WRITERS IN EXILE
513
the USSR and its subordinate countries, nor the degradation of
morals and culture have any connection with the nature of
Communism, of the Soviet regime, and the shining ideals of
Marxism. All the rubbish and blood of a ruined historical
experiment they attribute not to the organic properties of un–
controlled power, economics-the external and internal policies
of the USSR-but exclusively to the cost of a healthy revolu–
tionary process, to growing pains, to notorious historical
necessity, and, of course, to the intrigues of hostile reaction.
These people don't want to admit defeat and appear to us
to
be
fanatics. The manner of their political conduct is determined by
the loss of a feeling of reality; their thoughts are ruled by a
depraved desire-the desire to win back, the desire to prove to
oneself once and for all the correctness of the original game plan
and the judiciousness of all the sacrifices made in the exciting
game.
But in our age of unstoppable rockets and superbombs, it is
time for political and moral bankrupts to cease their suicidal
games, time to cease risking the last stakes in history: our lives
and theirs, the genetic fate of our descendants, and the cultural
values of mankind. Which today is more moral: to support a
totally defeated system romantically and devotedly, or to look
judiciously into why we are facing the threat of destruction?
Which is more noble: to stand up face to face to the merciless
truths of reality, to correlate the promises of centuries-old
manifestos with the demagogy of Soviet propaganda, with the
essence of Soviet politics-or to support, support, support, naively
and cynically and criminally furthering the biased perversion of
the objective experience of history?
I am convinced that the "fans" only untie the hands of the
true warmongers, the people whose ideology and politics have
ended up in such a hopeless dead end that they see the blackmail
of peoples by nuclear war, local confrontations, terrorism, and
the destabilization of world democracies as their only chance of
winning. I am sincerely convinced that the USSR, which sends
out its malignancies throughout the world, infects not only other
peoples but also its own. A thorough analysis of the character of
each of them would reveal the symptoms of a chronic spiritual
devastation, multiplied by the delusions of grandeur and per–
secution driving them into paranoic adventurism.
