ANTI-COMMUNISM
391
Moscow, the Christian Democrats have provided a useful argument
for those Communists who wish to change their Party's relationship to
the Soviet Union. The way is now open for the development of an
indigenous Italian Communism which may well prove of considerable
political appeal; it is remarkable that the recent polemics within the
P.C.I. have been accompanied by net electoral gains. A sophisticated
Communist attempt to cope with the problems of Italian economic and
social development will have interesting effects on Western opinion else–
where, and will certainly render Communist polycentrism impossible of
containment within its current limits. Of course, all of
thi~
has as yet
to occur; the fact, however, that it can be discussed as a possibility is
in itself a contribution to the erosion of anti-Communism.
Recent changes within Communism have coincided with the ascent
of a new Western generation, for whom Communism means not simply
Stalin but Tito, Gomulka, Nagy, Kolakowski, and Evtushenko. The new
generation's spiritual distance from the horrors of the recent past may
indeed constitute a source of distortion in its political judgments. It is,
however, able to approach a new situation in a new way. I have said
that dissent within Communism has encouraged a Western sense of
affinity with the dissenters. Intellectuals within the two camps are
discovering (or re-discovering) their common distrust of the spiritual
pretensions of political authority, their common (:and increasing) scepti–
cism towards schematic interpretations of history as forms of moral judg–
ment, a joint desire for more complex types of personal moral engage–
ment, a shared perception of the absurd, the grotesque and the unjust
in bureaucracy, and an insistence on measuring institutions by a human
standard which can fairly be termed transcendent. It is the young who
are everywhere prominent. The younger intellectuals
in
Communist
societies have used Western social criticism to attack their own enemies.
The young in the West have seen that anti-Communism
has
led their
elders into spiritual sterility and political impotence. The alterations
in
both Communism and anti-Communism, then, are not simply con–
nected; a change of generations is an important element in each.
I have said that the internal transformation of Communism (po–
tential as well as actual) is the single most important recent cause of
the disintegration of anti-Communism. Perhaps, however, this is inac–
curate. The sheer animal fear of a catastrophe is now a world political
factor of primary importance. The fact that in
Partisan Review
some
contributors could declare that
nothing
is worth a nuclear war, attests
the extent to which an unashamed acknowledgement of this fear
has
attained intellectual respectability. (It is not, indeed, a fear of which
