen-farmer and then as sheriff, battling a passel of bad guys in rural Tennessee. Left-liberals who complain about Pusser’s “puritanism” ignore the fact that the bad guys’ gambling was crooked and that the hero and friend were nearly killed when they tried to get their money back; and that the moonshine was poisonous enough to kill a dozen customers. Joe Don Baker makes a great hero, in the classic tradition of an innocent who is victimized, and then fights back to conquer the victimizers. It’s great to see Phil Karlson back after many years, and let’s hope that he makes many more films.

Chosen Survivors, dir. by Sutton Roley. With Jackie Cooper.

A pleasant, though scarcely a great, politico-science fiction film, with — let us strongly note—an explicit libertarian content. The villain of the piece is the U.S. government, its computers, and its verdamte “behavioral scientist”; the government shanghais and drugs a group of people chosen by its computer to serve as unwilling guinea pigs in a behavioral science experiment. Shipped far underground to a “totally controlled environment”, the poor experimentees are told that nuclear war has just wiped out virtually everyone on earth, and that they are among the few chosen survivors, who would have to remain underground for years until radiation on the surface had disappeared. It’s all, however, a trick, for the good of “research.”

Interestingly enough, the capitalist in the group, well played by Jackie Cooper, is the only one to smell a rat and to keep agitating for the group to escape. Treated by everyone-as a greed-filled and selfish pariah, it turns out that the pesty capitalist was right all along. For this we can forgive Roley some of the crudities derived from his TV background.

Daisy Miller, dir. by Peter Bogdanovich. With Cybill Shepherd.

Written by Frederic Raphael, from the novel by Henry James.

Dare I say it? Dare I think the unthinkable? Namely, that I have always found Henry James b-o-r-i-n-g; is there anything quite so excruciatingly boring as the old gentleman’s endless, quibbling, and plotless stories? I have said before that Peter Bogdanovich is one of our best young directors, but here he is trapped by his own major leitmotif—his reverence and love for “classical” literature and cinema, his rejection of the avant-garde. For Bogdanovich is here trapped by his neo-classicism—usually a virtue of his—into a faithful translation of the original vapidity to the screen. For James, the most uncinematic of writers, such a faithful rendition may be of interest to antiquarians, but it is a film disaster. If one wants to translate James to the screen, he must be made cinematic; a literal rendition is a disaster, in this case Daisy Miller.

For one point, for those who like that sort of thing the charm of James is his endless filagree and subtlety of language; since all that has to drop out in any movie version, what we are left with is a plotless plot, and endless shots of the passive protagonist of the film standing around moping as he observes Daisy’s pointless antics. Another problem here is that Bogdanovich and Raphael, as sophisticated Americans of the 1970’s, seem incapable of understanding that James’ viewpoint of a century ago, in his endless novels and stories about crude Americans visiting aristocratic Europe, was pro-Europe and anti-American. In pitching the movie in precisely the opposite direction, Bogdanovich and Raphael have made hash of whatever point James was laboring to make.

To top off the whole stew, Bogdanovich fell into another trap, one that has been mentioned by most of the critics. Usually, he is a master at getting sterling performances from his actors; but here he cast the crucial role of Daisy with his current amour, Cybill Shepherd, who either can’t act at all or can’t do so under Bogdanovich’s direction. I suppose it’s something like the old motto that a lawyer should never argue his own case. At any rate, Miss Shepherd, who is supposed to be a charming flirt, rattles on in a machine-gun delivery, and with such an evident lack of even feigned, much less genuine, interest in any of her suitors, that the center of the film never has a chance to hold.

For Kurdistan

Why is it next to impossible for people to approach foreign affairs from the point of view of justice? This chronic difficulty has been fatally aggravated in the last thirty years by the exigencies of the Cold War. National liberation movements are evaluated, by the Establishment and by the Left alike, solely on the basis of their Cold War orientation (are hey “pro” or “anti”—“West”?) rather than on the actual merits or the concrete history or facts that are involved. The result is not only moral blindness, but a positive distortion, on both Right and Left, of what is actually going on in a large portion of the world.

