prise will come to an end.nThe report issued by the Senatencommittee after the 1982 hearingsndeclared that, “Documents submittednfor the record contain evidence of thentraining of large numbers of SWPO’sn’cadres’ in the Soviet Union, both innmilitary doctrines and, without exception,nin Marxist-Leninist ideology.nThe position of ‘political comissar’ isnentrenched at all organizational levelsnof SWAPO. These men . . . arentrained at the KOMSOL Party Schoolnin the Soviet Union, in the GDR andnin Cuba.” In testimony which Raditsanfound particularly compelling, BartholomewnHlapane, a former membernof the Central Committee of thenSACP and the National ExecutivenCommittee of the ANC, declared;n”No major decision could be taken bynthe ANC without the concurrence andnapproval of the Central Committee ofnthe SACP. Most major developmentsnwere in fact initiated by the CentralnCommittee.”nMr. Hlapane testified that, “Thenmilitary wing of the ANC, also knownnas Umkhonto We Sizwe, was thenbrainchild of the SACP.” The solensource of funds for the ANC’s militarynactivities, he added, was the CommunistnParty itself, during the period thatnhe acted as treasurer of the SACP.nOther witnesses before the Senate indicatednthat, as members of the ANC,nthey had received military and politicalntraining in Angola and East Germany,nas well as in the Soviet Union. Shortlynafter the Senate published its report onnSoviet support for terrorism in SouthnAfrica (a campaign aimed largely atnmoderate blacks who seek peacefulnreform, not at the government). SenatornJeremiah Denton reported to hisncolleagues as follows (June 20, 1983):n”I had the painful duty of informingnthe Senate that one of the witnesses,nMr. Bartholomew Hlapane, and hisnwife were murdered in their home innSoweto on December 16, 1982, by annANC assassin armed with an AK-47nassault rifle.”nAs South Africa moved in the directionnof further internal reform andnbetter relations with its neighbors, thenANC increased its terrorist activities.nSpeaking on April 13, 1986, WinnienMandela, wife of imprisoned ANCnleader Nelson Mandela, declared:n”With our boxes of matches and ournnecklaces, we shall liberate this country.”nThe “necklace” referred to is angasoline-filled tire placed around a victim’snneck and set on fire. This methodnof “execution” has been used by ANCnactivists — not against white South Africans,nbut against blacks who seeknpeaceful reform.nLeo Raditsa laments that, while allnof the evidence shows that the ANCndoes not want to share power withnwhites but seeks to take over SouthnAfrica by violent means, and that it isnopposed by the vast majority of blacknSouth Africans, the American medianhas almost totally ignored this reality.nThis is a powerful and welldocumentednlook at what is reallyntaking place in South Africa at thenpresent time. It deserves to receivenmore attention than the hearingsnwhich motivated it.nAllan C. Brownfeld is a syndicatedncolumnist and an associate of thenAccuracy in Media—AlliednEducational Foundation SpeakersnBureau in Washington.nThe Critic and thenConservativenImaginationnby M.E. BradfordnActs of Recoverynby Jeffrey HartnHanover and London: UniversitynPress of New England;n256 pp., $19.95nBecause of the great range of hisninterests, it is very difficult to predictnwhat Professor Jeffiey Hart willnnext produce. Hart writes out of andevotion to literature as “the principalnvehicle for transmitting the ideas andnfeelings that constitute our shared publicnculture.” Following the examples ofnpublic-spirited critics running fromnSamuel Johnson and Matthew Arnoldnto T.S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling, ProfessornHart explicitly rejects the coterienculture of deconstruction and the newnliterary history that make of the critic anhierophant occupied in the unfolding ofnmysteries or a tasteless malcontentnmired in endless accusations. “The as­nnnsumption throughout [these] essays isnthat the study of literature is central tonour discourse and that the habits ofnmind generated by the study and discussionnof literature can be applied to anwide range of subject matter”: that thenliterary education is the best possiblenpreparation for the study of the culturenat large. But not if we neglect that partnwhich is specifically literary. Hart hasnnot done this. He writes well aboutnGeorge Herbert, about the poetry ofnFrost and Eliot and the fiction of thenSpanish novelist Jose Maria Gironella.nHe does formal explication as I wasntaught to understand that enterprise andnalso, in an essay on Boswell and Johnson,ntraditional literary history. We cannlook forward to a Hart monograph onnHemingway and Fitzgerald from thenUniversity of Missouri Press.nOut of such grounding, on the basisnof so various a literary education, it isnnot surprising that Hart as a man ofnletters in the antique sense of that termnhas followed closely and perceptivelyndevelopments in political and socialntheory, in the sociology of knowledge,ntheology, poetics, and in the art wherenall of these concerns meet and resolve,nrhetoric. For he needs all of thesencompetencies to translate form into thenlanguage of our time. Nor is it surprisingnthat he has written speeches for thencampaigns of Richard Nixon andnRonald Reagan. Indeed, all of the linesnof inquiry that gather in the thought ofnJeff Hart combine and reinforce onenanother in Acts of Recovery.nThe prototype for this book is ThenLiberal Imagination (1950) of Hart’snimmediate preceptor in the business ofncriticism, Professor Lionel Trilling ofnColumbia University, whom Hart honorsnin his preface. But the distancenbetween Hart and Trilling is moreninstructive than their connection — andistance of which Hart speaks when hendescribes his book as essays that “representnan attempt to push beyond Trilling’snhesitation and doubts to explorenthe possibility that there really is anwider and deeper tradition than whatnTrilling believed in 1950 to be ‘our solenintellectual tradition'” (i.e., naturalismnand/or positivism). Because it is evennmore radically skeptical than Trilling’snmodernism, because it doubts the usuallynunchallenged assumptions of thenleft as much as it does older attitudesnthat have lost their vitality in thought-nFEBRUARY 1990/35n