Arts/Review

LOYALTIES: A Son’s Memoir. By Car!
Bernstein. 262 p.p. General. $18.95.
Available through the People’s Co-op
Bookstore.

Reading Loyalties strikes a chilling
chord with those who remember the
fearful Fifties and the preceding decade.
It is also a necessary revelation for those
who may have thought political repres-
sion in the United States began in the
1960s.

Journalist Carl Bernstein brings a
fresh look at that dreadful period of
witch hunts and anti-Communist hyste-
ria in his effort to find the truth behind
his parents’ decades-long ostracism. This
book is not, nor does it try to be, an
encyclopedic examination of that period
— the mid-For- Bee..@"
ties to the early
Fifties — but it
is an effort to
come to terms
with and under-
stand his parents’
long ordeal, why
it happened, and
how they now
view it.

Communists,
as well as those
merely suspected of being Communists,
were persecuted under various congres-
sional acts — McCarran-Walter, Mundt-
Nixon, Smith. And President Harry
Truman’s Loyalty Oath, Executive
Order 9835, was used to persecute thou-
sands of government employees.

These marked the long nightmare of
investigation and persecution by govern-
ment committees which, after all, had no
right to investigate anyone not accused

of a specific crime, whatever their politi-
cal beliefs.

(Nevertheless, this writer and her hus-
band were on leave from the (U.S.)
Communist Party while he worked for
the National Labour Relations Board.
Even during the New Deal period it was
deemed unwise to be an open Commu-
nist while a government employee. This
was in 1938, when industrial union
organizing was in full swing, helped
along by then sympathetic NLRB. Our
friend Al Bernstein was already organiz-
ing the laundry workers in Washington,
D.C. I remember him as a jovial soul and
a demon poker player.) :

Al and Sylvia Bernstein were dogged
by the FBI well into the Seventies. Al, as

counsel for the United Federal Workers
of America, was especially singled out
because of his courageous and largely
successful defence of more than 500 of
those employees. ““He won 80 per cent of
those cases,” recalls Carl.

BERNSTEIN

Bernstein: persecution
during McCarthy years

Carl Bernstein is the journalist who
with fellow Washington Post reporter
Robert Woodward helped topple Richard
Nixon through their revelations of the
Watergate skulduggery. He notes that
his parents were members of the Com-
munist Party for a few years but they
insist, in the rather painful discussions
reproduced in Loyalties, that the CP
wasn’t an important part of their lives.

They were much more involved, they
said, in union organizing, the defence of
government employee victims of the
Loyalty Oath, desegregation, and pro-
tests against the execution of Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg in 1953.

Some of the agonizing dialogue that
deals with the question of loyalty to one’s
parents in conflict with the search for
truth remains unresolved, neither par-
ents nor son seeming to accept the idea
that being a member of the Communist
Party is relevant and valid, albeit dan-
gerous in certain historical periods.

Ace investigative reporter that he is,
Carl Bernstein has done an impressive
job of digging up data on this infamous
chapter in U.S. history.

Al Bernstein, as union counsel, tried to
defend workers against the charge of dis-
loyalty to the government, while denied
the right to confront and cross-examine
their accusers.

When Carl was growing up, the U.S.
capital was a racist town. That is true
today, but it is a long way from the kind
of segregation Bernstein describes when,
as a child, he accompanies his mother on
sit-ins in the company of African Ameri-
can children and parents to protest all-
white lunchrooms, or on “‘wade-ins”’ to
desegregate Washington, D.C. swim-
ming pools.

And he vividly recalls the terror he felt
when word came that the Rosenbergs
had been electrocuted. They, too, were
Jewish progressives. That night in 1953
he cried uncontrollably, and in recalling
his feelings, he writes:.“‘To a child the
connection was unavoidable: If they
could be executed, what was to prevent
the execution of one’s own parents, par-
ticularly one’s own mother?”

Bernstein explained during a recent
TV interview that the book “‘is not about
the Communist Party. I set out to find
out what happened in my childhood and
to my parents and to the country — a

truly totalitarian epoch. We know it as
“McCarthyism today.

“As an adult and a journalist (I) try to
make some sense out of what happened
in my childhood and also come to grips
with what happened to my parents and
really what happened to the country.”

— Pele deLappe
People’s Daily World

A reminder that sales of the Early Bird
tickets for the Vancouver Folk Music Fes-
tival end June 17. These cost $50 for
three evening concerts and two full days
of local stage performances — including
the festival’s noted “little folks” area —
as compared to $60 for regular advance
tickets. The festival takes place at Jericho
Beach Park on the July 14-16 weekend.
Tickets available at the folk festival
office, 3271 Main St., Vancouver V5V
3M6. Phone 879-2931.

