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PARTISAN REVIEW
common fight of all democratic elements to prevent the Iron Curtain
from advancing West--a
fight that cannot be won without American help.
I do not know what a "paradise of liberty" would be, and I suspect
I would not enjoy many of its liberties
if
it were occupied by fanatical
people with widely different tastes. But I grant that the Weimar Republic
Was no paradise of liberty. Neither was the Loyalist regime in Spain.
Nor Czechoslovakia in 1938, Poland in 1939, Finland and Holland and
Belgium in 1940. Will anyone, who wishes to breathe the air of a free
culture, therefore strike an attitude of neutrality between what is short
of paradise and the totalitarian Inferno which threatens to replace it?
Were the unhappy occasion ever to arise I can imagine no more con–
venient premise for the Petainists of a Russian occupation than Sartre's
foolish equation. I am confident he would be the first to repudiate it–
if his erring brothers in the Communist Party let him live long enough.
No speaker at the sessions who opposed the Atlantic Pact made the
legitimate distinction between the rearming of Western Europe, which is
a highly debatable proposition even on the basis of military strategy, and
its guarantee of protection to European countries that they could con–
tinue their program of social reconstruction ; even, as in the case of Eng–
land, the building of a socialist economy, without suffering the fate of
Poland or Czechoslovakia. To be against the Atlantic Pact simply
followed from their opposition to American imperialism which was just
as bad-to the splinter and crackpot groups even worse-as the expan–
sion of the Soviet terror state. As to the concrete meaning of American
imperialism in the present historical conjuncture, no coherent or con–
sistent account could be elicited. It was hard to separate opposition to
chewing gum, Coca-Cola, the
Reader's Digest
(best selling periodical
in
France) from condemnation of segregation, the monopoly of the atom
bomb, and the "colonialization" of Europe achieved by the Machiavel–
lian device of sending bread and machinery to rebuild Europe.
De Kadt, member of the Dutch parliament, and the leading figure
in the left-wing of the Dutch Labor Party, began his five-minute speech
with a condemnation of Dutch policy in Indonesia. This brought tumul–
tuous applause. But when he went on to explain in simple words why
the Dutch workers firmly supported the Atlantic Pact, the audience–
or what was left of it by the time he spoke-turned hostile. De Kadt
remained unmoved. In the calm voice of a sober man speaking among
drunkards--and by this time many
in
the audience seemed word-drunk
as a result of the sloganized speeches,
"If
you want peace, prepare the
revolution,"
"If
you want bread, prepare the revolution"-De Kadt
reminded them that if it were not for the Marshall Plan and the Atlantic
