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in and out of the political lexicon. And , of course, they were the apologists
for the arrest and torture of countless dissident writers in the Soviet Union
and in other Communist countries .
I suppose if we were the ideal, selfless human beings we sometimes
pretended to be, we would have transcended all these factors and come to
the defense of peoople we thought to be the instruments, whether conscious
or not , of a new barbarism.
In any case, how could Lillian Hellman not know these things? And
just as she asks how we could not come to the defense of McCarthy's victims,
one could ask her how she could not come to the defense of all those who
had been killed or defamed by the Communists? How could she still be
silent about the persecution of writers in Russia? Why has she not spoken up
against Russian anti-Semitism or the lies about Israel?
Perhaps one explanation for Lillian Hellman's attitude is that she does
not distinguish sufficiently between the anti-Communism of the Right and
the anti-Communism of the Left . I, myself, do not believe that even the
conservative intellectuals were responsible for Watergate. That is too simple
a reading of the forces behind these macabre phenomena. But, clearly, those
anti-Communists who were socialists or liberals and who have been at least
as critical of our own society as they have been of Russia have no more to do
with Nixon than with McCarthy . And one should reasonably expect that
someone as honest and talented as Miss Hellman would have identified her–
self with those writers who do not selectively protest against oppression and
injustice .
Miss Hellman speaks at one point of writers who have not' 'stepped for–
ward to admit a mistake, even now ," and she says of herself that she "took
too long to see what was going on in the Soviet Union ." Of course, most
people find it easier to admit other people 's mistakes; and admitting a mis–
take is sometimes a substitute for correcting it. But the fact is that it has
been very difficult to maintain one 's political balance in these chaotic times
that constantly wipe out traditional standards of behavior. And it is only fair
that
if
I point out what I think to be Lillian Hellman 's errors that I confess a
few of my own. As I look back to the thirties , when many of us were born
politically , it seems clear that my own swings , though they seemed to cor–
respond to the political needs of the time, tended to be too extreme . At
first, I was taken in if only for a short period, by the Communists. Then my
anti-Communist reaction probably carried me a little too far in the other di–
rection despite the fact that I still considered myself a radical. Then in the
sixties, though I was critical of the New Left, I could be said to have been too
tolerant of its half-baked politics. Perhaps we cannot avoid such excesses,
but
if
we are to be saved from the extremes that have seduced so many
