INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS
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tual world. The essay, he will be pleased to hear, will give the
neoconservatives no comfort. Here they are, from sunrise to sun–
set shouting against the Soviets, and Irving Howe gets the
blame!)
Dickstein's descriptions of the past, however, are more
troubling than his prescriptions for the future.
It
is one thing to
stay out of politics, whose particulars are usually sordid; maybe a
good mind should.
It
is another thing to stay out of history. Let us
settle something, however, about the comparison between Stalin
and Hitler.
It
was Hitler, and not Stalin, who perpetrated the
Final Solution; I am glad to be reminded of this, as I am glad to be
reminded of my Jewishness. But Stalin murdered more people
than Hitler. This is a fact, and it can't be helped.
It
is also a fact
that Hitler murdered more]
ews
than Stalin, and for that I will
hate him in a way I hope never to hate anything else. But it is not
"a numbers game" (is Jonathan Schell's "republic of insects and
grass" also "a number game"?) to acknowledge the full dimen–
sions of the destiny that befell non-Jews at Stalin's hands. It is
not exactly courageous either. It is merely honest. As is, there–
fore, the deep hatred of Stalinism, and the irascible impatience
with its apologists. (" ...Apologists for tyranny, and no more,"
Dickstein calls them.)
Dickstein worries that the hatred of the Soviet Union will
cloud the judgment of the American government in an age of
nuclear weapons; I worry about that too.
It
is a proper worry,
though President Reagan's record on Russia should allay it
somewhat; the right has more reason to complain about our
Soviet policy than the left. Dickstein believes that Stalinism is
"simply irrelevant" to the formulation of American nuclear
strategy; he must know, since he has read my essay on strategy, that
I believe this too, though I have an aversion to his rather charac–
teristic "simply." (Some of Dickstein's strictures on my writing
suggest that he is a bad reader, which is not what we would ex–
pect, to borrow a phrase, from a student of literature.) Still, the
nature of the Soviet system does have consequences-not for our
military strategy, but for our foreign policy. Here another im–
portant difference between Hitler and Stalin must be cited, and it
is not a difference that will be congenial to Dickstein. The rele–
vant history since the Second World War has been this: Hitler's
regime was destroyed, but Stalin's regime was modified.
It
persists,