* * *

Considering that this installment of
Frontline news program on KCTS is
entitled, “Death of a Terrorist”, we can’t

‘Cheep’ early bird tickets

vouch for the content or direction of the
one-hour documentary on Mairead Far-
rell, one of three unarmed Irish Republi-
can Army activists who were gunned
down by British security forces on
Gibraltar, March 6, 1988. For those who

want to check it out, it airs Tuesday, June ~

seek
KCTS public television in Seattle pres-
ents Letter from Palestine, a 30-minute
program Saturday, June 24, 8:30 p.m. It

13. 10 p.m. Closed captioned.
*

- offers a look at the work of the Palesti-

nian Medical Relief Committees, consist-
ing of volunteer Palestinian health
professionals who provide services in the
occupied territories. Closed-captioned.

10 ¢ Pacific Tribune, June 12, 1989

Eugenia’s
story
gives
personal;
account
of fight

in El Salvador

THEY WON'T TAKE ME ALIVE. By Cla-
ribel Alegria. The Women’s Press, London.
$10.50. At the People’s Co-op Bookstore.

I don’t think that anyone who reads the
Pacific Tribune is unaware of the situation
in the Central American countries today.
We are all pretty knowledgeable about the
right-wing fascist dictatorships which are
mainly subsidized by the U.S. government.

We have heard about the terror
unleashed upon the people: the death
squads, the disappeared and the poverty.
But somehow this little book, They Won’t
Take Me Alive, the true story of “Eugenia,”
who moved from being a model student ina
Catholic school in El Salvador to become a
commandante in the Farabundo Marti
National Liberation Front (FMLN) army,
moved me more than most.

Eugenia, who was born Ana Maria Cas-
tillo Rivas, was murdered while on a
manoeuvre transporting arms to the guerril-
las during the first week of the offensive by
the FMLN on Jan. 17, 1981. She was 31
years old.

The guerrilla forces had brought the
country to a standstill. They had achieved
most of their military objectives in the inte-
rior: several garrisons were immobilized in
regional capitals and a general strike had
begun.

(Translator Amanda Hopkinson writes
in her comments in the preface that what
Eugenia and her comrades had hoped for

was a triumph on par with the revolutions _

in Cuba and Nicaragua. Unfortunately, this
did not happerand the country has settled
into what the revolutionary movements
term a “prolonged popular war.”)

Author Claribel Alegria, an Salvadoran
exile, wrote this book as a promise to Javier,
Eugenia’s husband and comrade. However,
this is not only the story of Eugenia. The
book touches on the lives of many others
who dedicated their lives to build a new
society for themselves and their children.

Eugenia grew up in a strict Catholic
middle-class family. She belonged to the
Student Christian Youth Movement and in
1969, at age 19, went on a missionary pro-
ject to Guatemala and worked among the
Mayan Indians. The appalling poverty and

exploitation of these people, Alegria writes,

led the young missionary to conclude that
there was a political reason for their plight.

When she returned to El Salvador, Euge-
nia joined the University Socialist Move-
ment and it was there that she met Javier,
who is credited with furthering her political
education.

In this book Javier relates that the young
couple decided to immerse themselves in
working among El Salvador’s rural poor.
They joined grass-roots organizations,

developed the worker-peasant movement,
and studied Marxism. “Although our
immediate tasks lay in the countryside (Jav-
ier says), we organized what later became
“The Movement” which was converted toa
quasi-underground movement.”

By 1976 — the same year that Javier and
Eugenia decided to marry — state repres-
sion was so intense that the organization
was forced to go into hiding.

Author Alegria vividly portrays the life of
the peasants and revolutionaries in the
fightback against the oppression in a coun-
try where a few families own nearly every-

thing and the rest of the population.

practically nothing, and where the United
States government spends roughly $50 mil-
lion a year to keep the poor in virtual slav-
ery.

In this situation, Eugenia and her hus-
band were often separated, sometimes for
months. They were often forced to leave
their infant daughter in the care of com-
rades or family. © :

Along with Eugenia and Javier, the lives
and activities of many other revolutionaries
colour this book, which details the tragic
and criminal death of 43-year old Inez
Dimas, a primary school teacher who was
active in the Farabundo Marti Brigade.

North American journalist Ann Nelson
witnessed Inez’ death. Nelson was returning
home to a house rented by international
journalists near the U.S. Embassy when she
heard gunfire and saw about 50 National
Guard soldiers and police armed with mor-
tars, machine guns and a tank. They were
attacking a private house. The only shots to
be heard from the house came from a hand
pistol.

When the shooting stopped and the
smoke began to clear, police and the jour-
nalists went into the house. There was a
young woman about 25 years old, dead in
the bath, a woman in her early forties
stretched out in a pool of blood and a
woman of about 17 also dead.

Nelson says she couldn’t believe her eyes
when the chief of police put a machine gun
into the oldest woman’s hand, and tossed
several rounds of unfired ammunition into
her blood. “Those were her bullets. She had
a machine gun, she was firing on govern-
ment forces,” he said. He repeated the pro-
cess with the youngest woman, placing a
small gun into her hand. The oldest woman
was Inez Dimas.

Eugenia was a young woman passionate
for the freedom of her people. But as this
book demonstrates, with its details of the
lives of other martyrs, there are many
Eugenias in Latin America (and in sou-
theast Asia and Africa, for example) fight-
ing against oppression.

— Jonnie Rankin

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