THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST
49
It is claimed that what is at stake is survival: after the West
has survived it can reopen its museum of values, some
wings
of
which have been closed for the duration. But this is what the
Russians claim too. They too have a museum of Western values.
The " cultural heritage" of the Greeks, of the Romans, of the
philosophers, poets, and painters, would not be lost if the West were
to lose the battle for men's minds as it is called. And the Russians
too promise freedom, not just culture in libraries, once capitalism
has been finally defeated...
My feeling is that political thought today would be less paralyzed
if we stopped using terms like "the West," which are sheer cant at
present, and said what we really meant, e.g., "nations friendly to
capitalism," if that
is
what we mean. This would make our heads a
little clearer in the argument we conduct with ourselves about nuclear
war. While we prepare to die for the survival of the West, it would
be reassuring to know what the West is or was, before we and it
died for it. "He died for liber-r-ty," an old Irish saloon-keeper said
to me one St. Patrick's Day, speaking of Robert Emmett. This was
true, roughly speaking, of the Irish patriot, but it cannot be said
of a nation of "patriots" herded hopefully in bomb shelters with a
stock of canned goods.
If
we die it will not be for liberty but because
we had no real choice in the matter.
If
you gave the ordinary man
a free choice he would prefer a harsh life under Communism to
death in a thermonuclear holocaust. Who wouldn't? And if the
ordinary man were politically serious he would still more emphatically
choose life under Communism to mass incineration. Alive, he could
engage in political agitation, get arrested, go to Siberia; if he were
shot eventually for his activities, his death at least would have some
meaning.
This in fact is the difference. From the point of view of the
ordinary conscript death in war has always been senseless as com–
pared to death in bed. The drafted soldiers and the bombed civilians
who died in the last war did not, for the most part probably, die for
liberty as a matter of intention; nevertheless, their death served a
purpose: the fall of the Nazis and the end of the concentration camps.
Their deaths can be said to have been "worth
it."
But today no such
clear and defined aim can be proposed for the extinction of most
of the population of the world, to say nothing of the genetic con-
