SOCIALISM AND LIBERAT IO N
517
and the more conspicuous forms of party terrorism in Communist
countries are motivated today by considerations of political strategy.
They may be reversed overnight. Nonetheless they are all points of
ideological and institutional infection in the Communist body politic.
If
these heretical germs get into the Marxist blood stream, they may
produce fevers
in
the short time and languors in the long time re–
sulting in profound organic changes in the system.
Recent events behind the Iron Curtain have shown that socialist
humanism, despite its exaggerated claims to novelty, has a greater
continuity with traditional forms of Western humanism than both its
official spokesmen and its hostile Western critics imagined. The new
Soviet men, the new Communist men with new criteria of the true,
the good, and the beautiful, of whom Stalin boasted and whom the
West feared, are a myth. Despite the principle of
(C
partinost"
or
partisanship in dialectical materialism, Communist intellectuals,
whether scientists or historians, know the difference between truth
and lies, facts and fiction. They have not succumbed to the totali–
tarian psychoses described by Orwell in his 1984; and if they re–
write the past at the behest of Big Brother or of a Committee of Big
Brothers, they know what they are doing.
If
they confess to imaginary
and impossible crimes, it is not because of the sacrificial mysticism
attributed by Koestler to Rubashov but because of the beatings, the
broken ribs and other violent methods admitted by Khrushchev at
the Twentieth Congress to be the standard techniques of examination.
Things can never be the same again after the fumbling attempt
of Stalin's accomplices to de-Stalinize, after the Polish declaration
of independence, after the heroic spectacle of the Hungarian nation
in arms against the Russian occupation. Even without war and for–
eign intervention, even without violent revolution, the intellectual
elite of all Communist countries will produce
in
each generation,
and in every social group or class, critical spirits nurtured on the
ideals of freedom expressed in the classics of Marxism as well as
in those of the humanist tradition, well aware of the discrepancies
between Soviet promise and performance, and of the Communists'
betrayal of almost all the liberating ideals which inspired the socialist
movement. Their presence, whether articulate or eloquently silent,
will constitute a permanent opposition to cultural and political tyr-
