Communism

“We can only find the ways to communism if we get started and try them out, whether in the opposition or in the government,” Gesine Lötzsch, co-president of the German Left Party, declared earlier this week.

Throughout American history, citizens have been duped. It’s a word as old as the republic itself. George Washington, in his “Farewell Address,” warned about “dupes”—that is, those who, unwittingly, allow themselves to be deceived or misled by active adversaries of the United States.

Last Exit to Utopia

The Survival of Socialism
in a Post-Soviet Era
by Jean-François Revel

NO ONE CAN BE SURE of the exact size of China's Internet police force, but estimates hover between 30,000 and 40,000 officers. And their back-up is impressive--China has just spent $200 million on new firewall technology as well.

THE REAL STAR of "Frida," the much-hyped film biography of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, is not Salma Hayek, the beautiful Arab-Mexican actress who handles the lead role, but Mexico--in all its legendry, folklore, and intensity of color and passion. Mexico has remained in large part untouched by the globalization of architectural dullness, and it provides the film a setting so magnificent it almost overcomes the film's tendentiousness.

So, too, the real subject of "Frida" is not Kahlo as she actually was, but Kahlo as she has become since her death: a global feminist icon.

Victor Serge

The Course Is Set on Hope
by Susan Weissman
Verso, 320 pp., $35

WHO NOW READS Victor Serge? The novelist is nearly unknown these days, even among the most literate readers. Few of his titles--"Men in Prison," "Birth of Our Power," "Conquered City," "Midnight in the Century," "The Case of Comrade Tulayev," "The Long Dusk"--can be found in bookstores.

Sacred Secrets
How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History
by Jerrold and Leona Schecter
Brassey's, 320 pp., $18.95

SINCE THE END of the Cold War a flood of revelations about Soviet espionage in America has discomfited old leftists and startled many Americans. Easy assumptions about how Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs had been framed or Harry Dexter White and Larry Duggan hounded into their graves by false charges have given way to documentary evidence that all of them were guilty of providing confidential information to Soviet intelligence agencies.

Studs Lonigan
A Trilogy Comprising Young Lonigan, the Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day
by James T. Farrell
Penguin, 912 pp., $20

JAMES FARRELL is not exactly forgotten.

ON TUESDAY, February 5, PBS will air "Secrets, Lies and Atomic Spies," a documentary by the award-winning NOVA science unit.

SAIGON--In our national psyche, the word "Vietnam" remains heavily loaded with meaning, a synonym for failure. But as I travel through Vietnam, witnessing the explosion of free enterprise and the affection for so many things American, a divergent thought keeps recurring: We won, and we won big. Communism is dying fast. Vietnam's new revolution is Coca-Cola red, ubiquitous, and authentic. It marches forward on the power of its own force instead of at communism's bayonet point.

Ho Chi Minh City, still called Saigon by most residents, is the economic spark plug of the country.

The Feast of the Goat
by Mario Vargas Llosa
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $25

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA'S "The Feast of the Goat" portrays in stark terms the thirty-one-year reign over the Dominican Republic by General Rafael Trujillo, the man known as the Goat.

In alternating chapters, the novel presents three stories. The first is the story of Urania, the daughter of a leading Trujillista, and her long struggle to come to grips with an unspeakable act of betrayal she suffered in the days leading up to Trujillo's assassination in 1961.