Leftism
17. Another Leftist War
British enthusiasm for Poland was never excessive, but Mr. Chamberlain was certain that another of Hitler’s “peaceful grabs” could not be permitted. In France pacifist feelings were strong (Nous ne voulons pas mourir pour Dantzic!), but British public opinion was outraged by Hitler’s march on Prague and regarded this, quite rightly, as a breach of promise. Negotiations were started between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union to build up a solid front against Hitler. There is very little doubt that peace would have been preserved if Germany had been faced by the specter of a two-front war. The German-Russian military pact, concluded between Ribbentrop and Molotov, gave to Hitler the necessary guarantee for a free hand in the West. Even after the joint Nazi-Communist conquest of Poland Soviet economic aid to Nazi Germany was increasing: In the fall of 1940 Nazi planes engaged in the battle of Britain were using Soviet gasoline. The prospect of a two-front war, on the other hand, would have resulted in a reorganization of the conspiratorial forces within the German army. Surprised by the political developments and the successful negotiations in Moscow, the German generals started only in November 1939 to close their ranks again.
All this came as a terrible surprise to the American left, the most naive people under God’s sun. Only on August 23, one week before the outbreak of the war, the “Committee on Cultural Freedom” under the signature of a huge crowd of “leading intellectuals” had published a full page advertisement in America’s most important papers. Signatories were among others Jay Allen, Henry Pratt Fairchild, Waldo Frank, Leo Hubermann, George Kaufmann, Paul de Kruif, Max Lerner, Clifford Odets, Frederick L. Schumann, George Seldes, James Thurber, Richard Wright, Dashiell Hammett, Vincent Sheean, Maxwell Stuart. Here are a few excerpts:
“The fascists . . . are intent on destroying such unity [i.e., of all “progressive forces”] at all costs . . . realizing that here in America they cannot get far with a definitely pro-Fascist appeal, they strive to pervert American anti-Fascist sentiment to their own ends . . . they have encouraged the fantastic falsehood that the USSR and the totalitarian states are basically alike. . . .
“The Soviet Union considers political dictatorship a transitional form and has shown a steadily expanding democracy in every sphere. Its epoch-making new constitution guarantees Soviet citizens universal suffrage, civil liberties, the right to employment, to leisure, to free medical care, to material security in sickness and in old age, to equality of the sexes in all fields of activity and to equality of all races and nationalities.”
Convinced “evolutionists” should remember that these brilliant facts, figures, and forecasts were stated nearly one-third of a century ago and had ample time to become reality.
Still, whereas we can insist that America’s entry in 1917 was a truly fateful decision which paved the way to World War II, a Nazi victory in Europe—for one or two generations—would have been an almost unmitigated disaster. Nearly as disastrous, however, was the political-psychological warfare waged by the Allies as well as the “order” which actually emerged from World War II. Taking into consideration the ignorance, the prejudices, and the ideological trends prevailing in the West and in the Soviet Union, not much else could be expected. This was also the reasoning of a few intelligent American isolationists.
In the United States the great enthusiasm for the Soviet Union came only after Pearl Harbor, the cleverly organized back door to get the United States into the war. We have no reliable demographic statistics, but it is my impression that the pro-Soviet fervor was less strong in the United States than in Britain if for no other reason (and there were others) than that America had too many citizens of East European and East Central European descent who could not so easily be hoodwinked. But they were rarely to be found in the higher and highest social layers, with the result that the Red Hysteria was much stronger in Boston or Philadelphia than in Pittsburgh or Johnstown, not to mention Sauk Center. I still remember a cocktail party in Manhattan in 1943 where a lady in mink, balancing her highball, screamed that it was America’s most urgent task to show herself “worthy of her gallant Soviet Allies.” “To think,” she sobbed later, after some more libations, “that I called them ‘Bolsheviks’!” I had to reassure the good woman that there was nothing pejorative in this appellation.
This “magnificent unity” while almost half a million Russian Vlassovtsy fought under the German flag, needs no comment.
But then, what do we make of Mr. Reynolds’ message to the reader on the wrapper? He says that this “is a war to decide whether or not men can sit around the crackerbox in the general store and lift their voices in praise or criticism. It is a war to decide whether or not we can worship Christ or Mohammed or Buddha or a clay pigeon, or anything else which we, as individuals, decide to worship.” Yet, if some of us worship navel-gazing Buddhas and the others clay pigeons, while sitting around a crackerbox, where do we get that so necessary “magnificent unity” for which Stalin has a “complete justification”? Here we are certainly faced with complete schizophrenia.
