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PARTISAN REVIEW
and hardened fellow-travelers, speak from the Partisans' platfonns.
The Partisan audiences are for the most part those who can be ordered
to come to any other Communist-led meeting or demonstration. Even
in doggedly neutral Sweden, the recent Stockholm Congress of the
Partisans of Peace was publicly repudiated by almost every section of
Swedish opinion, from the most conservative newspapers to the trade
unions.
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But though the Partisans of Peace find heavy going under their'
own banner, they are doing somewhat better under substitute colors. For
example: though the Stockholm Congress was, as I have mentioned, a
failure in Sweden, the petition campaign "against atomic bombs," which
that Congress initiated, has done rather well. Isn't everyone against
atomic bombs? Even if we repudiate the Partisans of Peace in general,
should we not sign a petition, presented by no matter whom, to do away
with atom bombs?
It
is like a petition to do away with disease, or hunger.
Things are not, unfortunately, so easy. Here we have a specific case
where that obligation to tell the truth, which we have affirmed so often
during these days in Berlin, is likely to be uncomfortable. Let me speak
only for myself. I am opposed to this Stockholm Petition, as I am op–
posed to the Partisans of Peace in general. I am so opposed because this
petition, like the Partisans of Peace, is an instrument of Soviet imperial–
ism.
It
is designed to weaken the non-Communist world, to provide a
recruiting list and ground for the Communist parties, and to serve as
a cover for the development of Soviet war plans and the building of
Soviet armament-including conspicuously Soviet atomic bombs. This
petition is not a genuine move toward peace, but part of the preparation
for-and conduct of-the war of the Soviet power for world conquest.
Moreover, I must add, in order to be fully honest, that I am not,
under any and all circumstances, against atomic bombs. I am against
those bombs, now stored or to be stored later in Siberia or the Caucasus,
which are designed for the destruction of Paris, London, Rome, Brussels,
Stockholm, New York, Chicago, ... Berlin, and of Western civilization
generally. But I am-yesterday and today at any
rate-for
those bombs
made in Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge, and guarded I know
not where in the Rockies or American deserts.
Will you forgive me as an American in the tradition of our national
frankness, when I say that I should think that Europeans would join
me in being
for,
not against, those latter bombs. For five years, those
bombs have defended-have been the sole defense of-the liberties of
Western Europe. Permit me to repeat: the sole defense of the liberties
of Western Europe.
If
we abandon the comforts of easy rhetoric, it is
