PARTISAN REVIEW
People
obj~ct:
"It wasn't you who put through these reforms
that you cite." We answer that they were put through only because
we were there; and little would be left of them were we to disappear.
Burnham:
From most of the officials, businessmen, labor lead–
ers, and intellectuals that I have met here, I have heard, like the tune
of an old phonograph record, this story of the great defeat of the
Stalinists. We hear the same report in the United States. Walter
Lippman informs us that the cold war is finished with a complete
victory. According to the editorials, Schuman ended the Stalinist
danger in France. How many times the Stalinists have been finally
vanquished in the imagination of these men who conceive that ques–
tions of politics, in an era of revolution, can be settled by the formulas
of civics textbooks
!
The announcement of the Cominform was an event of decisive
significance. It proved that the Communists, counting on American
paralysis induced by the approach of the Presidential election, have
determined to force a decision in Europe this year. Every event since
then demonstrates that their tactic continues offensive, that they
retain the initiative. They are launching massive blows in rapid suc–
cession: the speeches at the United Nations, the French and Italian
strikes, the winter campaign in Manchuria, the Markos government
in Greece, the abdication of Michael in Rumania. How revealing
that in the United States, one week after the formation of the
Markos government and on the very day of Michael's abdication,
the Communists actively begin their drive for Wallace as a Third
Party candidate
!
The general line makes it almost certain that they
will attack firmly, in France and Italy, within the next months.
Two opposite errors are prevalent today in connection with
the problem of internal Communism. The first is the reactionary
view that all troubles would be over if somehow the Communists
were got rid of-shot or imprisoned, if necessary. The reactionaries
overlook the fact that, even if the Communists did not exist, the
positive tasks of economic reconstruction would still remain, and
there would still be the same crucial need for a viable political order
on both the internal and the world arena.
The second is the liberal error.
It
is founded on the comforting
illusion that economic reconstruction will automatically solve the
416
