COMMENT
DISILLUSIONMENT AND PARTIAL ANSWERS
The radical writers made homeless by their break with
the Soviet cause, in their search for a vantage-point from which
to
reassess the contemporary scene, continue to bear ' witness to their
disenchantment. These writers have long been a source of annoyance
to certain liberals, respectable social types most of them, journalists>
literary men, and academicians, in whose circles the word has gone
out that all those troublesome ex-Communists or ex-Marxists are
to
be
lumped together as a group of renegades neurotically "obsessed"
with the Russian question and therefore so twisted in their testimony
as scarcely to deserve serious consideration.
This
attitude is as pre–
sumptuous intellectually as it is mischievous politically; and what it
comes to in the end is a roundabout defense of totalitarianism on the
part
of liberals so intent on keeping open a line of communication
to the power-center in the Kremlin that willy-nilly they become its
accomplices. Now, however, that Stalinist aggression and duplicity
have gotten us into a new pre-war situation and that the whole
Western world has finally come to recognize the crucial importance
of understanding the true nature of the Soviet regime, it can readily
be seen that the so-called "obsession" of the homeless radicals is a
piece of reality, while the apparent sobriety and reasonableness of
the official liberals and their opportunistic attempts to take a bal–
anced view of a total evil amount to nothing less than political mud–
dle and cowardice, if not downright collaboration with the enemies
of democracy and freedom.
There is also a certain type of literary man, genteel and non–
political to the core, a hero of nonparticipation and noninvolvement,
who takes it upon himself to scold the homeless radicals for their
political bias and assertiveness. Now it is true, of course, that the
homeless radicals were nearly
all
associated, in a variety of ways,
with the Communist movement of the thirties.
This
movement, how-
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