724
PARTISAN REVIEW
weakened the force of the first and revealed more clearly its Communist
character. The placarding of the walls of Paris with posters advertising
the International Day undoubtedly had some limited educational effect.
Nonetheless the initiators of the Day were careful
not
to call it a
counter-demonstration to the Stalinist meeting, among other reasons
for fear of antagonizing a considerable number of persons who although
not sufficiently sympathetic to the Communist Party to accept the role
of public fellow-travelers are not sufficiently courageous to appear in
open opposition to it.
The cultural and political climate of opinion in France until
recently has been such that it required more courage in non-Communist
left circles to be openly critical of the Communist Party and the Soviet
Union than is required for an individual to become a Communist Party
fellow-traveler in the U.S. Last summer I had already observed this
obsessive fear among avowed non-Communists in France, particularly
in French literary and intellectual circles, to challenge in any funda–
mental way the Soviet myth. Ignorance of conditions in the Soviet
Union was matched only by ignorance of conditions in the United
States, about which the Communists and their fellow-travelers had
sold them a misleading bill of goods unwittingly helped by American
novels of social criticism like those of Steinbeck, Lewis and Wright.
(The French read these books as sober sociological reports about the
current state of American culture.) The Communist Party was regarded
not as the French fifth column of the Kremlin, something which the
Party itself hardly troubles to conceal, but as an organization of brothers
in the class war against capitalism-erring only in impatience and
unnecessary dogmatism. This is still the predominant spirit among the
so-called left, and raises several problems I shall discuss later.
It
is this mood which explains the astonishing fact that the initiators
of the International Day offered a place on their program to official
representatives of the Communist Partisans for Peace-which might
have been tactically legitimate under certain circumstances-but refused
to invite men like Koestler, Burnham, and Raymond Aron, who what–
ever else may be said of them, towered intellectually above most of
the other participants present, particularly the French. Raymond Aron,
e.g., former resistance leader, sympathizer but not a member of De
Gaulle's
R.P.F.,
to which he is perceptibly cooling, more clearly fulfilled
the conditions of participation laid down by the organizing group-–
opposition to war and dictatorship, and willingness to consider all pro–
posals to prevent both-than the Stalinists to whom an invitation had
been extended but who scorned it.