In my novel Black Banners I have described this orgy of lies which took place in World War II and which engulfed the entire globe. The hero listened to the various short-wave broadcasts:
America’s leftists had been strongly reinforced by those newcomers, the émigraille, and the more extreme among them fostered the cause of the Soviet Union. Such an attitude, even more so for those born in the country and those who had solemnly sworn allegiance, was criminal. It was downright treason, whatever the government’s own attitude, and when it became apparent that treason actually had been committed and that the culprits had to be found out, great excitement broke loose among the leftists, native or foreign born. These supporters of an alien totalitarian government suddenly invoked for their treatment all the sacred principles of classic liberal tolerance.
The betrayal itself cannot be doubted: its documentary evidence is unimpeachable. I personally am viewing these activities with the eyes of a non-American, of a person dead-set against the whole development of identitarian and egalitarian frenzy to which Jefferson was not alien and which has affected American popular concepts and American political folklore. (Which does not mean that the evil seed is not also sprouting in other parts of the globe—and more powerfully so than in the United States.) The question I want to raise is this: Where are we going to draw the line? The line between objective treason and loyalty is very clear. A man who puts the interest of a foreign country above that of his own is not acting patriotically—provided no moral issues are involved. (Obviously “My Country Right or Wrong” is an immoral, an un-Christian device. It is Churchillism pure and simple.) A man who secretly, illegally hands over vital information to a country which is a potential or an actual enemy of his country is legally a traitor.
Of Mrs. Roosevelt’s dicta I would like to take only a few samples which I consider characteristic. Let us look at My Day in the Chicago Sun-Times of July 7, 1948. There she says:
There is more in this column than immediately meets the eye. One has to read it two or three times and then draw one’s own conclusions.
Here is another piece. (January 19, 1949):
I am in receipt of two interesting communications relative to a column I wrote about the imprisonment of Cardinal Mindszenty. What I was trying to say, of course [!], was not that the cardinal was an altogether admirable character, but that it is stupid [!] of the Communists to imprison people where it can be said that they have been imprisoned because of their religion. Our correspondent—a man who edits a publication which claims to be completely factual—writes that the arrest is not a matter of religious persecution, but of opposition to progress. He claims that the cardinal is a reactionary, if not a fascist and a notorious anti-Semite.
So far, so good. Mrs. Roosevelt obviously said nothing. She merely related what one of her correspondents told her. She is perfectly innocent of all pro-Communist propaganda.
Naturally, in her column, she sided with Alger Hiss against Whittaker Chambers on whose word “nobody could rely.” She opposed Cardinal Preysing’s visit to the United States. She thought that Franco’s Secret Police were just as bad as the Gestapo and that the only persons who should teach German youths are those who “have proved their democracy,” a phrase which undoubtedly would surprise a student of the English language. Was Mrs. Roosevelt deeply imbued with pro-Communist ideas or merely naive? Probably both. Witness an article she published in McCall’s (February 1952) about the President’s unease with Stalin at the Teheran Conference. “My husband was determined to bend every effort to breaking those suspicions down, and decided the way to do it was to live up to every promise made by both the United States and Great Britain, which both of us were able to do before the Yalta meeting. At Yalta my husband felt the atmosphere had somewhat cleared, and he did say he was able to get a smile from Stalin.” Indeed, how many people would not sell millions into slavery to get a smile from that dear old man!
If I have not made myself sufficiently clear, I would like to point out that, just to quote one instance, a typical burgher of the city of Pamplona in Navarra in the seventeenth century confronted with the Marxist-Leninist message would have shrugged it off as a piece of egregious nonsense. Accepting none of its premises, he would have listened to none of its conclusions. The average American with a degree from his progressive college is much nearer to the Red message; the devoted uncommitted leftist even more so. There comes the moment when the non-Marxist leftist inadvertently steps into the magnetic field of the Red Doctrine and then his guardian angel or his last residues of rationality will prevent the worst. Just a few more symbolic reminders mentioned occasionally much earlier: Columbia on the old half-dollar with the Jacobin cap; the fasces on the dime piece which reappear on the French Republican and in the Fascist coat of arms; the first battleships of the Soviet Union named Danton and Marat; the studied utopianism in terms such as “the American experiment”; the replacement of the Calvinist outlook (which, after all, is still a Christian one!) with Roussellianism which lies at the bottom of all Utopian leftist heresies. (Herein lies the root of the entire internal moral and political crisis of the United States.) In other words, an American conservatism, any movement on the true right (which of course could not in any way be totalitarian) has to return to far distant historical sources—not to stay there but to get the right start. Back to the imaginary burgher of Pamplona in the seventeenth century? Though he hails from another part of this world (and therefore is not a fitting reference), he certainly had a grasp of basic truths. It is the Great Western, the Great Christian tradition which has to be reconstituted, and this is a gigantic task requiring radical thinkers and far-going measures.
