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My cold war

National Interest, The, Spring, 1993

THIS PAST FALL, in what used to be East Berlin, I attended a commemorative conference on "The Cold War and After." It was sponsored by the late, lamented Encounter magazine, which had been founded in London in 1953 by Stephen Spencer and myself, and which ceased publication last year. Though I left the magazine at the end of 1958, to return to New York, I have always felt a special sense of solidarity with it.

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Encounter was accused of being a "Cold War" magazine, which in a sense was true enough. It was published by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was later revealed to be financed by the CIA. As a cultural-political journal, it published many fine literary essays, literary criticism, art criticism, short stories, and poetry, and in sheer bulk they probably preponderated. But there is no doubt its ideological core--its "mission," as it were--was to counteract, insofar as it was possible, the anti-American, pro-Soviet views of a large segment of the intellectual elites in the Western democracies and in the English-speaking Commonwealth.

Just how large this segment was, and how influential, is now easily (and conveniently) forgotten. In France, it was practically impossible to work in the film industry unless you were a member of the Communist Party or a reliable fellow-traveler. In Italy, it was not very different. In Germany, the dominant posture of intellectuals was "neutralist"--i.e., asserting a "moral equivalence" between the United States and the USSR. Even in Britain and the United States, majority opinion in the intellectual elite was, when not fellow-travelling or "neutralist," insistent on distancing itself from America's Cold War policies as overly "militaristic."

This intellectual Weltanschauung derived from the fact that most intellectuals, everywhere, were generally on the Left of the political spectrum. It was therefore easier to give the benefit of all doubts to the Soviet Union or, say, Cuba which were nominally "socialist" and ideologically egalitarian than to a vigorously capitalist United States. Only among the so-called "right-wing Social Democrats" did one find a consistent "anticommunist" attitude--which was never, however, a simple pro-American one, for obvious reasons.

Under these circumstances, it is understandable that the political coloration of Encounter was, on the whole, right-wing Social Democratic--something which annoyed those of my American friends who felt that an unqualified pro-American position was incumbent on us. Though by this time I had become skeptical of Social Democrats or "liberals" in the American sense--they came to the same thing--I appreciated the clear strategic desirability (perhaps even necessity) of such an orientation. But I was less than enthusiastic about it and took some satisfaction in publishing a few articles by some of the younger, more gifted British Tories.

The truth is that, by the time I came to Encounter, anticommunism or anti-Marxism or anti-Marxist-Leninism or anti-totalitarianism had pretty much ceased to interest me as an intellectual project. As a young Trotskyist in my college days, I had studied Marx and Lenin and Trotsky to the point of disillusionment. It was a useful inoculation that rendered me, not only immune, but positively indifferent to the ideological chatter around me. For almost half-a-century now, I have found it close to impossible even to read any apologia for a communist regime, any political analysis written from a pro-communist point of view, or any socio-economic analysis written from a Marxist or quasi-Marxist point of view. Only rarely did I feel moved to refute such writings. I was happy, for the most part, to leave that to others--scholars, journalists, publicists--being content to associate myself with their efforts to do God's work. I heartily approved of their Cold War but it was not my cold war.

My disillusionment with the Trotskyist version of radical socialism proceeded along its own path. I have never felt myself to be an "ex-Trotskyist" in the sense that some people conceive of themselves as "ex-communists." The experience was never that important to me, and my rightward drift commenced promptly upon its termination. I then defined myself as a "democratic socialist," though this was a movement so intellectually placid and politically inert that I am convinced I always understood it to be a convenient transitional phase.

In any case, my tepid loyalty to "democratic socialism" did not survive my experiences as an infantryman in the army. I entered military service with a prefabricated set of attitudes: The army was an authoritarian, hierarchical, mean-spirited, mindless machine--as later described by Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead--while the common soldiers, for all their human imperfections, represented the potential for a better future. Well, it turned out that, as a provincial from New York, I knew nothing about the American common man and even less about the army as an institution. Again and again, and to my surprise, I found reasons to think better of the army and less well of my fellow enlisted men. It is true that, since I was inducted in Chicago, my regiment was heavily populated by thugs or near-thugs from places like Cicero (Al Capone's old base), so my impressions may have been extreme. Nevertheless, my army experience permitted me to make an important political discovery: The idea of building socialism with the common man who actually existed--as distinct from his idealized version--was sheer fantasy, and therefore the prospects for "democratic socialism" were nil. The army may have radicalized Norman Mailer; it successfully de-radicalized me. It caused me to cease being a socialist.

My cold war

National Interest, The, Spring, 1993

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