290
PARTISAN REVIEW
than the devotion itself to that power. We are long since familiar
with the fact that the Communist Party is a Fifth Column, since it
proposes no other end for all its actions but the advantage of the
Soviet Union. The "liberals" have become a more potent and dan–
gerous Fifth Column since they succeed in deceiving a good many
more people.
It would take a very obtuse intelligence to
miss
the Stalinist
sympathies of
PM,
but the methods of
The Nation
and
The New
Republic
are at once more confused and more subtle.
PM
is the
plebeian wing of the "liberal" admirers of Russian totalitarianism,
and its methods are therefore far cruder and more obvious. But many
readers of
The New Republic
and
The Nation
probably
miss
the
subtle internal politics of book reviewing that goes on week by week.
When
The New Republic
wished a reviewer for Victor Kravchenko's
I Chose Freedom,*
what happy stroke of editorial inspiration led them
to select Frederick Schuman? Is it possible they did not know the
kind of review they would get? There is a point beyond which the
hypothesis of innocence cannot be stretched. Does the editor know
anything about his reviewers beforehand or does he hand his books
out to any chance comer in the street? Schuman did not disappoint:
for vilification and innuendo his review might almost have adorned
the pages of
The Daily Worker.
Among other things, he defended
Stalin's terror by pointing to gangsters, lynchings, and strikes in the
United State ; without mentioning, however, that gangsters and
lynchings are not the official program of our government as their
equivalents are in Russia.
As
for strikes, perhaps Schuman would
prefer the situation (no doubt, "after all, socialist") in Russia, where
striking is a capital offense. The "liberal" weeklies
will
maintain they
are conducting their reviews on the principle of freedom of opinion–
remarkable that the "freedom" seems to run so consistently one way.
Why didn't they allow such "freedom of opinion" in their reviews
of Hitler and Mussolini? Schuman himself is scarcely worth noticing,
except that his choice as reviewer and his review itself afford a par–
ticularly startling whiff of the "liberal" putrescence. Schuman jus–
tifies the Russian terror as the necessary price for rapid industrializa–
tion;
ap~t
from the fact that this argument has been refuted time
and again, all evidence pointing to the continual disruption of indus–
try by the political dictatorship-we might analogously justify Hitler
for having reduced unemployment and built magnificent roads in
.
'
*
Scribner's. $3.50.