Take, for example, the Kurds, a distinct nation of several million strong who, for literally several millennia, have been striving for independence from an endless series of imperial conquerors and occupiers. In contrast to the Leninist view that imperialism is a product of “finance capitalism”, this phenomenon has been around since one tribe or nation began to conquer and rule over another: in short, imperialism has been almost co-terminous with the existence of the State itself.

The Kurds are still striving for national independence, and they are still as far from ever from attaining it. “Kurdistan”, the once and future goal of the Kurdish people, is a distinct area encompassing northeastern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and southeastern Turkey, with a tiny area in the southern tip of the Soviet Caucasus and another tiny area in the northeastern tip of Syria. In short, Kurdistan is wholly occupied under the heel of three States, as well as two other minor carvers of the Kurdish pie. After World War I, the major thrust of Kurdish Rationalism was against Turkish rule, and Kurdish leader Sherif Pasha vainly presented the case for Kurdish independence from Turkey, at the Versailles conference. Since World War II, the major thrust of Kurdish aspirations has been in Iraq, and the great leader of the Kurdish movement in Iraq for the entire time has been General Mustafa Barzani.

But while the Kurdish national movement in Iraq under Barzani has been a constant force in the Middle East for thirty years, the interpretation and the attitudes toward Barzani and the Kurds have changed drastically with the winds of the Cold War and of the general conflicts in the Middle East. In the post-World War II years, the American Establishment press, headed by the New York Times, treated Barzani as a virtual Communist, and as a pawn of Russian imperial interests. In those days, the U.S. was allied with the Iraqi government, and so any disruption of the status quo was blindly considered subversive and an instrument of the Soviet Union. Actually, Barzani was in no sense a Communist; as a national liberation leader, he took the usual approach of accepting any aid from any quarter that wishes to give it—in much the came way as the American Revolutionaries gladly accepted aid from France, Spain, and other enemies of the British empire. In neither case were the revolutionaries “tools” of anyone; it was simply that they were willing to accept aid without dominance from any quarter in opposition to their imperial masters.

Three decades have passed; and General Barzani and the Kurds are still fighting the Iraqi government on behalf of national independence. In fact, they have been willing to settle for autonomy within Iraq, and have concluded several agreements over the years with the Iraqis. But in each and every case, the Iraq government has betrayed its agreement as soon as it has felt strong enough to resume the fighting against the Kurdish guerrillas. The latest agreement was made in 1970, and the latest betrayal was the refusal to grant the full autonomy to the Kurds that Iraq had pledged itself to grant by March of 1974. Hence, since this March, fighting between the Kurds and Iraq has again broken out: Oh a large scale.

But this time the shoe is on the other foot. The Iraq government is solidly anti-Israel and a staunch defender of the rights of the dispossessed Palestinian Arabs to return to their homes and lands. Hence, the Soviets are now, at least for the moment, pro-Iraq, and it is now the Left that regards the Kurds and poor Barzani as a “tool” of Western imperialism: and of the American allies in Turkey and Iran. True to his policy of accepting aid from any quarter against Iraqi rule, Barzani has indeed been accepting Western aid. Which makes him no more of a “tool of the West” now than he was a “Commie” thirty years ago. Where anyone stands vis à vis Israel or the Soviet Union is irrelevant to the Kurdish issue: that issue is simply the battle of the Kurdish people against age-old and continuing aggression by the imperial rule of the Iraqi State.

The two million Kurds of Iraq are now engaged in a classic national liberation-guerrilla confrontation with the Iraqi government. Once again, as in the armed Kurdish rebellion of the 1960’s, the 40,000-strong Kurdish guerrilla army does very well against Iraqi troops in the mountainous terrain of Kurdistan despite Iraqi use of napalm and once again, the major Iraqi weapon is the barbaric use of air raids and bombs against the civilian Kurdish population. Aid is coming across the Turkish and Iranian frontiers because the Iraq government has imposed a savage blockade on the movement of food into the Kurdish areas. Meanwhile, Iraq has executed nearly 100 leaders of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Bagdad.

