INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS
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indeed, in common with most left liberals, supported the alliance
of the Western democracies with the Soviet Union during the
Second World War when Hitler's Germany was clearly the main
threat to freedom and to the independence of the nations of
Europe.
After the war, the Soviet Union ruled by Stalin absorbed half
of Europe, and anti-Stalinists on the left, including those associ–
ated with
Partisan Review
supported American and Western
resistance to the threatened further expansion of Soviet power.
T his
stand involved taking a position on foreign policy which
was not entailed by the rejection of communism
per se.
(William
O'Neill's
A Better World
accurately describes this political-ideol–
ogical history-Dickstein's comment on O'Neill is so blatantly
prejudiced as to raise doubts whether he has ever read the book.)
Russian power, not communist ideology nor even the totalitarian
nature of Soviet society, became the problem the United States
and Western Europe have had to face up to since 1945. Is it "theo–
logical" to insist on the reality of Soviet power and to doubt that
its aims have been benign?
It
is not clear that Brooks and
Dickstein would answer this question affirmatively as opposed
merely to objecting to the crude rhetoric about "evil empires,"
echoing older stereotypes of "godless communism," that Reagan
indulges in from time to time. The injection of religious emo–
tions into our foreign policy certainly might impart to it a charac–
ter of militant aggressiveness that was absent from the original
containment policy. Such attitudes were prevalent in the 1950s so
often recalled by Reagan's rhetoric, a time when the United States
was much stronger than the Soviet Union. Yet despite demands
for a rollback of Soviet power in Eastern Europe and the restora–
tion of Chiang in China, our actual policies remained more
cautious and defensive under Eisenhower and Dulles than in the
later Kennedy-Johnson years.
Dickstein argues that political life is haunted by "the spec–
ter of Stalinism and anti-Stalinism." I agree that "the ghost
of Stalin is simply irrelevant to strategic issues today," but is the
reality of Soviet power irrelevant to such issues?
It
was under
Khrushchev that the Soviet Union suppressed the Hungarian
Revolution, threatened Europe with a rain of nuclear missiles
unless it got its way over Berlin, and placed nuclear missiles in
Cuba.
It
was under Brezhnev that a Czechoslovakian liberal
