millan and incriminate Lord Aldington.nTolstoy has been informed by anfriend in British intelligence that thisnwas not an “independent” commissionnat all, but one arranged by Sir RobertnArmstrong, recently retired cabinetnsecretary. Tolstoy suspects that thengovernment wishes to preserve the formernConservative prime minister’s reputation,nand says the materials havenbeen mishandled by the commissionn(even though they strengthen the casenagainst Aldington) and will be easilynrefutable, should they be introduced atnthe trial.nIn spite of the pressures of publicnscrutiny, Tolstoy is grateful for thennotoriety. For although he already hadnthe testimony and support of manynformer British military personnel whonobserved, or were forced to participatenin, the atrocities in Austria, many morenhave come forward, along with membersnof the victims’ families and anhandful of survivors, who would notnhave known of his work without thenpublic exposure. “As much significantnmaterial has come to light since thenpublication of my book as before,” andnhe believes the commitment of hisnsupporters all over the world has deepenednaccordingly. He told me hownhe’d just received an anonymously donatednfive-pound Australian note withn”God bless you” written on the card innUkrainian.n”This trial is the only way to bringnthe reality of these massacres home tonpublic understanding. And we hope, ifnthe funds hold out, to bring a greatnnumber of witnesses, in order to imprintnit on the record and the publicnconsciousness.”nThe legal expenses are, in fact, ansource of serious concern. While LordnAldington is a man of considerablenmeans, Tolstoy is not able to assumenhis legal costs himself, and a charitablenorganization, the Forced RepatriationnDefense Fund, has been set up by hisnsupporters to assist him.nFortunately for Tolstoy, The Comingnof the King spent two months onnthe British best-sellers list.nNikolai Tolstoy has come full circle,nfrom a fiction manuscript that wasndestroyed in a fire, through years ofnscholarly research on England andnRussia, only to return to fiction thatncouldn’t have been written without anlifetime of study.n56/CHRONICLESn”If my first books, which I’d set mynheart on, had been published, not onlynwould I have become arrogant andnconceited, but that arrogance wouldnhave led me to write more books of thensame sort. It would not have forced mento come to terms with myself, to findnvery slowly and painfully what I wasncapable of, and ought to be doing. Anlot of achievement in writing is doingnthings and having them destroyed, butnit’s really a regenerative process. I thinknwe really need tempering in life. Andnwe just have to go on working.n”But I do love the exercise of tryingnto slip into another age, as much as younpossibly can.”nSally S. Wright lives in BowlingnGreen, Ohio.nFILMnCaution: HistoricalnRevisionism atnWorknby Arthur M. Ecksteinn^ ^ T T e who controls the past con-nX X trols the future.” Nowhere isnBig Brother’s dictum truer than in thencase of Vietnam and the antiwar movement.nLately, one can detect a newnand persistent attempt to remold thenhistory and goals of the antiwar movementnin a way designed to make itnmore acceptable to. the mass of thenAmerican people. And obviously, hownone is taught to view the movement asnit was in the 60’s will help determinenhow one ought to view various move­nnnment efforts of the 80’s: the encouragementnof a nuclear freeze, for instance,nor the fierce support fornCommandante Ortega’s Nicaragua.nHollywood, of course, has always sentimentalizednthe radicals of the 60’s: thenoutrageous Running on Empty (1988),nwith its warm, fatherly and motherlynex-bomb throwers still (for some reason)npursued by a harsh and unbendingngovernment, is only the latest in anlong string of ideological epics thatnstretches back to Alice’s Restaurantn(1969) and Zabriskie Point (1970).nBut what is particularly at issue here isnnot the romanticizing of radicalism.nRather, it is the denial of the existencenof radicalism, radical ideas, and radicalngoals among the movement in the firstnplace.nAs far as I am aware, this new tacknwas first taken by Stanley Kauffman, innhis review of The Hanoi Hilton for ThenNew Republic in March 1987.nKaufFman bitterly objected to the depictionnof representatives of the antiwarnmovement in that movie: the movementnwasn’t sympathetic to the NorthnVietnamese (as it is portrayed in thenfilm), didn’t idealize them, didn’t seenthem as angels. The mass of antiwarnmarchers, KaufFman insisted, had nonopinion one way or the other about thenHanoi regime: they simply wanted thenwar to end, they wanted to “bring thenboys home.” In that sense, they were,nif anything, sympathetic to our soldiersnin Vietnam. This same theme — thatnthe antiwar movement was basicallynpatriotic in its goals — recently appearednagain in Curtis Cans’ review ofnan excellent new book of memoirsnfrom disillusioned movement peoplensuch as Peter Collier, David Horowitz,nand Carol lannone: Political Passages:nJourneys of Change Through TwonDecades, 1968-1988, edited by JohnnH. Bunzel. Writing in The WashingtonnPost (July 24, 1988), Cans insistednthat the authors of these memoirs hadna fundamentally misguided view of thenmovement: the movement did notnconsist of sympathizers with the NorthnVietnamese, such people constituted anmere “handful”; and meanwhile “thenmillions of patriotic Americans” whonactually made up the movement arenignored in the book. The same point isnpushed by Kauffman. Oh yes, he says,nthere were a “few” people in thenmovement who dressed in Vietcongn