594
PARTISAN REVIEW
The worst political wntmg has come from born-again
moralists like Wieseltier, who use anticommunism as a club and
as a universal litmus test that supersedes all other issues. In re–
sponse to George Kennan, Wieseltier has written that "to 'put an
end to the systematic condemnation' of the Soviet Union ... is to
put an end to the telling of the truth." Yet despite such self–
righteousness and moral absolutism, Wieseltier has written well
about nuclear arms issues in
The New Republic.
The ghost of
Stalin is simply irrelevant to strategic issues today, despite the
Administration's attempts to link West European protesters to
the Kremlin. There are marginal segments of the peace movement
which
are
pro-Soviet; they criticize only Western arms, and tacitly
accept the suppression of genuine peace groups in communist
countries. Our aim should be to keep the peace movement honest
and independent, not to tar it with a communist brush for failing
to support Pentagon policies. With all the pressures for escala–
tion of the arms race, cloaked in an anodyne technical jargon
which conceals the reality of nuclear war, we need the counter–
pressures created by a peace movement, if only to remind us of the
actual horrors to which our war games and scenarios might lead.
The peace movement is no more the successor to the fellow
traveling ideas of the Popular Front than the neoconservatives are
heirs to the independent radicalism of those who first broke with
the Party. In the strained and polarized atmosphere of the 1950s,
many intellectuals gave up both radicalism and liberalism to
make anticommunism the keystone of their political lives. In a
wide variety of well-funded organization, think tanks, and publi–
cations, some of the same people are working feverishly to pro–
vide a rationale for today's new cold war mentality .
Peter Brooks
William Phillips's "Mind Sets"
(Partisan Review, 4,
1982), strikes me as
mor~
a distressing symptom of the current
impasse of political thinking than a cogent analysis. Phillips de–
votes one paragraph to the confusions of the right, and the rest of
his commentary to those of the left-as if the major threat to
political rationality lay on the left rather than with those in
