Criticism of Socialist Nations for Rights Violations by the Left

Dershowitz takes The Nation to task for an editorial in our June 12 issue, which he accuses of indifference to the students massacred in Tian An Men Square. The killings took place on June 3-4; I drafted this editorial on May 22; it went to press on May 24.

Only the most malicious and tendentious reading could lead Dershowitz to conclude that we lacked sympathy for the Chinese students and their cause. It is simply false to say that we “ignored the students’ homage to the Statue of Liberty, their references to Patrick Henry and their repetition of American freedom slogans.” I mentioned all those things, and by name. Our point, however, was that Western governments and commentators had no monopoly on the Chinese students’ demands, and that their protests drew on a much broader range of political slogans and symbols--Mikhail Gorbachev, above all, but also Boris Yeltsin, the workers’ anthem “The Internationale,” and Poland’s Solidarity--to express their yearning for political reform and democracy.

The students debated at length what kind of statue they wished to erect in Tian An Men Square. They chose to depict not the Statue of Liberty, as other students had in Shanghai, but a “Goddess of Democracy” with discernibly Chinese characteristics--to prevent the regime from making any crude claims that their movement was the tool of Western interests and propagandists. Sadly, all too many Western commentators remained blind to such subtleties and went right on calling it the “Statue of Liberty.” The vicious old men in Beijing seized upon those commentaries in turn to slander the students as stooges of the West. Dershowitz says his piece was based on calls that an associate made to a number of left-wing “democracy-bashers” in the aftermath of the massacre. Had he paid us the courtesy of such a call, I would have been pleased to lay to rest any doubts he may have had about our position by reading him a second lead editorial which I drafted for our June 26 issue (press date June 8). We condemned the massacre in the harshest possible terms, and wrote: “If there is any comfort to be drawn from the carnage in Beijing, it is in the future that the students looked toward, in the moral superiority that they indelibly displayed over a crumbling system.” The courageous students deserve better defenders than Dershowitz.

GEORGE BLACK

Associate Editor, The Nation