And here we come to another point. I am dead certain that at the turn of the century, historians will try to find out the answer to two crucial historic questions:
1. What caused the United States to withdraw its armies immediately after the armistice from all parts of the world? Was the clamor “Let’s Send the Boys Home” somewhat “organized?”
2. What prevented the United States—as sole atomic power between the years 1945 and 1948—from using its deadly monopoly to “ease” the Soviets out of their ill-gotten gains? A war never would have been necessary. The mere threat would have been sufficient. Panic on an unprecedented scale would have been the immediate result. Of course the answer is tragically simple: A “democracy” rests on the “fermentation” of the people. It merely hits back if attacked and is more perplexed by victory than by the task of defending itself (which belongs to the military hierarchy and not to amateurish politicians).
“Reeducation” also ran into a few snares. Luckily the leftist plans never came to fruition but what they would have been like one can guess from the “Zook Report,” published in parts by the New York Times (October 16, 1946). Dr. George F. Zook, head of a mission of nine men and women (among them a Catholic priest!) sent to Germany by the State and War Departments, declared that the goal of democracy is “democratic man.” This commission found the main ills of Germany to be “discipline in the family” and the high school-college, which begins at the age of ten. “The survival of democracy would warrant an invasion of the German home,” the report suggested. It referred to the “stern German parental authority” that produced Freudian ambivalence, or a clash of tenderness and hostility in children, undermining individual self-reliance, if not also self-respect, while women were confined to cooking, children, and churchgoing, thus converting “worthy enough functions into antidemocratic sterilities.” The report went on to say that to “shun the majority rule principle was to play into the hands of a Hitlerian ‘superman.’ ” Ninety percent of the Germans went to vocational schools and “this separation of children at an early age was an important factor in developing the superiority complex of the privileged class and the subservience of the trade class which had led Germany to totalitarianism and war.”
The so frequently followed British example, too, was at times exceptionally evil. The Austrians have seen not only the “Hell of Lienz” but also the bestial surrender of the Domobranci, the Catholic Slovene Home Guard, which had protected Slovenes against the depredations of Tito’s partizani. Thousands of them were rounded up, shipped over the Karavanken Mountains, to be mowed down in masses and their corpses used as natural fertilizer for the fields. One should never forget: Sadism is the outstanding characteristic of the entire left.
Needless to say that the blunders of American leftists have their analogies in other parts of the world. French, Spanish, Italian, German, Austrian, and British “moderate leftists” are no less silly and supercilious; however, their influence, their weight, their historic importance is now a great deal less than that of their American confrères who have an establishment with which the others cannot vie, because it is in a key nation deciding the fate of the world. One can listen to certain Spanish (or Peruvian) students—who are filled to the gills with most incredible nineteenth-century nonsense—be informed by sophisticated Frenchmen how the Texan oil millionaires murdered President Kennedy, or be instructed by Italian Repubblicani about Italy’s economic exploitation by the Vatican. The stupidities uttered by Greek intellectuals, soft-headed German literati or sixth-rate English university professors are just as bad, except that they matter less. From the masses no intelligent man expects a superior knowledge anyhow: they can only throw back what has been fed to them by the information manufacturers or by the opinion makers. Common sense is valuable, no doubt, but not without knowledge, just as knowledge is worthless without common sense. The masses cannot really be blamed.
The Soviets needed the democratic restoration of 1945 very much indeed. We know about a leading American general who, after World War II, met a Soviet leader. We quote: “Circumstances had brought the two together on a number of occasions and the American had noticed an attitude of considerable friendliness on the part of the Russian. One day he commented on his attitude.
“The Soviet leader made no reply for the moment, then he drew his chair closer to the table and from a matchbox he took four matches which he placed methodically on the table, each match about an inch from the next and parallel to it. Then he said, ‘Now this first match is what you call “Capitalism”; the second is what you call “Democracy”; the third is what you call “Socialism”; and the fourth is what you call “Communism”.’
