Europe and America: The Meaning of "Western Defense"

...One must foresee a major change in the ideological climate (which in fact the "withdrawal" of America would already have created), a steady deterioration of relations with Western Europe, a series of ultimatums and rejections, and a new set of attitudes in which the paranoia of American political life would be given full indulgence...

...Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 163 If this seems outrageous to the liberal, let him consider the conditions under which a war might now start...

...To double steel production in a given sector—let us put it arbitrarily—he discovers that he must triple his labor force...

...Still, it is a thesis I have held for several years, and I have found it, for myself at least, a not unfruitful hypothesis by which to understand events...

...Just as the British were forced in the last war to destroy the French fleet at Toulon, so America will be obliged to blow Western Europe into bits...

...Worse...

...From its point of view, the Soviet must attempt to find some way of bringing Western Europe peacefully into its orbit...

...Given a Stalinist Europe there could be eventually a Stalinist world...

...Such a project would be not only beyond my capacities, but I see small purpose unless it were done on an heroic scale...

...On the horizon, Asia could be approaching daybreak rather than a Stalinist twilight...

...Imperialism, since one is forced to go back to the ABC's of these things, is still the employment of excess surplus value to create new markets, dominate backward countries, superintend partial and specialized development of their industry, and establish spheres of influence...

...For it is the characteristic of a crusade that economic laws can temporarily be adjourned...

...111 Against this background I want to place the paradox of Western Defense...

...I am neither wholly convinced of it, nor confident of my political insight...

...Trotsky once said that socialism means more milk, not less milk, and the Soviet attempt to build a major economy was driven to put its emphasis upon less milk...

...Under such conditions, aggravated, repeated, and multiplied, the state of the Soviet Union can only remind one of that swelling of the joints which accompanies anemia...

...It is time to drop the habit...

...The conformist press, ignoring the eight years which have passed since the Second World War, contents itself with posing the static threat of Soviet attack, and never hints there might be some alternative to immediate aggression by the Russians if we did not have armed foot-soldiers to intimidate them...

...If it could not, the Third World War would almost certainly begin, as I have tried to argue earlier, and indeed it would hardly matter who won such a war, so disastrous would it be...

...It would have failed in its cold-war strategy of gaining Western Europe peacefully, and having failed, could never allow such a productive plant to be used for the interest of the United States...

...The reason the USSR does not attack is that the productive capacities of Western Europe are worthless to the Soviet economy unless they remain intact...

...All they would have lost would be the graveyard...

...One need not depend only upon Orwell...

...It has only force enough to destroy it...

...particularly, why does it wait at a time when Western Defense may still become a reality...

...But it is too long and too familiar an aside to criticize the fetichistic enthusiasm of the "progressive" before the altar of nationalization of industry...

...One needs only the example of Russia's production in the last war, where no matter the physical destruction of the economy, its rate of production, enthusiasm, and efficiency were probably never so high...

...It is mainly this reason, I would argue, which has motivated the brutal and apparently irrational conduct of the Soviet bureaucracy in the Eastern satellites, rather than any theories or explanations which depend upon a mystique of totalitarianism...

...Strategic bombings, even if atomic armaments were not used, would be successful in mutilating key industries and scrambling communications...

...Arthritic through most of its members, suffering from high-blood pressure in America, it can continue to function only so long as it manufactures armaments whose "ultimate consumer"—(I regret I cannot find the source for this quotation)—"is the enemy soldier...

...It may well be asked why Western Defense is not enlarged to the point where it could hold the Russians at their borders...

...I want to return to this point later...

...In passing, one may mention other benefits for the Stalinists: a show-case demonstration of the destruction which awaited Europe, and the opportunity to keep China from being recognized by the United States, with all the eventual dangers of a Titoist deviation implicit in such recognition...

...No matter where it would begin, and the probability is in Asia, one thing is certain...

...There is a specter facing the American military, and its connotations are so frightening that a great deal will be sacrificed and a great deal more threatened before the project of Western Defense is abandoned...

...Whatever the Soviet's crimes and horrors and total perversions of socialism, and we know the list unbearably long, they can hardly be accused of imperialism.* The guilt for imperialism belongs to the West, that chalice of civilization, and not all the public relations from here to the millenium can word it away...

...On the one side they are uncongenial to America's need for European statesmen who must obligatorily be cynical and indifferent to the condition of the European working class...

...When the country is backward as was Czarist Russia, everything is made worse, of course...

...If it is on the one hand a virtually open declaration that America is determined to force European re-armament at no matter what cost to the living standard and possible political independence of the European worker, it conceals an even more sinister purpose...

