INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS
593
World,
a polemical tract masquerading as history, William L.
O'Neill rakes through every instance in which Stalinist or pro–
gressive writers made allowances for Soviet behavior. O'Neill's
proximate targets are later chroniclers like Lillian Hellman,
Vivian Gornick, and Victor Navasky who portray fellow travelers
as well-meaning idealists who became victims of witch hunts and
blacklists in the repressive atmosphere of the 1950's. O'Neill is
not alone in criticizing their books. Each of them was greeted by a
chorus of anti-Stalinist critics who rose up in rage that any virtue,
passion, heroism, or even martyrdom could be imputed to
American communists and their allies. Their illusions about
Stalin made the fellow travelers
ipso facto
accomplices to mass
murder. About such people nothing good could be said, whatever
their professed devotion or actual labor for idealistic causes.
It
doesn't matter whether they may have been courageous about
unions or racial discrimination or active in a dozen other areas
against injustice or inequality. The fact that they were wrong
about Stalin makes them dupes of totalitarianism, apologists for
tyranny, and no more.
The same logic is being applied to the peace movement to–
day, though it includes far fewer people who have any illusions
about the Russians and it bears no resemblance to a monolithic
and conspiratorial organization . The more the climate of the
1980s comes to resemble the cold war of the fifties, the more we
import the scenarios of the past to explain the politics of the
moment. The specter of Stalinism and anti-Stalinism hangs over
this magazine today, because of its unique history, its place at the
center of past intellectual debates, which recent memoirs have
brought back to the fore of public attention. Many neoconserva–
tives are eager to claim this history as their own. Others have
turned arguments about Stalinism, McCarthy, or the blacklist
into Aesopian versions of present-day debates. In the past year
alone, the proportion of articles on communism in these pages
has been staggering. The best have been by East European dissi–
dents and emigres who have recently experienced Soviet commu–
nism first hand.
It
is our duty and privilege to give these writers a
forum, in order to insure that the KGB does not succeed in cutting
off their tongues. But, as Solzhenitsyn's work has shown, their
powerful personal testimony is no guarantee of strategic or politi–
cal wisdom.
