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PARTISAN REVIEW
III
It is clear from this outline of their recent behavior that the
"liberals" are embarked upon nothing less than a policy of
appease–
ment of Russia.
This may exist as a confusion and a fear in many
"liberal" minds, but it is none the less a policy for all that. A policy
is simply the effective direction in which one throws all one's available
political weight.
We are not surprised to find appeasement repeating itself, and
the new instance already shows all the features familiar from the
appeasement of Hitler.
It
involves first, as we have already said, a
campaign to hate Britain, conducted with a new subtlety but with
infinitely more political viciousness than that of the Bund and Amer–
ica First groups. When Henry Wallace publicly declares:
"We have
no more in common with imperialist England than with Communist
Russia,"
he is playing exactly the same game as the appeasers who
shouted:
"We have no more in common with imperialist England
than with National Socialist Germany."
But those appeasers were
at least more honest: they did not masquerade as champions of
democracy and they did not have the effrontery to label themselves
"liberals." By a well-timed coincidence Ralph Ingersoll's
Top Secrei,
which portrays the British as secret villains of World War II, appeared
during the Iran case. One step further and Ingersoll himself would
have been openly accusing (in effect, he made the accusation at a
rally at Madison Square Garden on May 16) the British of working
for the defeat of Russia in World War II.
A second feature of this new .appeasement is the consistent attack
upon the State Department. The discrediting of the State Department
very shrewdly paves the way for the kind of attack in
The New
Republic,
from which we have quoted at the he•ad of
this
article.
Not the least dishonest aspect of that attack was its pretending to
assume that the State Department had in fact already got sufficiently
tough against Russia. Instead of trying to needle this timidly conser–
vative Department into a more aggressively democratic policy, the
"liberals" are trying to make it stoop lower to the despicable service
of pulling Stalin's chestnuts out of the fire for him. Bad as the State
Department may be, to tre.at it as a greater menace to world peace
than Stalin's Politburo, to criticize it violently and consistently while
Russia is criticized, if at all, only lackadaisically and inconsistently–
is a piece of sheer idiocy or sheer knavery.