...If one inquires why the Soviet Union is "predatory," the answer is almost always the descriptive and circular response that it is in Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 157 the nature of totalitarian regimes to be aggressive and imperialistic...

...The vista which confronts the Soviet bureaucrat is to add another graveyard to his impoverished real estate holdings...

...There is no need to recapitulate the history of its disasters, some due to Leninism, some due to capitalist encirclement, but the "great experiment" should have proved if it has proved nothing else that one cannot build socialism in an isolated bloc let alone an isolated country...

...Let it suffice that the Korean War was successful for the Soviet in one way at least—the plans for Western Defense have not been fulfilled, and the prospects seem poorer today than at any time since the inception...

...I think we can agree that at no time since the war ended, has there been a real military difficulty to the Soviet occupying Western Europe...

...I would assert that Russia began the Korean War not as a blunder, but as a calculated risk to have the United States engaged in Asia at exactly that moment when its energies and the consent of Western Europe seemed to promise a quick and successful establishment of Western Defense...

...But still there is a hope here, provided such a Europe could maintain its independence of Soviet overtures...

...To the European nations subjected to America's Air Force, the Russian propaganda that the United States is barbaric and warlike would be given an objective demonstration, and the Third World War would become exactly what the Russians would wish it to become...

...The authors, though bound together by common political aims, obviously have sharply different views as to the analysis and possible solutions of the problem they attack...

...As illustrated here, it is the policy of DISSENT, while favoring a broadly radical emphasis, to print a variety of political opinions...

...As easy to ask the state to wither away...

...Up to a point much the same may be said of Germany...

...In the event, which would leave a vacuum, one can foresee the emergence of an independent Western Europe, neutralist and with a 164 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 socialist coloration...

...One finds it perfect that our third-rate imitation of Stalinist distortion of history, our government by public relations, should have coined the phrase, "Soviet Imperialism...

...The key to the problem and the ugly paradox is that it is only to the Soviet Union's interest to keep the productive wealth of Western Europe intact...

...I must add that in support of this I will present no documentation nor any research...

...No wonder that Dulles begins to speak of the "agonizing reappraisal...

...What must be emphasized is that imperialism is exclusively the problem of finding investments for the collective idle profit of monopoly capitalism, and it has been the difficulty of finding such markets and backward countries which has dominated the history of Western civilization through World War I, through panics and depressions, through the loss of the world market and World War II until the only solution left since the Second War has been the war economy which marries full production to a necessarily crippled market—the Soviet Union having absorbed too many of the backward countries of the world...

...If there exists this necessity to absorb Western Europe, and I would guess that the Politburo considers it exactly a necessity, the question may well be asked why the Soviet Union has not moved to occupy all of Europe, and taken its chances on the war which would follow...

...Its aim is to alienate Western Europe ideologically and economically from the United States, open trade relations between the East and West, expand them, and finally make them central to the economies of Europe, while the Communist parties of these countries would on the surface be "liberalized" to appear more attractive...

...Needless to say, such events will not occur without their preparation...

...So the imperative facing America as the dominant world power is to keep Europe from becoming a productive annex of the Soviet Union...

...We are all agreed that I do not want to give this impression...

...If it would be argued that the bombing of Germany in the last war did not destroy its economy, the differences must be emphas*zed...

...If it did not go to war, it would face the prospect in a decade or more, of succumbing one way or another to Stalinism...

...on the other is the knowledge of the European socialist that to support Western Defense is to support Western annihilation in the event of war, and it is exactly Western Defense which brings war closer, for it destroys the hope of a Third Camp emerging...

...Without a single soldier on the soil of Europe, the United States would still be completely capable of leveling the productive plant of Western Europe...

...Europe and America:—The articles that follow comprise a discussion of a central political problem: the relations between the Old World and the New, a weary Europe and a powerful America...

...One cannot create giant steel works and coal mines and railroads and other heavy industry at an accelerated pace without inflicting upon one's labor force a demand for Ionger hours of work at smaller real wages...

...Still the problem—I would call it the problem—of increasing the rate of production in the USSR has been alleviated only temporarily by the war gains...

...For such a task an army of fifteen to twenty million men would be required which is equivalent to declaring the economic bankruptcy of Europe and the most severe depression of the standard of living in the United States...

...if it did go to war and bombed Western Europe its situation would be hardly bettered...

...For what is rarely admitted, and yet is taken for granted by almost everyone, is that Western Defense has no genuine capacity to defend Western Europe...

