Norman Birnbaum
THE COMING END OF ANTI-COMMUNISM
The recent
Partisan Review
symposium on "The Cold War
and the Future of the West" is just one striking piece of evidence for a
change of mind among the Western intellectuals. Anti-Communism, as
a basic and comprehensive view of the world, is on its way out. Things
were said in the symposium which could not have been said in
PR-or,
at any rate,
were
not said in
PR-ten
or even five years ago. The
American case, it is true, is rather special: the decline of anti-Com–
munism among the intellectuals has been accompanied by a recrud–
escence of a popular anti-Communism which has assumed forms far
more malignant than McCarthyism. This has reinforced (and may well
have been reinforced by) the increasingly open scepticism of the intel–
lectuals as to the value and probable results of the prosecution of the
cold war.
In
Europe and elsewhere, of course, the intellectuals unwilling
to subscribe any longer to militant anti-Communism simply articulate
what millions of others think. (The German Federal Republic, where
the intellectuals criticize government policy and the public does not,
seems to resemble the United States. There is, however, this difference:
the Germans are terrified at the prospect of a war, and on this point
American popular imagination is defective.) The situation is fluid,
but not entirely opaque; it is surprising that some of those who not
too many years ago announced the "end of ideology" have as yet to
deal with
this
new development. A sketch of the anatomy of the
growing revulsion for anti-Communism, therefore, seems appropriate;
at the least, it may show how arguments in New York are (after
all)
part of a world historical process.
The crisis of the ideology of anti-Communism reflects the crisis
of anti-Communism as a political system;
in
the end, it may well
intensify it. Since 1946 political energies in the West (which is to say,
ultimately,
moral
energies) have been concentrated on the defense of
those institutions and the maintenance of those forces which were
Editor's Note: This article is part of PR's discussion on the problems of the
cold war and the future of the West. Comment is invit.d.
