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HAROLD ROSENBERG
reassuring some American leaders and citizens that we can af–
ford nuclear brinkmanship because we have taken out insurance, when
in fact the only real insurance lies in an eventual dismantling of the
weapons of genocide. To the people on this crowded island, as perhaps
also in Great Britain, the current shelter boom in America seems
cowardly rather than virile-and frightening and more than a little
crazy to bystanders. I have never been convinced that totalitarian
governments are here to stay, whatever their own boasts or the fears of
their enemies, and I share the concern of George Kennan and many
others for finding ways of combatting totalitarian government without
resort to totalitarian weapons. I believe that, if in spite of all we
manage to survive the next years without war, the want of imagina–
tion and ingenuity among ourselves that makes slogans like "Red
or dead" attractive will be replaced by a fresher, less menacing
vision of the human enterprise.
HAROLD ROSENBERG
The cold war is a delusionary struggle between real inter–
ests. We affirm everyone's right to the advantages of freedom, they
to the advantages of socialism. Freedom and socialism being both
good things, the world is in danger of being blown up out of altruism.
Why blown up? Freedom could win the world without a blow
if
"the West" were really fighting for it. So could socialism if that's
what the Soviets were after. Would any people reject a program of
making available the resources of society for the free self-development
of themselves and their neighbors? But what else is freedom and
what else is socialism? The joke of the cold war is that each of the
rivals is aware that the other's idea would be irresistible if it were
actually put into practice. Whoever first demonstrates that he means
what he says gets the prize. Each knows, however, that there is no
danger of this happening, and is therefore not afraid to twit the other
about the opportunities he is missing. "Think of where you'd be
today," the West nudges Moscow, "if, instead of suppressing insur–
rections in East Berlin and Hungary, you opened the Iron Curtain
