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PARTISAN REVIEW
been intellectual-baiting, homage
of the self-made man of action,
and appeals to some mythic sense
of reality beyond the hounds of
reason and imaginative conception.
In practice such appeals cannot
but result in that gloritication of
the "practical", as widespread as
it
is vicious, by means of which
the men of power and property
ever try to beat down the men of
art and the men of thought.
As expressed here, Williams'
politics are but a literary version
of the more obvious Stalinist
apologetics. To silence criticism
of the Soviet government, Wil–
liams raises the spectre of disunity
and military difficulties-the habit–
ual strategy of those groups and
individuals that have reason to
fear criticism. So Secretary Hull
has recently let it be known that
the critics of the State Department
are giving "aid and comfort to the
enemy." Yet if Stalin is to be
exempt from criticism because he
is fighting Hitler, why not offer
the same courtesy to Churchill
and Roosevelt? We notice that
the Stalinists do not in the least
restrain themselves when it pays
them to criticize the war-policies
of Britain and the United States.
(The second front issue is a
prime example.) But whenever
freedom of criticism is exercised
against them, their invariable re–
ply is to charge collaboration with
the enemy.
We in no way associate our–
selves with the political position
either of Dewey or of Eastman.
(We might say in passing that in
our opinion the latter is politically
quite as vulnerable as John Cham–
berlain.) But in so far as they
have helped to expose the real
meaning of the Moscow trials and
to show up the pretension of the
Stalinists to be something else
than what they are, both Dewey
and Eastman have rendered an in–
valuable service. It is character–
istic of Williams that he makes no
effort to disprove factually the an–
ti-Stalinist argument.
All he
does is insinuate, in the wake of
the notorious Mr. Joseph E.
Davies, that the justification of the
purges lies in their elimination of
the Fifth Column. Just what Fifth
Column of old Bolshevik leaders
is Williams talking about? What
actually does he know about men
like Burkharin, Pyatokov, Tuka–
chevsky, Gamarnik, Yakir, Sokol–
nikov, Zinoviev, and other veteran
commanders of the Red Army and
chiefs of the Soviet state? There
is no evidence that Williams has
even taken the trouble to familiar–
ize himself with the material on
the subject, such as the volume put
out by the Commission headed by
John Dewey. Williams' insinua–
tions are therefore gratuitous, and
so is his assumption that a criti–
cism of
Mission to Moscow--a
film that distorts even the book on
which it is based-is by definition
an intellectual crime. And just
as last winter the
Daily Worker
accused Dubins;ky and other labor
leaders opposing the trade-union
maneuvres of the Communist
Party of being responsible for the
fall of Kharkov, so now Williams
accuses Dewey of being in league
with "those who ordered the bomb–
ing of Guernica." This is the
sort of weird collusion of facts
and ideas that anyone in the least
acquainted with the style of Stalin–
ist polemics can spot at a glance.
By using the same method it could
be stated that Williams is in a
class with Captain Rickenbacker,
who now counsels a friendly line
on Russia, or that his poetry is to
be identified with that of Alfred
Noyes, who used an argument
