76
HAROLD ROSENBERG
But conservatism of this kind has not been achieved on either
side. Instead of conservatives, the U.S. has greedy, disgraceful little
Birchers and sophists of privilege, to whom the history of freedom
means only what
it
has left in their pockets; while the Soviets have
Stalinists, to whom socialism
is
the interests of the Party. People
blind to the limits of their ideas and aware only of what they want
are the opposite of conservative. Lacking a true conservatism, both
sides keep insisting hypocritically on the purity of their positions and
fly into frenetic reflexes when revolutions challenge their fictions.
As against these conservatives seeking to save both their values
and the systems that presently support them, there might be radicals
whose view would be: freedom for everyone all the way and the
hell with it. Or: socialism now and out with the fat boys. Between
radicals on both sides there could also be peace, since the radicals
are going toward each other from opposite ends of the tunnel:
revolutions in the twentieth century are for freedom
and
socialism.
The cold war is the product of people who are neither radicals
nor conservatives and who therefore feel threatened by every revolu–
tionary event, to which their own limits have contributed. Today,
both East and West are run by "liberals" who would like to serve
the ideal of freedom, on one side, and that of socialism, on the other.
The Western liberals are for revolutions against tyranny but when
such a revolution shows its socialist outline they complain that the
revolution has gotten off the track; while the Moscow anti-Stalinists
are for revolutions against capital but when the revolution shows its
libertarian side they denounce
it
as reactionary.
In
this
perspective we leap to PR's last question, the only one
which can be answered briefly: "Do you think the issues at stake
in the cold war so decisive as to be worth a nuclear war?" To answer
y
e.~
to this question one must have lost his mind. Among the war–
willing on the "Radical Right" many suspect they are mad and out
of fear of being locked up direct part of their belligerence against
state legislation to control mental illness, the National Association for
Mental Health and the World Health Organization of the U.N. The
lunatics on the "Left" are not so modest, I mean those liberal pro–
fessors and politicians who demonstrate their "realism" and rocklike
determination by crying, Better the Bomb than-
Better the Bomb than slavery? Imagine enslaving 180,000,000
