60
PARTISAN REVIEW
It is true that the greater flexibility of the new groups contains a
danger of its own. Though the actions of the businessmen have often
been of indirect aid to the communists--through omission or com–
mission, the businessmen have seldom been seduced subjectively by
communism. With only rare exceptions, the businessmen have proved
to
be
ideologically immune to communism, as if the American business
tradition had set up anti-bodies in their thought streams.
This
im–
munity has by no means extended to the new groups, perhaps just
because they are not the product of any settled tradition. Many of
the governmental administrators, professionals, and labor managers
have been infected in varying degrees of intensity with the Bolshevik
virus. The symptoms have ranged through innocent "fronting" to
persistent fellow-traveling to full (though often secret ) party mem–
bership to espionage service for the MVD and the Soviet Military
Intelligence.
It would be wrong to minimize the danger from this susceptibility,
the damage that these infected individuals have already worked, or
the still greater damage that will perhaps be done in the still more
perilous days that are yet to come. This particular danger, however,
is not altogether a disadvantage. For almost all persons, communism
is one of those phenomena like artistic creation or earthquakes or
love, which must be experienced, lived through, in order to be fully
understood. The congenital immunity of the normal businessman to
communism is probably no more than an expression of his inability to
understand communism. The members of the newer social groups are
not, it is true, gifted with any innate understanding- communists
are made, not born. But they are able to acquire an understanding
by the very process of undergoing, and passing through, the com–
munist or near-communist experience. The anti-communism of an
individual who has successfully cured himself of communism is usu–
ally of a different order from the anti-communism of one who has
not only not experienced communism but has never even felt its
immense attraction to the disheveled modem soul. The latter is
based very often on prejudice and ignorance; the former springs
from knowledge and inner torment. Moreover, the immunity to
communism acquired by having harbored and then thrown off the
virus is far more absolute than the congenital immunity. It is my
own belief that those who have been communists, or who have at