A complicating factor in the war is the fact that the great Iraqi oil center of Kirkuk is in Kurdish territory, and that is one area that the Iraqis are particularly reluctant to yield to Kurdish autonomy. So oil politics adds to the intensity of the conflict.

But an ever-constant factor in the shifting power struggles in the Middle East is the unfulfilled and legitimate aspirations of the Kurdish people. Some day, the Kurds will achieve their Kurdistan, and the sooner, Lelt, Right, and Center adjust to that fact, the better for ill concerned; certainly the better for the cause of justice.

The Hiss Case Revisited

It was on the famed perjury conviction of Alger Hiss that Richard Nixon built the formidable reputation that finally gained him the Presidency of the United States. Not only that: the Hiss Case provided the major bulwark of the Red-hunting crusade within the United States, the spy-hunt, the general fears of the “international Communist conspiracy”, and even much of the Cold War mythology itself.

The clinching evidence against Hiss arose from the allegation that the American government documents found in admitted Communist spy Whittaker Chambers’ famous pumpkin had been typed on Alger Hiss’ own typewriter, and that the Hiss defense itself had introduced into evidence the very typewriter that was then determined by experts to have typed these crucial Pumpkin Papers. Since the defense itself had introduced the typewriter as Hiss’ own, Hiss was then inevitably hoist on his own petard. The case was clinched.

Hiss could only feebly maintain that the FBI had committed “forgery by typewriter”, in short, had constructed a new typewriter to fit the typing on the documents, and then had led him to discover it in a Washington junk shop, masquerading as his own. Who could believe such a wild story? Who could believe that the then sainted FBI could do such a devious and foul deed of frameup?

In the light of the Watergate, we are all wiser now about what the U.S. government and the FBI are capable of doing. The first crack in the formidable government case came in the first edition of Richard Nixon’s famous book of self-congratulation, “My Six Crises”. In that work, Nixon stated that the FBI had “found” the typewriter. But since Alger Hiss himself had presumably discovered it in the junk shop, the implication was startling: for if the FBI had really “found” it, then it must have planted the typewriter in the shop as a decoy, and led Hiss to find it later; and, furthermore, what had the FBI done to the typewriter in the meantime? In the second edition of the Nixon book, the telling statement was changed to the opposite: that the FBI had not been able to find the typewriter. As the New York Times writes (May 3, 1974), “Mr. Nixon explained the change at the time by saying that it was an error by his researcher.”

Indeed! We are now all too familiar with Mr. Nixon’s “errors” and “explanations.” But now, in the already infamous Nixon transcripts, we find another cryptic and illuminating reference to the Hiss typewriter. In a conversation of Feb. 28, 1973, Nixon advises John Dean to study the Hiss case as a good example of how to get things done. Said the Tricky One: “We got the typewriter; we got the pumpkin papers.” So; “we” got the typewriter, eh? For almost twenty-five years, since his conviction in 1950, Alger Hiss has been trying to obtain the FBI files on his case; it is high time that these documents be released, and that the whole Hiss Case be re-examined.

From The Old Curmudgeon

What Price “Purity”? Sam Konkin’s New Libertarian Notes, which specializes in wrapping itself in the “purity” mantle and judging other libertarians thereby, has, in its May issue, an attack on the FLP for nominating the “impure” Percy Greaves for the U.S. Senate. And yet, in the very same “Christian Libertarian” issue, NLN contains an article by the Rev. Edmund Opitz, who is not only at least as impure as Greaves (to employ some Christian charity), but has spent a large part of his energy and output in the last couple of decades to attacking anarchism. So what price “purity” now? To mix our metaphors, I guess it all depends on whose “purity” is being gored. How did the Good Book say it: “Let him who is without impurity cast the first stone.”

