INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS
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cept maybe when the Germans bombed my school in Brussels two
years later. All reasoned arguments were forgotten at these meet–
ings, and the main theme was to avoid fascism not Soviet expan–
sion. The participants, young intellectuals, some of whom per–
ceive in this movement the renewal of 1968, at one point became
enthusiastic enough not to note the irony when in the name of
peace they contributed money for the purchase of weapons for the
guerrillas in El Salvador. Nor did they ask themselves whether
being ruled by the Soviets might mean the end of the freedoms
they had vowed to foster after 1945.
This lack of critical thinking, to some extent, may be due to
their blind acceptance of everything American after the Second
World War, so that quoting American peace advocates seems nat–
ural. Some of the latter would be aghast as the positions taken in
their names. The various American groups of "concerned" doc–
tors, lawyers, psychologists, etc., whose leaders talk all over the
world, after all, for the most part temper their demands for arms
reduction with specific proposals and do include suggestions for
negotiations. They also tend to assume that fewer arms expendi–
tures will lead to more support for the poor, the cities, and other
social amenities. But when their ideology is exported, as is cus–
tomary, it turns into a super ideology that is less and less tied
to reality. So when "professional" peace lovers of the world
unite, they assume that all those who oppose their tactics are
against peace rather than against their naive and uninformed
politics. Needless to say, we all want peace, although some of us
think that the best chance of achieving it is through a combina–
tion of deterrence and negotiation. That many Europeans agree,
has been shown by the elections of Thatcher, Kohl, etc.-elec–
tions which are ominous insofar as the ensuing polarization leads
to a situation that no longer allows for serious discussion. This
tends to destabilize and weaken the countries of Western Europe,
without reducing Soviet armament or removing the threat of
nuclear war. Is this really what the idealists on the left want?
Steven Marcus
It
is probably unfortunate that literary intellectuals
persist in speaking out in print about politics. What they often
offer as reasoned political argument is a mixture of pious hopes,
