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PARTISAN REVIEW
ing inevitably to war, and he
named it an imperialist war. In
the ·summer of 1940, he called it
a war in defense of the great
American dream that every social–
ist must support.
Somewhere
along the line he has changed his
grounds of judgment. Three years
la[er, he gives his reasons why the
victory of Hitler will have the in–
evitable effect of destroying the
labor and socialist movement: the
perfection of military instruments,
the use of hunger as a weapon,
the monopoly over economic, cul–
tural and educational means. These
three reasons were no less evident
in 1939 than in 1943. Hitler had
already crushed the labor move–
ment in Germany, Austria and
Czechoslovakia and had helped to
destroy it in Spain. The popular
fronts and war-mongering that he
had attacked in 1939 urged just
this argument, that another suc–
cessful aggression of Hitler would
mean the end of democracy and
the movement for socialism in the
whole world. Hook condemned
this argument as opportunistic,
short-sighted and an "invitation to
disaster". In 1939 he was con–
vinced that whatever the political
differences between the regimes of
the opposed countries and what·
ever their relative military
strength, the war could not ad–
vance democracy or the interests
of the socialist movement. To tell
us now that in calling on him to
explain this change in his views, I
am confusing three kinds of
front, is only to throw dust in
the eyes of his readers.
One can understand that the
rapid defeat of France in 1940
and the support of Hitler by the
Soviet Union at that time, should
demoralize opponents of the war
and create a mood of despair. But
later events have shown that Hitler
is unable to organize a fascist
Europe without further extension
of the war and without calling
forth intense resistance of the con–
quered peoples because of the
necessary acuteness of the exploita–
tion and insecurity. They have
shown also that the Soviet Union,
which Hook has characterized as
"the identical twin" ()f Nazism,
was sooner or later, as Trotsky
predicted, to be attacked by Ger–
many; and that England and the
United States are not fighting for
democracy but f()r world domina–
tion. Their plans for the peace
include the application of those
three means which, according to
Hook, imply the inevitable fasci–
zation of the world. It may be
argued that suppression of social–
ist workers and colonial peoples
by the Allied imperialists will be
less thorough and brutal than the
suppression by Hitler, but does
this difference justify the support
of the war by socialists, and can
it ever excuse the masking of this
war as a fight for the ideals of
the French revolution and the
"great American dream"?
It is essentially on the basis
of a false military and political
estimate of the future course of
the war that Hook changed his
views. This false estimate com–
pels him to be silent now about
the war with Japan, which unlike
Germany has invaded the Ameri–
can continent. He became so
convinced over night of the imme–
diate catastrophic consequences of
a Hitler victory that he sacrificed
to the war position the cautions
and resolutions acquired by social–
ists through hitter experience. He
gave up what little faith he had
in the masses and in the possibil–
ity of a superior and more honest
resistance to fascism under the
banner of socialism. The revolu-