Contra Federal Campaign Funding

By Bill Evers

Various proposals to limit campaign spending and to substitute in whole or in part money taken from the taxpayers are at present being debated in the halls of Congress and in the news media. These proposals are all direct attacks on the First Amendment rights of free speech and a free press.

Any limitation on an individual’s right to contribute infringes upon his right of free expression. The essence of freedom of speech is the prohibition of governmental interference with a man’s hiring a hall to say whatever he wants.

Similarly, the essence of freedom of the press is the prohibition of governmental interference with publishing.

If a person is prohibited from spending money to express his support for a political candidate, then that person’s liberties have been severely undermined. An election commission with tyrannical powers would be presiding over political expression.

Citizen’s Rights?

The proposal to have tax-supported election campaigns not only takes a citizen’s earnings, but puts that money in the pockets of men the citizen may very well oppose.

Michael Killian of the Chicago Tribune zeroed in on the issue involved: “Picture yourself as a South Side Chicago black who has just turned over a substantial portion of his income to the IRS and then turns on his television set to watch part of it being spent on a TV spot for George Wallace. Or a Vermont conservative watching a federally financed George McGovern talking about how this country needs more taxes.”

To add some parallel examples to Killian’s, imagine a New Leftist looking at a Nixon plug he has paid for, a feminist paying for an ad for an anti-abortion candidate, or an anarchist who doesn’t like any of the candidates he is paying to promote.

Anyone who has paid his federal income tax recently knows that the new “checkoff” program of federal financing pays only for the Presidential campaigns of the Establishment’s Republican and Democratic parties.

Choices Limited

When this program was launched, it was stated that those who participated could designate to which party they wished to have the tax money go. But the tax form does not allow this.

Supporters of the Peace & Freedom Party, the American Independent Party, the Libertarian Party, the Socialist Workers Party, and other groups are forced to pay for Republican and Democratic campaigns.

Most of the various campaign spending bills now in Congress require a government – sanctioned classification of groups into major parties and minor parties.

The groups designed as minor are effectively frozen into a situation in which uncertain prospects, little money, and stringent requirements paralyze them.

Status Quo Maintained

At a time when the public is dissatisfied with the large political parties, they are about to ensure their own wealthy and perpetual existence. In September 1973, a Gallup poll showed that one-third of the American public identifies with neither the Republicans nor the Democrats.

At a time when respect for politicians and trust in the government itself is at a low ebb, the established politicians are engineering a successful new raid on the taxpayers’ pocketbook.

At the same time, corporate liberal business figures (Miles Rubin, Daniel Noyes, Stanley Steinbaum, and Max Palevsky) are rallying behind the idea of tax-funded elections because they hope to re-stabilize a system shaken by the Watergate revelations.

In the November 10, 1973 issue of National Journal Reports, Mrs. Susan B. King, who runs the Center for Public Financing of Elections, is quoted on the large support the idea has received from the wealthy.

Big-Business Support

Business Week for September 15, 1973 reported that many business executives are strongly in favor of limiting campaign contributions and says that “many are willing to consider some government subsidy”

These corporate liberal leaders feel uncomfortable with the local interests who gain a voice through present-day election spending. Instead these corporate liberals, whose own activities are national in scope feel comfortable with the politicking of government-business planning groups like Nelson Rockefeller’s Critical Issues Commission or the Committee for Economic Development.

Reforms’ Loopholes

Under the proposed campaign reforms, we can expect simply that payments from large business and labor groups will no longer be in money form. Personnel will be donated, equipment will be loaned meeting sites will be made available at no cost.

Campaigns for programs that are linked in the public’s mind with a specific candidate will be promoted by “public interest” groupings of the candidate’s followers.

In sum, the proposed campaign financing laws are an assault on free political expression. As Yale professor Ralph Winter says “A law forbidding someone from spending a certain amount cannot be distinguished from a law forbidding speeches of over 10 minutes in public parks.” In addition, the law favors the incumbent politicians and those who like the American system as it is.

*Reprinted from The Stanford Daily, April 4, 1974.