...It is this paradox which the responsible liberal must face, not to mention those socialists who "choose the West...

...To allow it to produce for the needs of the Soviet Union would be fatal to America's position as the dominant world power...

...Even those who plunder must pay eventually, and the Soviet is now in the position of having to offer alleviations, reforms, and what is the ultimate disaster—counter-transfusions to its satellites...

...What remains is the argument that Western Defense, sealing Europe against the Soviet, pushes the USSR into Asian adventures which must sooner or later bring the war, and the failure of Western Defense offers the possibility of buying time, saving Europe from its cremation, and opens again the faint perspective of a socialist world...

...V One cannot say in all certainty that the United States would go to war against an all-Communist Europe, but it is very likely, and what is more to the point, war or no, the situation would be intolerable to America...

...The military destruction of Western Europe accomplished, America could face its war with the Soviet not unconfidently...

...The Soviet Union is now the master of an economically emaciated empire, progressively more worthless to it (in proportion as the parts are plundered), and yet like all empires it cannot be relinquished without the danger of the center collapsing as well...

...The liberal will advance the argument that "Keynesian economics" and the "welfare state" will dispose of capitalism's contradictions, but since this has proved politically impossible until now in anything approaching its intended form, the burden of proof is still upon him...

...As indeed well it might if one reads "Stalinism" for the problem, 160 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 and "internal revolution" for the prescription...

...To occupy Germany and France would be one thing...

...11 The economic problems of the USSR are congenitally different...

...The microscopically smaller voice of the "progressive" press, made up in last extremity of fellow fellow-travellers, contents itself with the ingenuous (let us be kind) assumption that the Soviet wants peace, and that peace would solve its problems...

...For plunder may be translated into consumer goods, and with more consumer goods, more efficient production can legitimately be expected of the Soviet worker...

...Attacking in such a way, the Soviet armies would be almost universally hated as the invaders, and to the temptations and demoralizations facing the occupation troops would he added the sabotage, inertia, and underground movements of the people of Western Europe...

...It is here that Western Defense betrays its ambiguity...

...Moreover, the contradictions in arming Western Europe have come to term...

...Germany, after all, was fighting its own war and with some determination which is hardly equivalent to a conquered country ordered to produce for its conquerors...

...For this would be a vastly different kind of bombing than retaliatory attacks against Russian aggression...

...But one loses oneself with images of Apocalypse...

...Nor is it any more difficult to go in reverse...

...On the one side he is becoming increasingly depressed, if indeed not terrified, by the movement in America toward conformism, hysteria, and McCarthyism...

...And since such an installation could occur only if Western Europe were first temporarily free of both Russia and the United States, it must be equally America's necessity to prevent Western Europe from becoming independent...

...With such plunder, equivalent to economic transfusions, there is the hope of breaking out of their economic trap...

...Its chronic crisis has been the inability to increase production organically rather than the need to find a market for surplus profit...

...The nominal reason advanced for Western Defense is that it is the bulwark of civilization against the predatory and aggressive aims of the Soviet Union...

...Nonetheless, I doubt it...

...After all, the portrait of Russia given to the average newspaper reader was reversed almost completely within less than a year...

...So it is not a practical solution for the USSR to invade Western Europe, it is not even a desperate solution, for desperate solutions must still have some possibility of success, and there is none here...

...For a modern example, Venezula comes to mind...

...But the chances for peace are equally enlarged, for if men emerge to match the occasion, it is far from impossible that such a Europe could survive, playing off the East against the West, until it grew strong in proportion to the increasing weakness and the insoluble contradictions of the Colossi...

...The Stalinist bureaucrat must reason that if only those countries could be diverted into the Soviet orbit, the economic anemia could be solved...

...I offer this argument therefore in all modesty...

...The heart of its inability to increase the rate of its productivity vis-a-vis the United States and Western Europe has been the irremediable dilemma of being forced to demand more and more of its workers in return for less and less goods and creature comforts...

...What is lost in factories is more than gained in the productive esprit of the working force, and improvisation is substituted for inertia, cooperation for sabotage, and patriotism for underground work...

...One is given two explanations, antithetical if equally distorted...

...The answer, simple to the point of truism, has never even been suggested, to my knowledge, in the ten-thousand-weight of articles, "expert" analyses and scare headlines which suffocate the question in this country...

...Under such conditions the difficulty of extracting production from a conquered Europe would be replaced by the far greater difficulty of being obliged to keep the population alive...

...Far from being imperialistic, Soviet aggression bears much greater similarity to primitive capitalism...

