656
PARTISAN REVIEW
borrowing from him, turned to demagogic use), ideas are effective
only as they operate through human passions.
It would be bad enough if America had only to deal with an
Asia in chaos, but the situation is infinitely worsened by the fact that
much of Europe tends toward the Asiatic level. Six years of war and
then its destructive aftermath have produced a human chaos in
central Europe: populations uprooted, driven into exile, shot by the
Hitler or Stalin terror. The survivors are driven to seek above every–
thing else a place for themselves in any regime that .promises stability.
Many refugees from Poland and Eastern Germany, unable to find
any place or employment for themselves in the West, have already
gone back to the East. There, if they keep their mouths shut, they may
wind up in a labor camp for non-politicals, where they may at least
have a subsistence ration. The whirlwind sown in the center of
Europe-first by Hitler, but prolonged by the entering Red Army–
does not leave behind it a climate favorable to the liberal political
structures we would like to see there.
Turning to Western Europe, we find that the war has left there
a more subtle, though no less real, social disorder, which the Marshall
Plan has not yet been able to establish a stable enough prosperity to
cure.
If
a country like France is non-Communist today, it is not out
of any intellectual conviction about the nature of Communism, but
out of deep traditional habits, passions, and prejudices of the French,
the most bourgeois of all peoples. Left to her intellectuals, France
would long since have gone over to Communism. In our last issue
Raymond Aron presented a dismal picture of the French
trahison
des clercs
in relation to Communism. What has America to tell these
intellectuals? That there are forced-labor camps in Russia, that indi–
vidual and political liberties are non-existent, that economic inequal–
ities are frozen there to a degree unknown in the West, etc., etc.? All
this information has been in the hands of French intellectuals for some
time-the point
is
that they refuse to draw the conclusions from it.
Many things prevent them: opportunism, the proximity of the Red
Army, resentment of American wealth, the disbelief in the French
nation itself through the defeat in the war. Not the least reason,
however, is the fact that Marxism has been the unquestioned climate
of opinion in which intellectuals have existed now for many years.
Thus Russian propaganda inherits the work achieved by genera-
