602
PARTISAN REVIEW
To appreciate this truth is to appreciate the extraordinary frivolity
that these intellectuals above the two camps display in their opinions.
David Rousset having proposed an inquiry into the Soviet concentra–
tion camps, Claude Bourdet answers him as follows in
Combat:
"The
number of victims and the character of the repressive methods employed
are no sufficient reason for opening up one category of inquiry and
closing another. Who can do the great thing, let him do the little.
If
the
mote is in our eye, let our first endeavor be to cast it out."
If
you
speak of the deportations to Russia or of the sovietization of Eastern
Europe, Merleau-Ponty answers you: "The Russians haven't held free
elections everywhere, but what about the Greek election . . .? The
Russians have deported Polish or Baltic families? But there are 15,000
Jews at Belsen-Bergen and English troops standing guard at the
Palestinian frontier."
In proportion as the Stalinist realities become known, the well–
publicized faults of the United States grow weightier in the eyes of
these "neutrals." The lot of the American Negro worsens as the
number of inmates of the Soviet concentration camps mounts. When
a talented poet, after. breaking off a long flirtation with the Muscovite
religion, feels a need to ease his conscience, he raises the standard of
Neither-Nor on high and, rushing into the lists, disposes of "imperial
America" in twenty-five lines: "No one thinks of grinning to see the ex–
peddler of suspenders transmogrify himself into a Defender of the
faith.... Communist terror is a sacred attribute of power, the fear of
the Americans only a panicky sign of impotence before the future. . . .
The lack of political intelligence predisposes the American people to
fascism. . . . In the space of four years, eighteen million people have
been psychoanalyzed in the U.S.A."
It
is quite clear that this sort of "even-handed" justice plays the
game of the Communists. But it is not for this that we reproach the
theoreticians of Neither-Nor. After all, they have a perfect right to
disregard the consequences of what they write in bearing witness to the
truth. But do they bear witness to the truth? What theory is it that
they seek to defend? The answer to this seems to me to be summed up
in one word: neutrality. Neutrality, however, is a word admitting of
a variety of interpretations.
There are those who conceive of neutrality as above all moral.
Neither of the two camps seems to them worthy of their support. They
either withdraw from politics entirely, or flock to some unreal and
peripheral movement, such as Gary Davis', or to any other group in
favor of a World Federation, Universal State, or United States of the
