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NORMAN BIRNBAU ...
break with the ideology of anti-Communism. The peculiar obscurantism
entailed in endorsing specific social changes in the West in order to
prove "our" superiority to the Communists has proved to be a totally
insufficient, and indeed self-negating, basis for that criticism. The
moral energies necessary for an attack on the discrepancy between
Western theory and Western practice have been released by a direct
examination of the discrepancy, in its own terms and in its own set–
ting. Paradoxically but effectively, the interdependence of modern
politics has endowed Western politics with a certain autonomy again;
the tumult in Communism has allowed Western disturbances to
rise
to the surface. Further, that interdependence has put anti-Communism
in a new perspective. Communism
is
a relevant issue in Africa, Asia
and Latin America; it is not, however, relevant in the ways insisted upon
by a crude anti-Communism (as the recent conflicts within the Cuban
Revolution show) .
Anti-Communism, as an intellectually respectable position, is end–
ing; it is difficult to say precisely what will fill the ensuing ideological
vacuum. What can be said is that the coming end of anti-Communism
will place grievous burdens upon the American intellectuals. The new
political criticism in America, followed by the intellectuals' disappoint–
ment in the Kennedy Administration, has destroyed that quasi-euphoric
reconciliation with their country which so many were experiencing only
a few years ago. The American intellectuals know
this
of their country–
men (what they don't know of any other population): their illusions
of omnipotence, their ignorance, their anxiety and their despair may
end mankind's existence. The growing conviction amongst American
social critics that acceptance of the prospect of thermonuclear warfare
is an expression of disdain for life itself is an insight of considerable
profundity. It is not, however, one with which it is
easy
to live-and
the labor of developing a politics which would cure this pathology
seems Sysiphean. In their struggle with these problems, however, those
who think in America can rely on the support and cooperation of their
fellow intellectuals elsewhere. In a period of disorientation, that may
not
be
much-but it is something.
