PARTISAN REVIEW
201
Now the reason I mention this is that, I think it immediately relevant
to Bob Lifton's questions. To be sure, some people were immobilized
by anti-Stalinism and could see no other evil, no other enemy, and
that's very unfortunate, I think deeply unfortunate. I think one
ought to be, in principle, as able to be charged up and made angry
and indignant by what the junta in Chile does as by what the
regime-I don't know-in Poland or in Cuba does. But this of course
requires, first, a very considerable degree of political sophistication,
the capacity for seeing two enemies at the same time and trying to
make relative judgments of which at a given moment is the greater
enemy-and there's no sure-fire way of doing it because you're
dealing with an historically unprecedented situation in the age of
totalitarianism; and it also requires considerable moral poise. Now
it's easy enough to say, in retrospect, that some people veered a little
bit in this direction and other people veered a little bit in that
direction, in terms of imbalance. But you can 't expect everyone to
have been as perfectly poised as William and I always were!
LIFTON:
If
I could say one more thing... about being able to see two
enemies instead of one. It's the more difficult (and I'm not simply
casting stones on this...really difficult issue) it's the historical
imagination that is in a way bound to that Stalinist experience as
opposed
to
all kinds of new experiences. The approaches are
interfered with by that binding of the intellectual imagination to the
Stalinist experience.
HOWE:
There is some truth, I think, to that, Bob, namely that it's very
hard to be caught up by two major historical experiences. Now if you
could show me a good number of examples of people who were
adequately responsive to what we might call (in quotes) the " post–
Stalinist" experience and who remained adequately responsive to the
Stalinist one, as against those who were responsive only to the
Stalinist and not to the other that came later, then I think your point
would be stronger. But you see, what some of us were upset by,
during the Vietnam period, was that many who were making
perfectly cogent and powerful criticism of American policy in the
Vietnam war were talking about North Vietnam and Cuba in the
way people had been talking about Stalinist Russia in the 30s... in
utterly fatuous and self-deluded and disastrous ways. Now, yes, to be
sure, one should be able to see all these evils at the same time. But
what I'm saying is that a number of people, to be serious, have tried.
In practice it is extremely difficult. What's hard is to make the
political judgments and adjustments of relationship that are
