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obvious that more accurate weapons are more dangerous or barbaric
than less accurate ones. And no one can know if deterrence will
always work or if nuclear war will escalate into a holocaust. Nor has
the United States become a military-industrial complex, nor do
human beings find their identities by "bonding through exclusion,"
as Thompson claims. Also, there are real political conflicts that drive
the arms race forward , and the Soviet build-up in Europe has taken
place during a period in which NATO was not engaged in parallel
activity. And contrary to Thompson's argument, while left-wing
neutralists in Britain and Germany may increase strains in the
Western alliance, the suppression of Solidarity should make it
painfully obvious that the Soviets are intent on sustaining their
control over the Warsaw Pact nations .
But the deeper flaw in Thompson's position is a moral and
political one. Thompson is not an orthodox leftist and certainly no
Stalinist. On the contrary, his is one of the most vociferous
anti-Stalinist voices on the British Left. Although his intellectual
roots are completely different, his position is similar to Herbert
Marcuse's analysis of one-dimensional society. Both blur the
distinction between free and totalitarian societies. Both view the
East and West as different forms of unfreedom and believe that the
way out is to achieve a new consciousness and identity through
politics, a third force between the superpowers . What neither could
accept are the ideas that the Soviet Union uses its military power in
other than purely defensive ways and that the United States and the
Atlantic alliance are defensive in their commitment to Western
Europe . Despite their criticisms of Stalinism, Marcuse in the 1960s
and Thompson today have insisted that the Soviet threat was a myth
of Western capitalism, a fiction of Pentagon propagandists, a relic of
American provincialism . Both ruled out the possibility that
Washington might be telling the truth about Soviet military
capacities . Even when Thompson does criticize the Soviets, he is
unwilling to take the next logical step and support the Western
military policies needed to deter Soviet power. Thompson provides
another example of the allergic reaction to the military power of
capitalist democracies that George Orwell criticized in the 1930s and
1940s. The ultimate conclusion to be derived from Thompson ' s
work is that there really is nothing to defend. As he says , the cold
war is about itself. Anyone who believes that will not want to
increase taxes to raise the nuclear threshold when it is so much easier
