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PARTISAN REVIEW
in contrast, secure in its ethics-makes haste to preach its sennon
over the grave of the revolution.
The lessons, however, that the capitalist moralizers draw from
the trials are in the last analysis summed up in the doctrine of original
sin. \Ve are eternally depraved; not even communism can save us.
And in the Soviet press also the end-terms of the thunderous denunci·
ations finally merge into the concepts of theology. No social analysis
can explain such diabolic crimes: every attempted explanation ex·
hausts the resources of the rational. For despite all the falsifications
of historical facts, the transformation of the old Bolsheviks into fas–
cists remains materially, psychologically, and politically unmotivated.
Hence it is not really political criminals who are being tried, but
sinners, evildoers, perhaps sorcerers. Thus we learn that it is
in
Moscow, the fountainhead of progress and the center of atheism,
that the black arts flourish and conjurers have made politicians their
bed-fellows.
But it is not only the old Bolsheviks who are on trial-we too,
all of us, are in the prisoners' dock. These are trials of the mind and
of the human spirit. Their meanings encompass the age. Much
is
being said and written about the "moral collapse of Bolshevism," but
how little about the moral collapse of the intellectuals. Among them
smugness has become the pseudonym of panic, and the more rapidly
they abandon the values of culture the more sonorous their speeches
in its defence. Everywhere they submit to the accomplished fact,
everywhere they place themselves under the surveillance of authority,
they rationalize, they explain away. Within such narrow mind-space
revolves the thought of those who trade in the mind's beauties and
powers.
War and revolution are the most crucial events in the history of
humanity; they are the supreme tests of character, of political in–
tegrity, of moral fortitude. The trials present the problem of revolu–
tion negatively, as counter-revolution. We are on the verge of a new
war, and already hostilities have broken out in several parts of the
world.
If
to be a "friend of culture" means something more than
merely being a friend of books, it is by subjecting the behavior of the
intellectuals to these supreme tests that we can best judge not only
their politics, but their morality,- in fact their culture itself.
After the last war the intellectuals repented, vowing they would
never again be deceived- but now they are once more clamoring
for blood. And always in the name of the most lofty ideals! They
want to guarantee the survival of culture by guaranteeing the victory
of the "democratic" imperialist powers in the coming struggle. The
perpetuation of "democratic" capitalism is their sole perspective. In
other words, they will fight to save culture from being put to a
