There are many lessons to be learned from the Polish events. But, I would maintain, the principal lesson to be learned is the lesson of the failure of Communism, the utter villainy of the Communist system. It has been a hard lesson to learn. And I am struck by how long it has taken us to learn it. I say we--and of course I include myself. I can remember reading a chapter of Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind in Partisan Review: When it came out in 1953, I bought the book--a passionate account of the dishonesty and coerciveness of intellectual and cultural life in Poland in the first years of Communism, which troubled me but which I also regarded as an instrument of cold war propaganda, giving aid and comfort to McCarthyism. I put it on my student's bookshelf. Still a student (though an unofficial one) twenty-seven years later, in 1980, on the eve of my first visit to Poland, I took down my old copy of The Captive Mind from the shelf, re-read it (for the first time) and thought, and thought only: But it's all true. And in Poland, I was to learn that Milosz had, if anything, underestimated the disgrace of the Communist regime instilled by force in his country.

I have asked myself many times in the past six years or so how it was possible that I could have been so suspicious of what Milosz and other exiles from Communist countries--and those in the West known bitterly as "premature anti- Communists"--were telling us. Why did we not have a place for, ears for, their truth? The answers are well known. We had identified the enemy as fascism. We heard the demonic language of fascism. We believed in, or at least applied a double standard to, the angelic language of Communism. Now we take another line. Now it seems easy to do so. But for many decades, when horrors exactly like, no, far worse than, the horrors now taking place in Poland took place, we did not meet to protest and express our indignation, as we are doing tonight. We were so sure who our enemies were (among them, the professional anti-Communists), so sure who were the virtuous and who the benighted. But I am struck by the fact that, despite the rightness of many of our views and aspirations, in particular our sense of the madness of a nuclear war between the superpowers and our hopes for reforms of the many injustices of our own system, we were not responding to a large truth. And we were countenancing a great deal of untruth.

The émigrés from Communist countries we didn't listen to, who found it far easier to get published in the Reader's Digest than in The Nation or the New Statesman, were telling the truth. Now we hear them. Why didn't we hear them before, when they were telling us exactly what they tell us now? We thought we loved justice; many of us did. But we did not love the truth enough. Which is to say that our priorities were wrong. The result was that many of us, and I include myself, did not understand the nature of the Communist tyranny. We tried to distinguish among Communisms--for example, treating "Stalinism," which we disavowed, as if it were an aberration, and praising other regimes, outside of Europe, which had and have essentially the same character.

At the beginning I called the brutal oppression under which the people of Poland are languishing "fascist." This is true in the sense that all the normal pretenses of Communist ideology have been abandoned. The methods and even the language are those of fascism: the demand for "normalization" and "order," the re-legitimizing of anti-Semitism, military rule presented in the guise of a "Committee for National Salvation." The similarities between the Polish military junta and the right-wing dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and other South American countries are obvious. Indeed, future fascist coups d'état will certainly imitate the Polish coup. No despot had ever thought of turning off the phones for an indefinite period, of forbidding the sale of gasoline to all private cars, of stopping the sale of rucksacks and of writing paper, Draconian measures that are not for twenty-four hours but, simply, a new way of life. For the imposition of martial law on December 13 has resulted in a perfect stalemate. It is, plainly, unlivable. And yet, despite the early promises of the government, it cannot be lifted. The present government has not only adopted the standards of fascist rule; it has offered fascist rule a whole arsenal of new techniques.

All this is obvious, or almost, when one uses the word "fascist" to describe the present Polish government. But I mean to use the word in a further sense. What the recent Polish events illustrate is something more than that fascist rule is possible within the framework of a Communist society, whereas democratic government and worker self-rule are clearly intolerable--and will not be tolerated. I would contend that what they illustrate is a truth that we should have understood a very long time ago: that Communism is fascism--successful fascism, If you will. What we have called fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown=-that has, largely, failed. I repeat: not only is fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies--especially when their populations are moved to revolt--but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of fascism. Fascism with a human face.

This, I would argue, must be the starting point of all the lessons to be learned from the ongoing Polish events. And in our efforts to criticize and reform our own societies, we owe it to those in the front line of struggle against tyranny to tell the truth, without bending it to serve interests we deem are just. These hard truths mean abandoning many of the complacencies of the left, mean challenging what we have meant for many years by "radical" and "progressive." The stimulus to rethink our position, and to abandon old and corrupt rhetoric, may not be the least of what we owe to the heroic Poles, and may be the best way for us to express solidarity with them.

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