The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 176

COMMENTARY ANALYSIS EDITORIALS SECTION OPINION SUNDAY Cos Alleles (Times DECEMBER 24. 1989 ASovietViewof Using Force as Foreign Policy Panama: U.S. intervention seems another manifestation of American provincialism belief that regional policies can be separated from global policies. jobs for all and communist equality. Marxian communism, moreover, came forward under the banner of the new religion of science.

No wonder it had an enormous attraction. It must be kept in mind that the economist system (thesis) it opposed (capitalism) was the most brutal and exploitative system yet invented by the race. It condemned millions to lives of desperate poverty and crushing toil so that a relative few might live in the luxury of Oriental potentates. Of course it did more than that It developed a remarkable technology, theoretically at least capable of supplying the needs of all the inhabitants of the globe, and a large and productive (and prosperous) middle class, a substantial number of whom, appalled at its excesses and inequities, became socialists of one kind or another and some of whom became communists (in the VS. very few workers did).

In any event, all the true believers in Marxism were assured that communism was the scientifically inevitable wave of the future. It might be resisted or abetted but it could not be deflected. I mention all this because the Marxian dialectic is only the most recent of the "laws of history" and. one might add, one of the shortest-lived. There is, in fact, as far as I can discern, only one law of history.

It was simply stated by the English historian-philosopher Lord Acton more than 100 years ago: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Although History: Since the Greeks, humans have sought the laws' of history. But there is only one law, and it explains the downfall of communism. By Page Smith SANTA CRUZ historian cannot observe the 1 momentous events of the last few months in Eastern Europe ri or. indeed, perestroika and mm lAglasnost, which opened the way for them, without being greatly instructed as to the nature of history herself of Clio. Queen of the Muses.

First, it must be said that the distinguishing feature of history is that it is full of surprises. The most renowned expert, the most farsighted prognosticator cannot anticipate the future. We have no idea what the future holds in store for us. The future. Robert Frost wrote, is given form by our faith.

We believe the future into existence. Why then can we not predict it? Well, for one thing, our moods are too transitory and unpredictable. We are too fickle and faithless to be relied upon. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, human beings, especially male human beings, have found the obscurity of the future maddening. They have shown remarkable ingenuity in trying to discover the "laws" of history.

The Greeks (and to a degree, the Romans) believed that time was cyclical, that nations were compelled to go through preordained cycles from democracy (which invaria- Page Smith, emeritus professor of historical studies at CoweU College, UC Santa Cruz, is the author of "A People's History of the United States" (McGraw-Hill). bly degenerated into anarchy), to dictatorship (which was legitimated into monarchy), to oligarchy (the rule of a rich and powerful class made restive by the arbitrary dictates of the king). And so on, forever. Christianity, by anticipating an end to time, the Day of Judgment, attacked the pagan notion of endlessly recurring cycles and "straightened history out." so to speak. Humanity was not condemned to endless repetition; there could be change and progress toward a clearer idea of God's intentions for man.

In the 19th Century, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel propounded his "dialectical" view of history. The dialectic consisted of a thesis (the dominant consciousness of the age) and an antithesis (a set of opposing propositions). Out of the struggle between the established thesis and its challenger, the antithesis, would come a new synthesis that combined the most enduring values of the rival creeds. Hegel's theory of the dialectic was one of the great creative notions in all of historyin part at least because it involved the principle of incorporation. The synthesis was larger, more comprehensive, more generous, if you will, than the rival systems.

The synthesis, in turn, became a thesis and was once again challenged by a new antithesis. I have always found Hegel's system a most fruitful one. Unfortunately, Karl Man did too. He adapted Hegel's dialectic, with bourgeoise capitalism as the thesis. The antithesis was communism, which must utilize the technological skills of capitalism and place them in the service of the classless society, run by and for the benefit of all, but especially for the benefit of the workers.

Millions of men and women were enthralled by the prospect of a society without class strife, with Acton put the idea in its most familiar form, it is an idea at least as old as classical times. The Greeks expressed it in the idea of hubris, or pride. Success, wealth, power brought in their train hubris. The human who sought and achieved power and wealth challenged the gods and they, angry at such human presumption, brought the pretender down in ignominy. Christians called it "original sin," the disposition of the individual to prefer his will to the will of God.

