INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS
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ing has shifted from negotiations to bullying, from political
to
military solutions, and from an interest in human rights to an
obsession with communism and stability. Our expensive new
weapons systems are the equivalent on a larger scale to arming
and training the Somocistas for murderous raids into Nicaraguan
territory. Instead of undertaking serious arms negotiations we
have made cosmetic gestures designed to pacify the peace move–
ment and shift the onus of failure to the Russians. This worked in
the West German election, where the left was repudiated, largely
for economic reasons; but much of European public opinion
continues to run against us. Rather than galvanizing the Euro–
peans to abandon detente and face up to the Russians, Reagan's
loose talk about nuclear war has done much to frighten them and
turn them against us. The currents of neutralism and anti–
Americanism which we decry are partly of our own making.
If
the Europeans want no part of our new cold war, the same
cannot be said of American intellectuals. Recent memoirs of the
1950s evince a certain embarrassment at how the principled anti–
Stalinism of the intellectuals was pre-empted by the crude de–
monology of Dulles, McCarthy, and HUAC. No such misgivings
inhibit neoconservatives today as they abet Reagan's attempt to
revive the anticommunist crusade. In more sophisticated lan–
guage, their hostility to the Soviet Union is as theological and
absolute as his. In these pages, Leon Weiseltier objects to Susan
Sontag's equation of communism and fascism, but only because
she calls it "fascism with a human face." What "human face," he
asks, as if a hundred years of socialist ideals, grotesquely dis–
torted in Soviet practice, were no different from a savage ideology
of
Blut und Boden.
"The equation of communism with fascism is
kind to communism," he seriously maintains. "There has not
yet been a fascist government that murdered as many people as
the communist government of Stalin." This numbers game is not
what we would expect from a student of Jewish history. For all
Stalin's vicious crimes, the systematic planning of a Final Solution
was not part of his repertoire. Equating fascism with anything is
close to unforgivable. But only an impassioned zealot would call
the comparison "kind to communism," or complain that for Sontag
"fascism is still the criterion of crime." Out of such discrimina–
tions holy wars are conceived.
Most conservative writers are concerned with more mun-
