BOOKS
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The liberalism is not a piety, but an anxiety, a necessarily
inadequate response to the twin temptations of Stalinism and ideologi–
cal anticommunism. To see why the response is necessarily inadequate
(and the source of anxiety) one would have to understand the choices
felt to be available at the time. What Chace omits in his account (a
consequence of his distance from the time) is the spectre of Nazism.
The very force of Nazism had made liberalism, even in the eyes of the
liberals, seem insufficient. Communism (or at least fellow-traveling)
was the alternative forced upon liberals, because it had-or seemed to
have-the capacity to meet force with force. Such an alternative, of
course, entailed the suppression or repression of knowledge of the
Soviet labor camps and of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. But the
bad faith of liberals who were utterly without the idea in modulation
does not evaporate the overwhelming fact of the threat of Nazism. Nor
is bad faith the whole story of fellow-traveling liberal antifascism in
the thirties. George Orwell's unillusioned witnessing of the Spanish
Civil War (as recorded in
Homage to Catalonia)
did not destroy his
conviction that he was on the right side and that he was in the
company of many gifted and courageous men who were willing to
sacrifice and indeed sacrificed their lives for a worthy cause.
It is an odd but significant fact of Chace's study (which covers a
period of fifty years from the mid-twenties to the mid-seventies) itself
perhaps a symptom of the American intellectual history that he is
recording that there is scarcely a reference to the experience of Nazism.
It almost seems as if American intellectuals had been deflected by
Stalinism from contemplating the enormities of Nazism. One cannot
imagine a comparable study of a European intellectual with such a
conspicuous absence. One must turn to a European intellectual,
Hannah Arendt, (a refugee from Nazism) in order to see Stalinism in a
perspective which includes the phenomenon of Nazism. One of Han–
nah Arendt's achievements (particularly in
The Origins of Totalitari–
anism)
is in her powerful demonstration that rather than alternative
phenomena, Stalinism and Nazism were part of a single historical and
ideological continuum. (Outside the community of New York intellec–
tuals, this view was promulgated by conservative thinkers with a
libertarian bias like Peter Viereck and Frederich von Hayek.) The
recent spate of books about the Holocaust may be viewed as a retroac–
tive attempt to compensate for the earlier scanting of the Nazi past; for
the Holocaust, after all, is the supreme expression of the working of the
Nazi system.
American intellectuals, at a distance from the war, did not have the
either
l or
experience of European intellectuals. They could afford the
