WHAT, INDEED?

Our media resounded with liberal guffaws when the Greek colonels, soon after taking power, launched a campaign against what they declared to be indecency and immorality. At a moment when most self-respecting revolutionaries would have been slaughtering oppositionists by the trainload, here were these hick Greek peasants in soldier-costume telling girls to lower their skirts, fining chaps for oaths and obscenities, demanding respect for parents and the elderly, condemning easy divorce, and ordering citizens to go to church on Sunday! Where do they think they are—back in the Middle Ages or something?

In between jeers, it may have occurred to thoughtful members of the chorus that this sort of post-coup puritanical wave has accompanied several other political overturns of our epoch. It was conspicuous in the shift from the Alexandrian Egypt of Farouk—which had become a synonym for corruption and moral decadence —to the regime of the devout Moslem, Nasser. (In his book on Nasser, J. H. Joesten quotes the comment of a CIA agent: “The real problem with Nasser is that he has no vices.”) In some measure it seems to be present in the Nasserite operation of the Peruvian generals, and in two or three other of the recent South American semirevolutions. It was at any rate in the background of the revolt against the morally dissolute Sukarno. It has been a feature of at least the early stages of the Communist revolutions. Although Communists regard themselves as liberated from conventional codes in sexual relations, the personal conduct of the Russian and Chinese Communists after taking power, and of the Castroites, was on the whole austere compared to the prerevolutionary norm: and even in sexual matters they were strict about public decorum. Felix Dzerzhinsky, organizer of the mass Red Terror and first head of the Cheka, ancestor of the GPU-NKVD-KGB, was considered, by his victims as well as his friends, a saint in his private life.

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James Burnham

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Our media resounded with liberal guffaws when the Greek colonels, soon after taking power, launched a campaign against what they declared to be indecency and immorality. At a moment when most self-respecting revolutionaries would have been slaughtering oppositionists by the trainload, here were these hick Greek peasants in soldier-costume telling girls to lower their skirts, fining chaps for oaths and obscenities, demanding respect for parents and the elderly, condemning easy divorce, and ordering citizens to go to church on Sunday! Where do they think they are—back in the Middle Ages or something?

In between jeers, it may have occurred to thoughtful members of the chorus that this sort of post-coup puritanical wave has accompanied several other political overturns of our epoch. It was conspicuous in the shift from the Alexandrian Egypt of Farouk—which had become a synonym for corruption and moral decadence —to the regime of the devout Moslem, Nasser. (In his book on Nasser, J. H. Joesten quotes the comment of a CIA agent: “The real problem with Nasser is that he has no vices.”) In some measure it seems to be present in the Nasserite operation of the Peruvian generals, and in two or three other of the recent South American semirevolutions. It was at any rate in the background of the revolt against the morally dissolute Sukarno. It has been a feature of at least the early stages of the Communist revolutions. Although Communists regard themselves as liberated from conventional codes in sexual relations, the personal conduct of the Russian and Chinese Communists after taking power, and of the Castroites, was on the whole austere compared to the prerevolutionary norm: and even in sexual matters they were strict about public decorum. Felix Dzerzhinsky, organizer of the mass Red Terror and first head of the Cheka, ancestor of the GPU-NKVD-KGB, was considered, by his victims as well as his friends, a saint in his private life.