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IN COMING ISSUES OF PR
LIONEL TRILLING
The Fate of Pleasure
LIONEL ABEL
The Naked Lunch
GEORGE LlCHTHEIM
The New Rome
ROBERT BRUSTEIN
Brecht Reconsidered
DANIEL FRIEDENBERG
Draper and Cuba
• • • and an entire issue of
new European writing, edited
by
MARY McCARTHY.
1.
Our views on the potentiality for
the open expression of conflict in Com–
munist systems are antithetical; time
will tell whether those who were so
wrong in 1950 will have saved any–
thing of their predictions by 1970. For
the moment, to assert that Stalin's
world survives "in essence" seems to
me historically inadequate. Like many
others, I signed a protest to Yugo–
slavia about Djilas' imprisonment; I do
not think that he is being held in jail
by the "essence" of Stalinism but by
a Titoist regime which, under certain
circumstances, can be induced to adopt
more civilized and libertarian standards
of political behavior.
2. I did not declare flexible anti–
Communism merely a contradiction in
terms, but held that it had proven im–
possible to develop in practice. Mayor
Brandt and the German Social Demo-
CORRESPONDENCE
crats would do well to give less at–
tention to the Berlin Wall as such and
more to their own share of the respon–
sibility for its erection. They supported
the foreign policy which,
inter alia,
led
to the wall; equally, they approved the
Federal Republic's attempt to impose
a quarantine on Communist Germany
-which has helped maintain Ulbricht
in power. I would agree that
it
is
tragic that the German Social Demo–
crats should find that their anti-Com–
munism has led them into alignment
with other enemies of freedom (a
designation I should not for one mo–
ment hesitate to apply to large numbers
in the ruling elite of the Federal Ger–
man Republic). This should be the oc–
casion for socialists to examine their
anti-Communism critically, again, and
to draw different political conclusions
from it. Incidentally, hasn't the Ger–
man Social Democratic Party in any
case now taken over Lenin's doctrine
of "democratic centralism"-and ex–
pelled a whole batch of opponents of
its policy?
3. Mr. Erlich does not deal with
one of my points which I thought was
obvious and which, if wrong, surely
merits attention. Insofar as intellectuals
like himself support that curious com–
bination of official and vulgar anti–
Communism which lends America from
outside, the appearance of a
l~natic
asylum, are they not serving as ac–
complices in preparation for the su–
preme moral abomination of thermo–
nuclear warfare? This does not mean
that they should cease a critical analy–
sis of Communism; it does mean that
they are morally obliged to think again
about the utilization of their energies.
In the meantime, the assumption that
Communism cannot evolve towards
liberty may well generate support for
policies which make their own con–
tribution to preventing that evolution.
Norman Birnbaum
