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PARTISAN REVIEW
who has come before the public principally as the exponent of a
philmlophy that Communism must attack and does, and who is there–
fore often engaged in polemic with the Communists, we are able to
attach all the more weight to our point that in this period of European
civilization the intellectual is a person of new humafl allegiances.
Against these new and mediocre allegiances, Andre Malraux has
felt that what is needed is nothing less than to resuscitate the concept
of Man, of which Communism, in his view, is a denial. Everything
in his history that makes man a superior and interesting animal, his
complex individuality, his spiritual heroism and conflicts-all are
negated by the humanity represented by the crass and routinized
commissars of the East, the "new Neanderthal men," as Koestler
once called them. This is hardly a negligible point. From one's personal
contacts with Communists one remembers those moments of recoil
when one glimpsed the human substance behind their political ration–
alizations; and when one then saw quite clearly that the very achieve–
ment of their society, all obstacles overcome, would be an appalling
break with the civilization of the past. This is the background for
understanding the recent purges of the arts in the Soviet Union. Those
purges were not at all the gratuitous comedy that some Americans
have thought, but an act of self-defense organic to a society which must
aspire toward human (though not technological nor administrative )'
mediocrity, and for which art is dangerous as soon as it awakens any
complex feelings about human life. But we notice about Malraux's
effort: first, that it is an idea for the consumption of intellectuals only,
and, second, that the idea does not seem to have made much head–
way among French intellectuals. The East has its own conception of
the hero (Hero of the Soviet Union), and the West cannot be roused
to remember what it once thought was heroic. In their French context,
the values Malraux talks about seem already to ring a little strangely
with the overtones of an individualism belonging to another epoch.
All of the foregoing adds up to a pretty desperate picture of
America's resources
in
the propaganda war. But the situation, though
desperate, need not be hopeless. Nobody fights on the assumption of
hopelessness, and the U.S. has already committed itself to fight in
the third world conflict. Besides history is full of flukes-like the
Russian Revolution, as Lenin himself knew; and there happen also
to be some psychological chinks in the armor of Communism.
