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PARTISAN REVIEW
etc.? And what about Chiang Kai-shek and Indo-China, and the Negroes
in America, and the oppressed minorities in Iceland and Patagonia?
Charity begins at home; cast out the beam of thine own eye ere thou
lookest at the mote in thy brother's .. . "-and so on and so forth. The
answer is of course that if we had adopted this attitude in 1933 there
would
~ave
been no antifascist movement; Britain would have had no
right to make war on the Nazis under a reactionary Tory leadership, and
for reasons of moral honesty should have accepted Gestapo rule.
(2)
The anti-anti attitude.
"Granted that Stalinism is a Bad Thing,
its opponents are even worse. What are your alternatives to Communism?
In France-de Gaulle. In Italy-the Vatican. In America-Big Business,
Colonel McCormick, the Dies Committee. I don't like Stalin's methods,
but I shall never, never join in that witch-hunt. Anti-Communism is the
cloak for disguised fascists. Your personal motives for writing anti-Com–
munist stuff may be sincere or not, I don't know, but how do you feel
when the reactionary press splashes your stuff and welcomes you to their
camp? The company you keep stinks. I am not a Communist, but I am
an anti-anti-Communist. Maybe if we had a Communist dictatorship
they would put me into a concentration camp for some deviation–
still, I would prefer to be in a Communist jail to being free under a
de Gaulle regime. . . . " ·
This last remark is a textual quotation of what a well-known French
poet said to me after getting very tight and very sincere. I said: "So
you yourself recognize that under a de Gaulle regime
of
the Kemalist
type you could after all go on publishing your stuff within limits, where–
as under the Communists you couldn't. Then in the name of what prin–
ciple do you prefer the Communist jail
to
Gaullist restricted freedom?"
He answered, with complete sincerity: "In the name
of
what principle,
you ask?
Mais mon pauvre ami, au nom de la liberte!"
You American radicals are perhaps not fully conscious of this des–
perate dilemma of the European Left. For you the choice is much easier:
it lies between totalitarianism and the continuation of capitalist democ–
racy, progressing and regressing on a wavy but fairly continuous curve.
But in most countries of Europe this organic curve has been cut with an
axe, and the branches from the stump tend to grow toward the extreme
right or left.
(3)
The comforts of sitting between two stools.
This brings us back
to the left wing of the British Labor Party. As the only socialist party in
Europe with an absolute parliamentary majority and safely in power for
at least another three years, the dilemma for them is not one of internal
policy, but projected onto a global scale. I have alluded to some
of
the
very sound reasons which make the Left here reluctant to make a final
choice between Russia and the USA. These negative reasons must of
course be complemented by at least a pretense of a positive program for
