INTERNATIONAL DAY
727
esting to note that most of the Frenchmen who criticized the Atlantic
Pact said very little or nothing against the Marshall Plan although last
summer they had been very hostile to it. When I asked for an explana–
tion of this one Frenchmen dryly remarked that they had all put on
some weight as a result of it. More significant was the admission many
were prepared to make in private but not in public that the Marshall
Plan had saved France from the Communists and De Gaullists.
The criticisms of the Atlantic Pact were not made on the basis of
an analysis of its specific provisions and of any realistic alternative but
in
terms of abstract formulas about expanding American capitalism. One
got the impression that they believed that the Atlantic Pact was im–
posed upon the governments of Western Europe in the same way as
Vishinsky set up a government in Rumania. In a statement read to the
Sorbonne audience, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Wright drew an explicit
equation between the terroristic annexations of the Soviet Union in the
East and the Atlantic Pact in the West, condemning both "equally and
for the same reason." In the case of Sartre reference to the Atlantic
Pact was purely formal. He spoke substantially the same way a year
ago, before there was an Atlantic Pact, about the Marshall Plan. And
he held the same view even prior to the Marshall Plan. From the stand–
point that the current cold war is nothing but an opposition between
two forms of economy-capitalism and socialism-apparently no par–
ticular analysis of anything is necessary. Last summer when I asked
one of the leading figures of Sartre's group in what specific ways the
Marshall Plan threatened French economy, the only reply I received
was the vulgar psychological
a priorism:
"Everyone knows that no na–
tion helps another except out of economic self-interest." As
if
the self–
interest of two groups cannot sometimes coincide!
This primitivism in economic and political matters is not surprising
because it is based on ignorance of complex matters and a kind of
exhibitionism by subtle men, too impatient to study something which
they feel is alien to their "essence" but in relation to which they wish
to take a brave "independent" stand. Primitivism in cultural matters,
however, by people with developed sensibilities is something else again.
Sartre's statement, developing the simple equation between Soviet
and American culture, admits that the Soviet Union is a terroristic
police state but then goes on to add "But neither is the United States a
paradise of liberty." Since the United States is not a paradise of liberty
-as
if
anyone, anywhere, at any time had even faintly suggested it
was!-there is no difference between it and the cultural hell of the
Soviet Union sufficiently important to justify engaging oneself in the