Every individual was born with this taint of sin, deriving from Adam's original disobedience. The most common political manifestation was the proclivity of humans to abuse power and indulge selfish desires rather than seeking the common good. If the law that "power corrupts" is the only irrefutably established law of history, it has a number of corollaries. In the words of the British historian E.L. Woodward, "Everything good has to be done over again, forever." Daunting, in one way, encouraging in another.

Woodward's axiom follows naturally from our disposition to abuse power. It was the Founding Fathers' acute awareness of this law that prompted them to try to devise a constitution that would prevent any class or interest from exploiting any other. Gouverneur Morris reminded the delegates that the rich had always exploited the poor no reason to think that they would be any less inclined to do so in a republic than in a monarchy. The only remedy was to hedge the rich with constitutional constraints. There was.

of course, no guarantee that human ingenuity could devise effective limitations, but it was worth trying. So what do we have? No laws of history but a single law and a number of corollaries, among them the assumption that democracy is the best system for calling the powerful to account There is also the related idea of rotation in office to prevent officeholders from acquiring excessive power and being corrupted by it It is not only individuals who aggregate power and almost inevitably abuse it; collections of individuals called bureaucrats also amass power and abuse it albeit usually in more modest ways. However, it may well be that in the last analysis, the bureaucrats are more dangerous to the general welfare than single abusers of power if only because they are so much harder to root out Which brings us back to Marxian communism. There is, obviously, no such thing as "historical inevitability," either communist or capitalist; there are only the touching, sometimes illusory dreams and ambitions of human beings who at their best yearn for peace and order and justice and at their worst make an inordinate amount of mischief (often in the process of trying to bring about peace, order and justice in the world There are, of course, many reasons why Marxian communism has failed so dismally, but perhaps the most basic reason is that in their pursuit of a Utopian social order, the Marxists ignored the only historical law that cannot be ignored "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." By In pursuit of a Utopian social order, Marxists Ignored the only valid historical law: 'Power tends to Politic Z(A 'a, raf 1 A vT establishing a one-party system, the Bolsheviks ensured that By Georgi Arbatov MOSCOW The American intervention in Panama has shown once again that traditional approaches to foreign-policy problems are still in vogue in the United States. I am not a fan of Gen.

Manuel A. Noriega, but neither his background nor methods of leadership can justify U.S. interventionism. It is especially regretful that the action in Panama is overwhelmingly supported by the U.S. public just as it was six years ago in the case of Grenada.

Nations and peoples do not change their habits very fast And that is why I would not like to sound too optimistic about Soviet-American relations by stating that all the current changes in these relations are already irreversible. The U.S. intervention seems to be another manifestation of American provincialismbelief that the regional policies of the United States can be separated from its global policies. But this is not possible in our interdependent world, and the use of force even at such a low level in Central America will inevitably echo in Europe, the Middle East Africa and elsewhere. For centuries the most reliable, realistic means of assuring national security was deemed to be stockpiling more arms and achieving military superiority over potential enemies.

But nowadays betting on such superiority is extremely dangerous and illusory, politically counterproductive and economically ruinous. If in the past military force was the main instrument of Realpolitikmd war was its continuation by other means now it has become impossible to achieve political aims by resort to force in any conflict larger than Grenada or the Falk-lands. In the Soviet view, a shift to consistent realism has implied, among other things, an understanding that our own interests will not be served by American difficulties, especially in the regions that are especially sensitive to the United States. In recent months Americans have begun to think more seriously about this, particularly in regard to Eastern Europe. There are few nations in the world other than the Soviet Union and the United States whose joint and parallel interests outweigh any real causes for conflict tension and confrontation between them.

Economically, the Soviet Union and the United States complement rather than oppose each other. As for ideological differences, I have never thought of them as an imperative source of divisions and collisions between the two nations. Ideology may play such a role only at the primitive levels of societal development when fanaticism and prejudice get the upper hand. We should not forget however, that ideology was frequently used as cam belli tot conflicts and wars to cover up for other much more fundamental and deep-rooted causes. The idea of "de-ideologizing" international relations and overcoming dogmatic stereotypes and prejudices in world politics has already been introduced into official Soviet foreign-policy doctrine and has become a key element of Mikhail S.

Gorbachev's New Thinking. By the same token, it appears that fascination with ideology and ideological "crusades" is falling out of fashion in the United States, while pragmatism begins to play a more important role in foreign policy. However, as Panama reminds us. there still exists an area of Soviet-American relations that during the postwar period was a constant and often highly dangerous source of conflicts and tensions: our positions in controversies and conflicts that flared up in various regions of the world. It is on this ground that the worst crises in Soviet-American relations took place.

