COMMENT
WRITING AND REWRITING THE PAST.
William O'Neill's
The
Great Schism
is a pedestrian book. But it is a useful documentary of
the political battles between the Stalinists and the anti-Stalinists.
It
serves to remind us of the foolishness and bad faith of so many
intellectuals who acted as apologists for the Soviet Union . But it also
demonstrates that anticommunists, though not as careless with the
data as the revisionists, also make a contribution to the falsifying of
history.
I had almost forgotten how full the thirties and forties were of
lies, rationalizations, double-talk, double-think, and the total
surrender of mind and will to the "great socialist experiment" in the
Soviet Union. The
Nation,
the
New Republic, P.M.,
the
Post,
and a
host ofless well-known publications ground out the most sophistical
and abject arguments justifying almost everything the communists
did and stood for and opposing almost everything America did and
stood for. And I had almost forgotten how many voluntary captives
of communist propaganda there were and how many permitted
themselves to be used by the communists in the period after the
Russian Revolution: Walter Duranty, Alexander Werth, Alvarez del
Vayo, Paul Robeson, Anna Louise Strong, Agnes Smedley,
I.
F.
Stone, Ronald Steel, Edgar Snow, Lillian Hellman, Albert Maltz,
Pete Seeger, Frederick Schumann, Elmer Rice, Owen Lattimore,
Dashiell Hammett, Thomas Emerson, Scott Nearing, F. O.
Mathiessen, Carey McWilliams, Waldo Frank, Malcolm Cowley,
Bruce Bliven-to list only a few, and not to mention all the
Hollywood celebrities who were made to pay for their services to the
communists. It is not a very distinguished list and it is endless.
This is old stuff. But it is useful to have it all together, to make
the record visible, as it were. And O 'Neill does a painstaking
job-too painstaking-in summarizing in great detail the
arguments of every major figure and every big controversy. In fact,
the book consists of a succession of running precis, declarative after
declarative, in the style of a graduate student overachiever. O'Neill
also provides the standard analysis of the defects of the Stalinists'
arguments and the merits of those of the anti-Stalinists: adding little,
however, to what we know about the means-ends argument, and the
suppression of information about the Soviet terror. But he fails to
solve the perennial question-perhaps it is insoluble-of whether
crimes or the concealment of them by idealists is more acceptable
