Betrayal--It's Only Human

Apologies to my loyal readers. I'm ill this week so won't be posting. I hope to come roaring back next week with yet one more tirade against dreck! Thanks for your patience.

As a young woman, I saw Marlon Brando in a film called "Viva Zapata." The young Zapata (Brando, who else?) begins as a firebrand, determined to free the campesinos of Mexico from their oppression and exploitation by Porfirio Diaz. Zapata, in the opening scene, stands shoulder to shoulder with a line of poor farmers, complaining bitterly to Diaz about the theft of their land. Diaz demands to know the belligerent Zapata’s name and then circles it meaningfully on a list. Together with his compatriots, Zapata eventually succeeds in overthrowing Diaz (which in fact happened). But his brother proves as corrupt as Diaz. In the next to the final scene, a group of poor farmers have requested an audience with Emiliano Zapata. One man steps forward to complain bitterly about Zapata's brother stealing the land. Zapata demands the man’s name and its spelling. He then circles it on a list.

That he subsequently resigns power doesn’t invalidate the film’s premise: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

(In fact, Zapata did betray a friend, Otilio Montaño Sánchez, who had fought beside him. He abandoned Sánchez to the nonexistent mercies of his enemies in Zapata’s army after they accused him, probably unjustly, of disloyalty.)

John Steinbeck, a passionate anti-communist, wrote the script for Viva Zapta, which became a movie in 1952. Steinbeck had already written In Dubious Battle (1936), a clumsy screed posing as a novel, but in reality merely a tirade against Communism populated with stick figures. As for Elia Kazan, who directed Viva Zapata, he became infamous during the McCarthy era as the rat who made possible the Hollywood blacklist by informing on several friends to the House Un-American Activities Committee, headed up by the crazed Joe McCarthy.

Steinbeck and Kazan therefore had reason to portray radical leftists as men who could not lead after the shooting stopped. Although the eponymous Viva Zapata honors the Mexican hero on whom it’s based, his misstep (occurring just prior to the ambush that kills him) undermines the notion that justice can ever emerge out of revolution.

It’s easy to succumb to the logic of that repudiation.

My generation watched the betrayal of the Communist dream, doomed from the outset in the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks ignored entrenched Russian personality characteristics. At that time, the population was predominately composed of peasants, fiercely committed to ownership of property and equally resistant to collectivism. Marx's economic and political structures, as he explained them, were supposedly workable solely in an industrialized society.

In this way, the Communists backed themselves out of Communism and into totalitarianism, because, without it, you cannot rule people who don’t want you to rule.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, my generation noticed that Mao had disintegrated from the brave idealist of China’s revolution into a funnel for cronyism, viciousness and despotism. And then there was Castro, besieged by the fanatically anti-Communist bully to the North, forced (as he saw it) to abandon his original democratic vision for Cuba to find shelter in the patronage of the corrupt Soviet Union.

In other words, my generation watched blueprint-utopia after blueprint-utopia emerge as updated versions of overthrown dictatorships—sort of like modern Egypt.

True, even these tyrannical leaders instituted some reforms. Castro took Cuba from a nation of illiterates to 99% literacy. Ironically, the rate has fallen somewhat (to 97%) under his brother, who has initiated some economic reforms welcomed by the United States, which has promptly called for more. Castro also instituted a national health system that took Cuban life expectancy from under 60 years to just over 77.

When the Soviet Union and its satellites collapsed, women once again faced the unchecked brutality of their husbands. And a decade after the wall came down in Berlin, East Berliners responded to a survey, noting that, although in general life was better, they missed belonging to a community in which people cared about one another. China has attempted to prevent peasants from tossing baby girls into the river, although population controls and the urgent need to produce males had probably accelerated that practice.

Currently, we are watching our own country trash its Constitution. President Obama circles names on a list just as Porfirio Diaz did. As our freedoms shrink, many Americans feel helpless. Some of us who fought for justice in the 60s experience the same impotence, perhaps doubly.


Too often we have witnessed reforms that haven't changed things for the better. Or when they do change things for the better, those changes occupy a precarious position, such as voting rights for African Americans in Florida.


The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. But who can afford eternal vigilance?