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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