The rout of the Taliban seems so stunning because in all the outpouring of media commentary over the past months there has been hardly any suggestion that such a thing could ever happen. On the morning after the fall of Kabul, NPR's Ivan Watson explained that armies frequently melt away during Afghanistan's wars. Why hadn't anyone mentioned that before?

If this were the first time a media failure of this kind occurred you might brush it off. But it's hardly the first time the media have portrayed an American adversary as too formidable a foe, and America's allies as a collection of dangerous riff-raff. More important, it is far from the first time the media has underrated a people's desire to rid itself of an oppressive government decked out in grotesque ideology. It happened in Serbia, in Nicaragua, Panama, and even in tiny Grenada.

This raises an ultra-contrarian question: does America's military and national security establishment actually have a better sense of the temper and aspirations of ordinary people in troubled lands than our supposedly "liberal" media? Are the media so transfixed by fear of appearing supportive of America's military aims that they overlook or downplay the vulnerabilities of our adversaries?

Bob Leiken has studied this "deformation professionelle" in media coverage of the Nicaraguan civil war. (Look for Robert S. Leiken: “Why Nicaragua Vanished: A Story of Reporters and Revolution.” Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming, 2002.) The Central American conflict pitted the revolutionary left against the traditional right, which fed speculation that the media had a leftist bias. But the military campaign in Afghanistan is being conducted against medieval sexists who loathe everything modern journalism supposedly stands for.

How strange.

Trade Issues Mount

Joel Freedman will participate in the meeting of the Council of the Socialist International in Santo Domingo on November 26-27. One item on the agenda will be a statement about the World Trade Organization, which again ducked the workers' rights issue at its Qatar meeting this week. The S.I. draft notes that while all WTO member states are also members of the International Labor Organization, and have endorsed the core labor standards of the ILO, many continue to argue that "there should be no link between trade policy rules and labor standards." The draft points out that although a majority of the members of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions are from developing countries, which may benefit from lax enforcement of labor standards, the ICFTU has nevertheless taken the view that trade rules should be linked to core labor standards.

The decline in the density of union membership in the work force of developed countries makes it hard for unions to succeed on their own in pressing for a trade-labor rights linkage. Until recently, many unions looked for allies among NGOs in such fields as environmentalism, the rights of women and indigenous peoples, and the array of small but active political groups that helped organize anti-globalization protests. The conflict in Afghanistan has thrown this coalition into disarray. http://www.thenewrepublic.com/092401/trb092401.html

There are now signs that some sectors of the business community may be in danger of losing the important linkage it had forged between trade rules and intellectual property rights. During WTO meetings in Qatar the U.S. and European governments backed off strong positions of support for respect for intellectual property rights by offering to permit developing countries to set aside patent rights on pharmaceuticals during health emergencies. These companies -- having forfeited considerable public support at home by denying the relevance of labor rights and environmental standards to trade -- now find it hard to sustain the position that trade should be linked to observance of property rights they themselves hold dear.

Local 25 Steps Up

There is a good article for anyone susceptible to the view that unions and their leaders do little for members but collect their dues: “Hotel Workers' Last Resort” in the Washington Post on November 13 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18690-2001Nov12.html The reporter describes the way Local 25 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) in Washington scraped together food and financial aid for over 4,000 of its members laid off after the tourism collapse that followed the 9/11 attacks. “. . .[T]he union office was the first place to go for help and it has become a community center for the workers, most of whom are immigrants and earn little,” the story says. “But many labor experts, social workers and union leaders said the layoffs and sporadic work could continue for another four to six months before workers are recalled to regular full-time schedules. It is unclear how some will survive until then.”

Many left-wingers and liberals still look upon the Communist Party as a group of well-meaning social activists who came to be persecuted by McCarthyites and other hysterics. Maurice Isserman, the biographer of Michael Harrington, believes that Harrington was poised to become an SDS hero and then a leader of a left-wing mass movement in the U.S. But, Isserman contends, Harrington could not break free from the dangerous influence of Max Schachtman, and became too virulently anti-communist and argumentative with young people who only wanted to unite the good folks on campus regardless of their attitudes toward the Soviet system.

Then there is “Carry Me Home,” a study of the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama. Carol McWhorter at first is exhilaratingly honest about those few CP members in the white and black communities of Birmingham who were active in the embryonic civil rights movement. But by the end of the book she mistakenly credits them with birthing the mass movement which brought down segregation in that city, while ignoring their blind adherence to a foreign power -- an allegiance which caused them and the blacks they worked with enormous difficulties.

But let's go back to Dmitri Volkogonov. I first read about him in David Remnick's “Lenins' Tomb.” Volkogonov was Director of the Institute of Military History under Gorbachev. He was one of the first researchers to have had access to the Soviet Union's archives; he used those archives to write a history of the Second World War. That history so inflamed the army and the bureaucracy that he was drummed out of his job and his book was never published. After the attempted coup, Yeltsin brought him back to government as a special assistant and chairman of the commission examining the Soviet archives. He is the author of biographies of Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky.

Volkogonov began his study of Lenin because, like so many disillusioned Stalinists, he was loathe to give up on Lenin. His biography presents a portrait of a brilliant man, who is both compassionate and fanatical, and also put off by the crudeness of an underling like Stalin.

But Volkogonov's research also gives focus to some troubling new facts. He contends that the extent to which Lenin took money from the German ruling class to finance the Bolsheviks before the October Revolution has been greatly underestimated. He argues that after the revolution, when most of Russia was starving, the Soviet government sent vast amounts of money to Communist Parties around the world in futile attempts to foment revolution. Most importantly, he describes Lenin's complete disregard of the need for majority support, his pathological intolerance toward any opposition, and his fierce assaults on thoughtful and irresponsible critics alike. This was a monstrous flaw, and became the taproot of modern totalitarianism.

As I was reflecting on all this, we were overtaken by the all too ghastly realities of September 11. We now find ourselves in a desperate campaign to root out shadowy forces of international terrorism. Columnists often announce that what is happening now represents a great departure from the experience of the Cold War. In some respects that is surely true. But those who stood with the anti-Communist left during the closing decades of the Cold War may find it hard to overlook enduring effects of the legacy of Leninism.

This all came home to me when I picked up another essay about Lenin in the November 1st issue of “The New York Review of Books” by the esteemed Professor Martin Malia. I found much to agree with in Malia's account, but became uneasy when he dismissed Volkoganov for being "sensational." One of Malia's concluding sentences leapt out at me: “Yet nothing now remains of his [Stalin's] and Lenin's work: the Party, the plan, the policies are all on the ash heap of history.”

Really? From a certain intellectual perspective, that legacy may now not be so compelling. But in the daily lives of vast numbers of people it is a legacy that grimly endures. The form of government shaped by Leninism still holds sway in China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba and, as a practical matter, in many of the outlying countries of the former Soviet Union. Much of the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons technology we now worry over has its origins in the Communist world. Although it has become cute to mock the CIA for having spawned bin Laden, in a deeper sense he was spawned by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment so pervasive in parts of Europe and the developing world certainly owes something to decades of Soviet propaganda and financial aid. So while Lenin and his system are but shadows of their former selves, our world is still deeply haunted by them.

We should not only bear in mind the evils of Leninism that remain with us -- we must also be mindful of opportunities that have been missed on its account. If the democratic Left had not been ravaged in its conflicts with Communism, wouldn't the democracies be far more capable of dealing with a menace like bin Laden today?

So Lenin's legacy was no mere bubble that popped and disappeared in 1989. A serious inquest is still due.

(Rachelle is the former Political Director of the American Federation of Teachers.)

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