"LIBERAL" FIFTH COLUMN
287
But perhaps the grossest ingredient in this new dish of appease–
ment is the constant "liberal" shout of war. They accuse certain
groups of talking in a way that can only lead to war, but in fact
nobody is beating the drums of war more loudly than they. Nobody
else has been staging public rallie..o. (complete with Frank Sinatra,
Olivia de Havilland and the indispensable Pepper) for or against
the next war; nobody else has been working with quite such political
cunning on the veterans--that particular segment of the population
which is most disaffected with war and therefore the easiest prey to
propaganda for appeasement- transforming mass-meetings, ostensibly
for veterans' housing, into rallies to sanction Russian aggressions.
At this point it is hard to believe we are not being confronted
with a piece of conscious deception. Obviously the American people
does not want, and could not now be mobilized into war. War cannot
therefore be a political issue now. To cry it up as such is to conceal
the issues which are really now at stake.
If
Stalin believed that war
were .an issue now, he would very quickly change from lion to lamb
and pull back from his aggressions.
Pravda
bleated towards Nazi
Germany during 1939-41 like the gentlest of lambs because Stalin
knew Hitler would not have stood for the kind of treatment now
being given the Allies. Stalin knows that neither Britain nor America
is ready for a new war, and he strikes
whil~
the iron is hot, grabbing
off as much as he can now while there is no prospect of armed
opposition. This is the immediate compulsion behind present Russian
aggression. The "liberals" have been so persuaded that Stalin does
not have Hitler's economic compulsions to expand that they will
continue to believe whatever he does is done only for "security."
How far does he have to go before they will believe it is aggression
and not security that is at issue? To the Rhine? the Bay of Biscay?
perhaps when Stalin starts to cross the English Channel? But beside
the economic reason of plunder, there may be political reasons for
expansion-a specifically totalitarian dynamic of expansion to sur–
vive. The dictatorship has always been rationalized by keeping the
Russian masses in a state of mobilized hostility towards the capitalist
world outside Russia. But whatever Stalin's ultimate purposes (and
for the present we can only speculate about them), there can be no
doubt about what he has done.
W e> do not have to establish a motive
to prove a crime when the crime has been publicly committed before
the eyes of the world.
But granted (which we do not believe) that the situation is as ·
hopeless as "liberals" make out, and any consistent criticism of
