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Not content to claim that the liberal opponents of McCarthyism
were compromised by accepting in practice some of its premises,
Navasky will not even grant the genuineness of their anti–
Communism. They were, he contends, in the "dissociating
business," rejecting the Stalinists at best in order "to preserve the
future of liberalism," at worst to protect themselves. Yet one need
not have been a Communist, let alone shared Schulberg's degree of
involvement, to have felt intense moral revulsion from Stalinism.
Even for someone like myself who mostly came into contact on ly
with fellow-travelers in or near the academic world, it was a sobering
experience to discover that these people of an almost suffocating self–
righteousness, who constantly preened themselves on the elevation
of their "social conscience" and denigrated as cowards or knaves all
who did not share their a ll egiances, were lauding a regime that had
imprisoned and killed many millions more innocent people even
than Hitler's, including foreign believers who had made sacrifices
to
support it.
Navasky has no personal past to vindicate; to him, the old
conflict over Stalinism is fraught with contemporary political
meaning and lessons for the future. Some reviewers have read
Naming Names
as a warning against the imminence of a new
McCarthyism ready
to
assau lt the left and civil liberties in a period
of domestic conservatism and renewal of the Cold War. But this is, I
think, at most a minor concern: recently, Navasky tried to dispel the
anxieties of some of his contributors to the
Nation
by sensibly
reminding them of the vast difference between the state of the
country today and in the 1950s. His deeper political aim is to restore
the moral credentials of "the Left" by discrediting its most serious
and principled intellectual critics while affirming the essential
rectitude of those who paid for their political errors thirty years ago.
Conor Cruise O'Brien once wrote of Orwell that "the cant of the left
... was a lmost destroyed by Orwell's attacks, which put out of
act ion so much cant-produc in g in its factories: the minds of left-wing
intellectuals." Navasky wants
to
write off the bad investments of the
past , evict the occupants who hold a partial li en on the premises, and
start the machinery whirring again .
If
compli city with Stalinism had been an isolated occurrence, a
bizarre intrusion of the darkness of Russian despotism into the
restless li ves of overprotected Western intellectuals, the idea of
pas
d'ennemis
a
gauche
might regain some plausibility. But the radicalism
