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PARTISAN REVIEW
many; helping to shoot democrats, of every shade and color, in Ger–
many, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Austria; helping to
strengthen the French Communist Party's reign of terror over public
opinion-a terror which
will
wax or wane with the position of Rus–
sia in western Europe.
These are not metaphors of political rhetoric, but a literal des–
cription of the consequences that follow from the political behavior
of
The New Republic's
editors. The juxtaposition of their editorial
statement with political reality could scarcely be more pointed, and
the direction in which it points has now become unmistakable: that
we have in our midst a powerfully vocal lobby willing to override
all concerns of international democracy and decency in the interests
of a foreign power. The foci of this infection are the newspaper
PM,
and the liberal weeklies
The Nation
and
The New Republic.
Insofar
as the advantage of this foreign power becomes an exclusive end in
itself, this lobby functions, as we shall show, as a virtual Fifth Column.
Whether those who march always know where they are going, whe–
ther they are- confused about their purposes or really taken in by
sham purposes, they are not any the less a Fifth Column. Political
positions are weighed by objective consequences and not by sub–
jective intentions. This is a wellworn truism by now, but it seems
it has to be dinned afresh into these "liberal" ears. But when in–
tentions fall out so persistently and shrewdly in one pattern, may
we not also conclude that they have a pretty shrewd glimpse of the
objective direction?
How has this Fifth Column arisen? and in what forms does it
exert its pressures? To answer these questions we must look briefly
at its genesis: the process step by step by which the Column has been
recruited in our midst during one year of peace.
II
The European War had hardly ended in May 1945, when the
rumblings in the Communist Party were announcing preparations
for a new line .and a new ideological offensive. These had to remain,
for a while, preparations only: the war had not yet become entirely
imperialist again, as in 1939-41, for Russia had still to play its part in
the Japanese War, having in fact to hasten into Manchuria ahead
of schedule lest the United States finish the war before Stalin had
won it for us. The explosion of the atomic bomb was the dramatic
end of the war. The two events were
also
a simultaneous political
