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When accused of violating human rights, Marxist-Leninists have usually retorted that once true Communism is established, the dictatorship of the proletariat will disappear, leaving the individual genuinely free for the first time. Meanwhile, though, these facts raise hard questions about the true intentions of the so-called Eurocommunist parties of Italy, France and Spain: after decades of being apologists for totalitarianism, they now profess their commitments to democratic principles. Purged from their platforms is the once obligatory rhetoric calling for violent revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat. Italian Communist Party Boss Enrico Berlinguer has said that under his party, "the system must remain that of liberty and individual rights, representative democracy that has its center in the parliament, pluralism of parties and alternating parties in the government."
But many analysts wonder about the sincerity of the conversion. Warns French Pundit Aron: "As long as these parties resemble an army of militants under the authority of a few, as long as they are prepared to do an about-turn either to the right or left when so ordered, no one will take even their most solemn declarations literally." Even if the Berlinguers are sincere, it is far from certain that once they are in office their views would continue to prevail over those of their colleagues, many of whom are Stalinists.
The record on liberty of some Third World socialists is no better than that of the Marxist-Leninists. Tanzania's prisons contain about 1,500 opponents of Nyerere's regime. Mozambique's socialist rulers have herded up to 10,000 "undesirables," including political dissidents, into primitive "reeducation camps." Iraq's xenophobic Baathist socialists have not held national elections since they came to power in 1968, and any critic of the Ahmed Hassan Bakr regime is quickly arrested by the Soviet-trained secret police.
There are, of course, nonsocialist countries that grossly violate civil and political rights. Witness Iran, Chile or Haiti. Yet it is surely more than coincidence that the only functioning democracies are found in capitalist or mixed-economy states, while authoritarianism is firmly installed in every socialist country, with the exception of the social democracies. This has prompted deep self-searching by many socialists. Says Asoka Mehta, India's leading socialist thinker: "Socialism is an attractive goal, but concentration of power is as dangerous as concentration of capital." Oxford Research Fellow Leszek Kolakowski, a dedicated socialist who left Poland in 1968, says, "One cannot discuss the socialist idea today as if nothing has happened since the idea was born. [In Eastern Europe] we expropriated the owners, and we created one of the most monstrous and oppressive social systems in world history."
Despair over totalitarianism has inspired dissident movements within the Marxist-Leninist states. East German Party Apparatchik Rudolf