RHETORIC AND PEACE
863
History plays a trick on us for the irresponsibility of our language.
She prompts the tyrants, whom she has sent to scourge us, to seize
for their own ends the words of our sentimental and humanitarian
rhetoric, and to send us to slave gang and death camp to the accom–
paniment of the pious litany of the Left.
After all, is it not the voice of the Lord of Katyn and Kolyma
1
which, from Bucharest, speaks to the world under the Cominform banner,
"For a Lasting Peace, For a Peoples' Democracy"? Is it not the govern–
ment of three hundred divisions that launches the movement of the
Partisans of Peace?
We have allowed ourselves to be trapped and jailed by our words–
this leftist bait which has proved our poison. The Communists have
looted our rhetorical arsenal, and have bound us with our own slogans.
The progressive man of "the non-Communist Left" is in a perpetual
tremor of guilt before the true Communist. The Communist, manipu–
lating the same rhetoric ("sharing the same ideals," as the naive leftist
puts it), but acting boldly and firmly, appears to the man of the non–
Communist Left as himself with guts. The unexamined rhetoric blunts
the blow against the Communist, and bares the soft non-Communist
breast.
We might do well to break these verbal bonds and bars. Rejecting
the rhetorical dilemma, we could, with some gain at least in clarity,
thrust through its horns of "Right" and "Left" to the historical reality
beyond. Not all who call to us in the name of proletariat, peace, and
democracy can safely be welcomed as friend. It may be that the political
leaders of our time must be demagogues, and that the mystical rhetoric
of the Left is an indispensable tool of their trade.
If
so, it is then all the
more imperatively
our
business to refuse to accept as true coin these
unbacked words. It is precisely because we are for peace and democracy
that we should no longer be content with the rhetoric of "peace" and
"democracy." We should seek today a poet of politics---one who will
recreate our dying words, and infuse their limp veins with the fresh blood
of direct experience.
I propose, in the remainder of this paper, to investigate the real
setting of the current agitation for "peace." This agitation takes a
variety of forms which range from pure or mixed pacifism to the call
1. Katyn Forest is the site of the massacre and mass burial by the MVD of
10,000 Polish officers. Kolyma is the vast area of northeastern Siberia which the
MVD is exploiting, principally for the sake of its gold deposits, by slave labor.
-ED.
