conservative assault on the New Deal progressives as well as on reformers and geo-political progressives in the foreign policy bureaucracies. The experience of Farm Security Administration chief, C. B. Baldwin, in 1943 was of the same pattem as that of Wolf Ladejinsky in 1954. There were other such cases. Shigeru Yoshida, the conservative Japanese politician and friend to the American Council on Japan, observed in his memoirs that radical elements, "New Dealers" had flourished in SCAP until recalled to the United States and questioned by the Congressional Committee on UnAmerican Activities.[48] The Ladejinsky case coincided with the purge of the Chinese experts at the Department of State in "retribution" for the "loss" of China to the Communists. In the New York Times, 8 January- 1955, a report by Dana Adams Schmidt on Ladejinsky and his work, appeared alongside a report by Elie Abel headed: "Vincent Criticizes Davies' Ouster By Dulles as Drastic and Cruel. Former Envoy Breaks Silence in Assailing Dismissal and Own Forced Retirement."[49] These were the so-called "McCarthy years," named for the Republican demagogue from Wisconsin, Senator Joseph McCarthy, who made a career of denouncing American public figures as "Communists." Senator McCarthy, however, was less eccentric than his tactlessness and irresponsibility made him appear and focus on his idiosyncracies ought not to distract us from the wide and deep conservative reaction of those years which provided him with his public opportunities.
1 4 . In the tangled and often polemical debates on land reform in the Cold War between Communism and the Pax Americana, all this history is too seldom remembered or pondered. Consider, for example, the summation by Sidney Klein to his 1958 study, The Pattern o f Land Tenure Reform in East Asia after World War II:
"Two distinct patterns of land tenure reform emerged in East Asia after World War II, the non-communist pattem and the communist pattern. The non-communist pattern was characterized by efforts to eliminate the abuses of the existing social order in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. In these areas, genuine attempts at reform were made. The system of private ownership of land was, however, retained. In sharp contrast, the communist pattern viewed the reform movement as means to an end, with the end being abolition of the existing socio economic order, including the system of private ownership of agricultural land. The Communist governments of East Asia viewed their land tenure movements as vehicles for travel over the road to collectivization and ultimately socialism."[50]
Klein's use of the binary opposition: "genuine'T'means to an end" has a strong Cold War flavor to it and conceptually precludes more nuamced reflection on the agrarian transformations in question. Why need it be presumed that a land reform which is a means to an end is not genuine? And were not the genuine American-supported land reforms a means to an end? Klein's use of this polemical binary opposition, however, is thrown into high relief by use of the same binary opposition sixteen years later in Gary Olson's leftist critique of American policy in which "genuine land reform" was juxtaposed with "more limited, controlled bourgeois rural reforms."[51] To be sure, Olson qualified the concept of genuine land reform such that it included varieties of dramatic redistribution: into family, cooperative or state farms, depending on local conditions,[52] but in antithesis to Klein, whose concept of genuine land reform is precisely what Olson called limited, controlled bourgeois. The land reforms in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, in particular, are cited by Klein as genuine; by Olson as bourgeois. And whereas Klein accused the Communist revolutionaries of using land reform as a political tool, a means to their ends and not those of the peasants, Olson charged that the United States had "consciously pursued strategies of agrarian change" to serve its ends and not those of the peasants. In Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, Olson asserted, "U.S. foreign policy actors began to develop an appreciation of land reform as a political tool."[53] Another critic of the U.S. land reform policy in Asia, writing in 1971, declared that in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, the U.S. found land reform to be a "major counter-revolutionary weapon ”[54]
15. Description of such a land reform as that which the United States sponsored in Japan as a "counterevolutionary" operation makes sense if, and only if, one defines revolution as upheaval, or as a process led by "radicals" and ending in the creation of some form of radical polity. One is reminded of the polemical assertions by Lenin and Stalin that bourgeois reforms were instruments of counterrevolution. If, on the other hand, revolution is defined with closer reference to agro-industrial transformation and cultural/political modernization, the precise nature of which is conceived in other than utopian or teleological terms, then such polemical and reductionist binary oppositions as the above lose much of their force. When Olson held up the "socialist vision" and "genuine land reform" of the "popular People's Republic of North Korea" in contrast wtih the "inordinately high price in terms of human development" and political apathy produced by the "bourgeois" path in South Korea; or when Alfred McCoy, Elias Tuma, or other critics of "bourgeois" land reform, compare Communist agriculture uncritically and favorably with the land reforms in East Asia, there are solid empirical grounds for scepticism. When they write as if U.S. officials were
at one in seizing upon land reform as a "major counterrevolutionary weapon" they are missing the most salient point in the history of U.S. land reform policy: that to a great extent land reform has been opposed, ignored, watered down or otherwise frustrated by conservative Americans precisely because the redistribution of landed property in any systematic form seemed to them to be revolutionary. That U.S. land reformers were in general not pro-Commumsts does not make them "counterrevolutionary" except in the pernicious, polemical tradition in which the Communist Party is identified with the volonte generale and its critics as much as its enemies are consigned to the "dustbin of history." The tragedy of the best land reformers, on both sides of the geo-political divide referred to as the Iron Curtain, has been their political impotence, caught between hammer and anvil in the Cold War.
16. What is true of China, W olf Ladejinsky exclaimed in 1948, is true of