A COMMUNIST AND HIS IDEALS
Revolution has a concept which was designed to combat the dangers of
an excessive nationalism-to combat chauvinism and imperialism-come
to mean, not anti-chauvinism, not anti-imperialism, but anti-all decent
feeling for one's own country.
And we all of us know the odd transformation by which anti–
nationalism has become pro-Russianism. I am not speaking of spies,
they are an extreme instance. I am speaking of ordinary American
citizens of education and supposed conscience, for whom America has
only to have something, or want something, or do something, for that
something to
be
automatically wrong-in much the same way that,
for the progressive adolescent, his family has but to want something, or
have something, or do something, for that something to
be
wrong.
But if everything America does is wrong, everything Russia does is
right. America spends months trying enemies of the state? This is legal
lynching. Russia goes through the farce of a trial, or executes her
enemies without trial? This is revolutionary justice. America seeks oil in
the Near East? Imperialism. Russia grabs oil wherever she can get it?
Well, machines need oil, do they not? One is inevitably reminded of
the joke about the woman with the married son and the married
daughter who boasts what a wonderful marriage her daughter has
made-she has three fur coats, two maids, breakfast in bed every
morning-but laments what an awful marriage her son has made-·
married to a woman who wants three fur coats, two maids, and who
has breakfast in bed every morning.
The path by which the idealist has moved from his total refusal
of concern for his own country, to total concern
for
one other country,
the Soviet Union,
runs,
in brief, something like this: The international
brotherhood of man is embodied in the international brotherhood of
the working class. Only in the Soviet Union is the working class able
to give and receive the hand of international brotherhood. Therefore
the Soviet Union
is
internationalism. Behind the refusal of commitment
to our own country, there lies-in other words-a refusal of corrunitment
to our own class.
This leads me, naturally, to the second broad feature in my com–
posite portrait of contemporary idealism. The idealist is someone who
finds virtue only where he is not-in the country which is not his country.
Also in the class which is not his class.
You will remember that I am speaking only of the idealistic mid–
dle class. Presumably there is also such a thing as working-class idealism,
but that is too complex a matter for me to deal with. I mention it here
