726
PARTISAN REVIEW
Congress for Peace. But here was a chance too good to miss.
It
involved
no risks.
III
With few exceptions the speeches were on an incredibly low
political level-and I am not now referring to the line-in tone, expres–
sion, and content. Not since I was a boy thirty years ago listening to the
soap-boxers in Madison Square have I heard such banalities and empty
rhetoric. There was no attempt at serious analysis. No one answered
anyone else. There was no discussion. This was as true at the Sorbonne
as at the Velodrome. The statues of Descartes, Pascal and other eminent
French men of thought looked down on the proceedings.
If
they had
come to life I am sure they would never have been convinced that they
were in France listening to Frenchmen. For whatever seems to be left
of logic in Paris has apparently taken refuge in the subways with their
clear and precise charts. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the
"underground man" in Paris is one who believes that evidence and
logic are still relevant in reaching responsible political positions.
If
those who attended were actually representative of the non–
Communist "left," it is testimony of the devastating effect of the war
and Nazi occupation on its political education. It is hard to determine
how representative the gathering was in political
feeling.
Certainly,
its rhetoric did not square with the practices of either the Socialist
Party or the non-Communist trade unions. As far as the audience is
concerned it seemed to be composed mainly of pacifists-the kind of
people who would tum out to hear Garry Davis-sprinkled with infan–
tile revolutionary sectarians who in reality are Stalinists
manque.
But several things were clear. The prevailing mood, both among
the speakers and audience, was as anti-American as it was anti-Soviet.
The anti-Americanism, I gathered, was not new; the anti-Stalinism was.
The effect was rather odd. In order to win the right to say a critical
word-usually by indirection-about the Soviet Union, the speakers
would attack even more vehemently and quite explicitly American im–
perialism. It was as if, fearful of being attacked by the Communists as
American agents, they sought to ward off the criticism by showing that
they could be as extreme and reckless as the Communists in their com–
ments on the United States.
Most of the speakers were quite outspoken in their opposition to
the Atlantic Pact, and pleaded for a neutrality between what they
called the two blocs, as
if
the liberties of Western Europe were threa–
ened equally by the Soviet Union and the United States.
It
was inter-
