Reflections on The Revolution in China

By Charles Krauthammer

Living as we are through the greatest global democratic awakening in history, it is hard not to feel the thrill Wordsworth felt when contemplating the French Revolution ("Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven!"). Of course Wordsworth lived to regret it. But there will be time for that later. Now is the time to thrill.

At the stunning uprising in China, of course. But it is only the latest event in the democratic demarche, which began with the Philippines and Korea and has now reached wondrous proportions.

-- In Lithuania the Soviet-installed, Communist-controlled, erstwhile puppet parliament votes for independence from the Soviet Union.

-- In Hungary the two wings of the Communist Party are fighting over whether upcoming multiparty elections mean the Communists will be voted out of power in six years (the hard-line position) or sooner (the moderate position).

-- Argentina is about to witness the first transition of power from one popularly elected President to another since 1922, though, by electing a Peronist, the Argentines have proved once again that democracy is a people's license to act stupidly.

-- In Chile a 15-year-old dictatorship holds a referendum on itself and loses, proving once again that democracy is a people's license to act enlightened.

-- Poland will not only hold free elections for the upper house of parliament this month but, in a little noted provision of its pact with Solidarity, will also have a popular election for President in six years.

With such goings-on, it's hard not to get gushy and to feel it a privilege to have lived to witness such a dawn.

I admit to feeling a gush or two of Wordsworthian euphoria. Though a drawing of Yuri Andropov graces my office wall (a warm reminder of the good old days when The Enemy looked the part), I am a cold warrior who does not mourn the passing of the great twilight struggle. The cold war made thinking simpler in a "four legs good, two legs bad" (the Animal Farm axiom) sort of way. But simpler doesn't mean better. There could be no happier outcome for the cold war than for us to win it and for old cold warriors to face the invigorating challenge of rethinking from the ground up what America's role in the world, if any, ought to be.

But some of the gushing is getting out of hand. The most common bit of mush, endlessly repeated, whether the reporting is from China or the Soviet Union or Lithuania, is that once the genie of freedom is out of the bottle it can never be put back in. This is rank sentimentalism. The idea that somehow, if people ) have tasted freedom, the taste cannot be wrung out of them is a fallacy so large it is embarrassing just to hear it. Think only of this century. Russia tasted freedom in February 1917 and by October had lost it for 70 years. Weimar Germany tasted democracy for 14 years; it took Hitler and his storm troopers a few months to eradicate it. (Had Hitler not started World War II, the taste might to this day not have returned.) Hungarians let the genie out in 1956; five days and 5,000 tanks later, Khrushchev had stuffed it back in. Twenty-one years ago, the Czechs tasted freedom for an afternoon. Tell the Czechs that today's "Moscow Spring" is irreversible. Nothing is irreversible.

I admit that the genie cannot be put back in the bottle forever. Oppression and extermination can repress the will to freedom for decades, sometimes generations, but inevitably it reappears. That is the lesson we learn from the earthquakes in China and the Soviet Union and Lithuania and Poland and Hungary.

The past decade has taught that the classical totalitarian theory of the '40s and '50s was wrong. That theory, based on Stalin and Hitler as models, made the then quite reasonable assumption that modern totalitarianism, harnessed to high technology and mechanized power (Stalin was once called Genghis Khan with a telephone), had the capacity not only to suppress freedom but also to eradicate it. Classical theory postulated the brainwashed mind, utterly enslaved through terror and manipulation. It supposed the shattered society, its mediating structures and competing allegiances (family, church, union) destroyed, leaving an atomized individual enslaved to the all powerful state.

Not so. We learn that totalitarianism can terrorize individuals and shatter civil society, but it cannot change human nature. The will to freedom can be suppressed, but inevitably it returns.

But to say that the will to freedom cannot be suppressed forever is not to say that it cannot be suppressed for a very long time. And from the point of view of the individual with a finite life-span that is the same as forever. There are many Soviets who have lived and died in this century and never known freedom of any sort. Yes, the suppression of the Prague Spring did not forever abolish the Czech hunger for freedom. But it did crush the life of an entire generation.

No one knows where the Chinese revolution is leading. But the notion that once a million people have marched in the streets, some carrying effigies of the Statue of Liberty, things cannot be undone is wishful thinking. History has provided a generous supply of Bonapartes and Lenins. Maos too. This is not China's first revolution. And even if this one does succeed, it will not be the last.

The will to freedom is, of course, a constant of human nature. But so is the will to power. And power is intolerant of freedom. The drama of today's revolution in China is the contest between the two. Neither will is absolute. All victories are temporary.

Hail freedom! But precisely now that it is ascendant, do not assume that it cannot be sent into long exile. Iran and Nicaragua and Cuba are now the exception. But only a minute ago they were the rule. They can be again.