Cultural War
O'Neill, William L.
Cultural War A BETTER WORLD by William L. O'Neill Simon and Schuster. 446 pp. $17.95. For more than forty years, a cultural cold war has been waged among American intellectuals over the related...
...foreign policy...
...William C. Pratt (William C. Pratt is a historian at the University of Nebraska at Omaha...
...For the past generation, it has been almost a required response in our society to characterize earlier hopes about the Soviet Union as either criminally naive or stupid, but such hopes may parallel the faith that some have today in the salutary effects of "an unregulated marketplace" or in Israel...
...A Better World does not concern itself with the activities of American communists...
...For more than forty years, a cultural cold war has been waged among American intellectuals over the related issues of communism, the Soviet Union, and U.S...
...O'Neill is not yet convinced that the ACCF was partially funded by CIA subsidies (but if that were the case, "this would have been disgraceful...
...What can one say about this discussion...
...William L. O'Neill's A Better World chronicles this bitter quarrel from the signing of the 1939 nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin through the appearance of Navasky's Naming Names in 1980...
...O'Neill is critical of U.S...
...Cold War tensions did not result solely from Soviet ambitions and maneuvers...
...One of the revisionists mentioned in a positive vein is William Apple-man Williams...
...He also refuses to acknowledge that "anti-Stalinist" intellectuals often contributed to a climate of fear that led good, decent people to hedge their bets and wait for a better day in which to defend basic American rights...
...Liberals, radicals, and others often were misled and frequently deceived themselves about the Soviet Union...
...Millions since then have been misled from the opposite direction by those politicians who fear they will lose influence and votes if U.S.Soviet tensions are relaxed...
...Controversies surrounding the publications of books by Lillian Hellman (Scoundrel Time) and Victor Navasky (Naming Names) and efforts to reopen the Hiss and Rosenberg cases are among the recent skirmishes in this left-liberal civil war...
...Hellman's 1976 memoir, Scoundrel Time, and Navasky's Naming Names do not pass O'Neill's muster...
...Unfortunately, O'Neill's efforts have produced another document of the battle, rather than a dispassionate discussion of its issues and developments...
...The American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF) gets good marks, "despite lapses of judgment and good taste," and O'Neill condemns witnesses before Congressional committees for their silence: "What the nation required was people who were not prevented from telling the truth by childish misconceptions...
...He writes that revisionism "raised the level of debate" and "presented the case against American foreign policy more honestly and intelligently than progressives ever did...
...Many will agree with O'Neill's contention that his topic has contemporary relevance...
...In his preface, he writes: "Here, especially, to know the past is to know ourselves...
...It did not need the lies, or implied lies, that silence represented...
...Recent scholarship supports some of the accounts published in these "progressive" magazines regarding British and American intrigue in the late World War II era and immediately after...
...Thus he criticizes The New Republic for shifting its policy to back Chiang Kai-shek on Formosa and Bao Dai in French Indochina after the Korean War broke out...
...They clustered around magazines such as The New Republic and The Nation, O'Neill claims, and misled many into believing that the Soviet Union was a wonderful place and a worthy ally during World War II...
...O'Neill often overlooks examples in The New Republic and The Nation which do not support his argument...
...involvement in Vietnam, and maintains that both the "progressives" and "anti-Stalinists" have good records on this issue...
...Regrettably, A Better World is an insufficient guide for such a self-examination...
...Yet O'Neill fails to point out that Williams was a frequent contributor to The Nation...
...One topic on which A Better World has praise for the "progressives" is their record on China...
...Though O'Neill indicates some concern for the way in which left-liberal China specialists were treated during the McCarthy era, overall his insensitivity to the civil liberties of political dissenters is appalling...
...He spends many pages outlining the intellectual and moral weaknesses of American liberals and radicals who did not devote their energies to denouncing "Stalinism" at home and abroad...
...One need not romanticize Soviet activity in eastern Europe to acknowledge British misdeeds in Greece or the belligerence of the 1947 Truman Doctrine...
...Of Navasky's work on Hollywood and its informers, he writes: "Naming Names was bad history because it was so relentlessly one-sided and selective, and morally dubious for the same reasons...
...That, combined with an apparent unwillingness to learn anything from numerous recent studies on the development of the Cold War, causes his own account to be "relentlessly one-sided and selective...
...Here, O'Neill believes that they had a better understanding of the situation than did their opponents, and he regrets their lack of influence on U.S...
...And it does not need to have such conduct glorified as heroic dedication to principle...
...In late 1944 and early 1945, "progressives" and even some "anti-Stalinists" denounced Churchill's suppression of the Greek resistance movement, the EAM...
...Though O'Neill finds that both these magazines abandoned much of their "pro-gressivism" with the outbreak of the Korean War, he manages to fault The Nation for "a lack of integrity" apparently even in the McCarthy era...
...Though it seemingly reached its height in the late 1940s and early 1950s, this struggle continues to the present day...
...At one point, O'Neill makes a grudging gesture toward the revisionist Cold War historians, but only as a dig at the "progressives...
...He claims: "Anti-Stalinists made false statements, too, but seldom knowingly and therefore did not corrupt intellectual life...
...policy...
...he finds them fraught with "progressive" defects...
...That occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, when many hoped against hope that "a better world" was coming and that the promise of the Bolshevik Revolution was still unfolding...
...Rather, it focuses upon the "progressives," who, in O'Neill's words, "were pro-Soviet without being members of the Communist Party...
...Critics of the "progressives," such as Sidney Hook, Dwight Macdonald, Louis Fischer, and Diana Trilling receive plaudits, though O'Neill concedes some of them "went too far" on occasion or were unfair...
...Prominent in O'Neill's hall of infamy are three Nation editors: Freda Kirchwey (particularly blameworthy), Carey McWilliams, and Victor Navasky (the journal's current editor...
Vol. 47 • April 1983 • No. 4