It is here that the foundations for mutual trust were undermined. But looking at world politics of the last four years, we see that the number of arenas for Soviet-American confrontation have dwindled considerably. Humanity has tired of conflicts, civil wars, extremism of right and left Ideas of national reconciliation are gaining momentum in Central America. Afghanistan. South Africa and Indochina.

To my mind, reduction of world tensions is a natural process closely linked to overcoming the bipolar system of the Cold War. By rejecting blind confrontation and "zero-sum game" approaches to policymaking, by reassessing the need to re-rfeasc see POLICY, MS Georgi Arbatov, a member of the Politburo, directs the Institute of US. and Canadian Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. communism would, in time, be corrupted by its unchallengeable monopo ly of power. In Czechoslovakia, the 'Velvet Revolution' Settles In Prague: Czechs and Slavs talk about not having show trials or seeking scapegoats; reconciliation, not revenge, is the urgent need.

By Milot Forman PRAGUE. CZECHOSLOVAKIA A few days ago I met with my old friend from high school. Vaclav HaveL He. like many others in Czechoslovakia, had changed jobs so often over the last 20 years and in such a bizarre fashion that only with a communist education could you be properly prepared. From a student to a playwright from a playwright to a dissident from a dissident to a brewery worker, from a brewery worker to a prisoner and from a prisoner to a candidate for the presidency of Czechoslovakia.

It was late at night Havel was tired but happy. "Do you know the nickname of our revolution?" he Milos Forman is Czech-born American director whose most recent movie is asked The "Velvet Revolution." The next morning, walking on Wences-las Square. I understood what he meant A few days before on French television in Paris I saw the human avalanche sweeping the same square. Three hundred-thousand people filled every square inch of it And today I am walking there, amazed that not even the tiniest branch of the many young linden trees is brokea I look around and see millions of slogans but they are not sprayed onto the walls. They are written on scraps of paper and carefully taped to the buildings.

Underneath the slogans, Prague's marble is still clean. Except in one place: Next to the Communist Party headquarters in a park named after him is a marble statue of Klement Gottwald, the first communist ruler of the country. The whole statue is snowy white except for the hands. Got-twald's fingers are bloody red and the paint is still dripping. What an irony that the former president Gustav Husak, didn't even muster enough decency to apologize to millions of his countrymen for the suffering that the last 20 years of communist rule had brought upon them.

It is a tragedy no communist rulers of Czechoslovakia seem to understand, that arrogance in denying an apology to the people is today the main reason for a burning question: Who is going to pay for this degradation of the human spirit? Will it be the informer who overheard a tipsy citizen in a local pub uttering some derogatory remarks and called his boss in the secret police, who then ordered his uniformed counterpart to arrange the arrest? Or will it be the two lowly cops ordered to perform the actual arrest? Will it be the interrogator who might have used physical persuasion to extract a confession or will it be the judge who sentenced this citizen to two years in jail? Havel hopes it will be none of them. After all. in those times, these people were just obeying existing laws. Their actions were, literally speaking, "legal." All this leads Czech citizens to a question: Are we capable of rising above "tit for tat" and. as at Nuremberg in 1946.

put on trial just a perverted philosophy and those few individuals responsible for its implementation? Should only those rulers who imposed laws clearly contradicting standards of human dignity be called for judgment? Civic Forum members, the opposition. believe yes. They believe Czechs and Slovaks are mature enough to break the chain of hatred and revenge. They talk about the possibility of national reconciliation in a democratic society. But they say they wish they weren't alone in this effort They believe that it is necessary to create a new international forum in the near future to examine cases like theirs.

The world has witnessed too much abuse of power in this century. The family of nations should abide by decisions from the International Court of Justice, empowered to interrogate those governments suspected of imposing on their citizens laws that violate basic standards of human decency. Only then will the wasted lives of millions be at least partially redeemed and many future human tragedies avoided. Meanwhile, on the streets, thousands of citizens in Czechoslovakia not affiliated with any political party are signing petitions asking that the Czechoslovak Communist Party take back its two expelled leaders, Milos Jakes and Miroslav Stepan. because they don't want to have them as equals.

Well. Kafka is obviously alive and well in Prague these days..