LETIERS
the division of Europe made at
Yalta. The American government is
anti-insurgent, bound and deter–
mined to halt Marxist insurgency in
the less-developed world . The
naivete of Wieseltier's praise for
Reagan ' s discourse is matched only
by the shortness of his memory.
Does he not dimly recall that one of
the Republican campaign planks of
1980 was the lifting of the grain
embargo imposed by President
Carter when the Soviets invaded
Afghanistan? The Soviet Union
does not threaten American inter–
ests in Europe ; its support for
Marxist insurgents in Africa, Asia,
and Latin America does . This is the
political situation that actually
exists.
The business of America, as
the much underrated Calvin
Coolidge said, is business. Anti–
communism is like church parade in
the army: you spend an hour there
on Sundays and then get back to the
business at hand. The real role of
anticommunism in American for–
eign policy is its service as a justifi–
cation for supporting odious
regimes and for overthrowing
revolutionary governments that
threaten our strategic interests .
Wieseltier's readiness to compro–
mise with power, indeed, his servility
to power and his callousness toward
the poor and the oppressed make
his argument a paradigm of why
anticommunism as an intellectual
position has been viewed with suspi–
cion by so many decent people .
Wiesel tier finds Sontag's
notion of communism as successful
fascism to be preposterous, and yet
it isn ' t preposterous that these two
systems so resemble each other in
practice. Sontag is hardly the first to
notice this. It was asserted decades
ago by, among others , Hannah
Arendt and Dwight Macdonald.
317
Curiously, it was Merleau-Ponty in
his
defense
of Stalinism who most vig–
orously insisted on the formal simi–
larities between the two systems :
Fascism is nothing but a mimicry
of Bolshevism. A single party,
propaganda, the justice of the
sta te, the truth of the state–
fascism retains everything of
Bolshevism except what is essen–
tial , namely, the theory of the
proletariat.
And we know what happens to the
theory of the proletariat once a com–
munist government comes into
power.
Wieseltier's view is that events
in Poland show the ever-present
" Bonapartist" possibility within
communism and argues that
J
aruzelski did nothing particularly
novel. But Sontag did not assert
that communism had only recently
become "fascism with a human
face ." Rather she insisted that this
had been its essential nature all
along, and her rhetorical flourish
doesn't look so extreme after all.
The events in Poland , she argued,
"illustrate . .. a truth we should
have understood a long time ago :
that communism is fascism-suc–
cessful fascism, if you will." That is
to say that communism as practiced
looks a lot like fascism as practiced.
What seems to worry Wieseltier
is that by comparing communism
and fascism, Sontag is being overly
"kind to communism." Far from
diminishing the iniquities of com–
munism by equating it with fas–
cism, Sontag clearly considers com–
munism to be the senior, more
successful variant of the strain . I
can hardly see how this assertion
devalues her anticommunism .
Wieseltier wants to playa numbers
game and reminds us that Stalin
killed more people than any fascist
