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PA.RTISAN REVIEW
Russia will necessarily lead to war; will appeasement, then, do any
better?
If
war is that inevitable, does
it
not become a man's duty
to cry stinking fish and face up to the inevitability? Was war against
Hitler avoided by appeasement? On the contrary, Hitler might have
been permanently checked had he been firmly opposed at his very
first steps towards aggression.
If
war between Russia and the United
States is not inevitable, then perhaps the only way to avoid it is to
stop licking Stalin's boots. Mter the disastrous record of a whole
decade's appeasement of Hitler, surely it is the depth of folly and
self-degradation to cast sheep's eyes at appeasement as the way out
of war.
IV
But what, then, do the "liberals" really want? Their program is
clearly appeasement, but are there any principles, political or human,
behind it?
If
you .are an international revolutionary, you may override the
interests of your government for the sake of some principle you regard
as higher-international socialism, for example. You may, on the
other hand, be a patriot in the specific sense that in a given interna–
tional situation you think the political values of your government–
however imperfect or circumscribed-are worth preserving. You may,
finally, persistently override the interests of the government
un~er
which you live for the sake of some foreign government from no
general principle except that ... well, you are for that foreign gov–
ernment. The three available political alternatives thus boil down,
without needless division into
~ubspecies,
to three: you are an inter–
national revolutionary, or an American patriot, or-a Russian patriot.
To which category do our "liberals" belong?
International revolutionaries? They have certainly been keeping
the secret very well hidden
all
these years. Have they ever committed
themselves even to socialism against capitalism? Well, on the other
hand, they have never committed themselves to capitalism against
socialism. By being neither fish nor fowl, the "liberals" think to
confound their critics, who will not know whether to take them with
hook or gun. But taking them as fish
and
fowl, and allowing them
moreover to shift their ambiguous biology wherever convenient, we
still cannot make them come out right with either logic or principle.
If
they were socialists, they could not be loyal partisans of the regime
which has paralyzed or destroyed every genuine socialist movement