...Hardly more than coloration, one must admit, surrounded as it would find itself by enemies, and possessing a half-moribund economy...

...But this properly is beyond my subject...

...The bombing attacks as finally brought off would undoubtedly be called something like Operation Liberty—its aim to destroy the taint of "Red" France's heavy commodities...

...The very aerial warfare which would succeed in making Western Europe a productive nonentity in the event of Soviet aggression, would now not succeed at all...

...It would not even be necessary that Western Europe become formally Communist...

...Which of course answers nothing at all...

...For the liberal, the problem of defending the West is perhaps even more critical a question than for the socialist, since it is the liberal who eschews Utopias and therefore finds himself without an exit...

...by military considerations America is in a far safer position with Western Europe destroyed (in the proper way of course) than to take the chance of having it become the property of the Russians...

...The real solution, probably the only solution in these decades at least, to the contradictions of Soviet economics exists in the productive capacities and techniques of Western Europe, specifically West Germany, France, England, and to lesser degree the Scandinavian countries and Italy...

...IV To what alternative does it look, then...

...Marx once mentioned the economic inefficiency of slavery as a productive system, and the USSR has given a further demonstration...

...to keep them producing would be another...

...It is a wonder the next page was never borrowed from Stalin's book which would give the USSR the credit for inventing imperialism...

...VI What then can one hope for...

...The answer is hardly easy, but I would incline to the idea that the hope of socialism and more immediately the chances for peace are best served by the collapse of the scheme for Western Defense...

...As I think will become clear in the body of my argument, the definitions which I have given to the economies of the West and the East are for analytical purposes, and are not intended to imply a moral superiority, ipso facto, to either the USSR or the United States...

...For if America quits Europe, and the Soviet Union succeeds in absorbing it "peacefully," there will be no good military alternative to destroying Western Europe from the air...

...If this could be accomSpring 1954 • DISSENT • 161 plished, the way would be open to plundering Western Europe by means of Soviet trade commissions...

...With the exception of Czechoslovakia and Eastern Germany, all of Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 159 the nations which the Soviet Union has swallowed, as well as China, are backward countries, almost hopelessly backward, and the transfusions leeched from them have merely attenuated the problem, displaced it slightly, and created new ones...

...I would argue that the mistake is precisely in so establishing the choice, and that the implement of this choice—Western Defense—has the ultimate and most abominable meaning of Western annihilation...

...Indeed, the main trend of Soviet foreign policy over the last years provides numerous examples...

...What is also possible is that an independent Europe would almost certainly revitalize the vigorous dissenting traditions of American political life...

...All of the world would be joined in a "crusade" against America...

...The Soviet Union would be forced to move against Germany and France...

...I feel it is not too extrava * The Editors have raised the point that my definition of imperialism (with which they differ in varying degree) seems to give the impression that because the Soviet Union is not "imperialistic" as I define it, it is therefore less culpable than the West...

...158 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 gant to say that if the Soviet Union were Utopia, the United States would be forced to invent a Stalinist nightmare...

...In fact, one can hardly visualize the cure of capitalism's chronic agonies through a nostrum which in effect asks private financial empires to accommodate themselves to the dissipation and eventual transformation of their power...

...From America's point of view it is not only political suicide but highly unnecessary...

...It is not so difficult after all, when one's reputation is based upon legends, to be Fascist beasts in 1945, and the heroic citizens of West Berlin in 1948...

...I believe this is equally simple in outline...

...This is the crisis of Monopoly Capitalism...

...The varying 162 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 prestige of the German populace in the eyes of American journalism can be a reminder...

...as an alternative he can only see the heavy danger of "Soviet Imperialism...

...It is not altogether impossible that the United States may withdraw from Europe in the next five years...

...Western Defense is, at present, whether one wills it or not, the active expression of the choice, and as such it means the suppression of any opportunity for responsible socialists to prosper politically in Europe...

...For in contrast to the present when socialist thought is splintered, and the liberal has drearily accommodated himself (I do not speak of such liberals-with-muscles as James Wechsler and Sidney Hook) to the conformity demanded by American political needs, which include the directive to keep Western Europe subservient, there would be positive aims, there would be something legitimate and tangible to support—the continuing independence of Europe--and this would provide enthusiasm with which to replace the ideological wastes and wilderness of McCarthyism, Eisenhowerism, Stevensonism, etc...

...If indeed with the disaster of such a victory the Russians would even feel themselves thus obliged...

...If this policy seems impossible to realize and more than a little fantastic, it must be placed against the background of Soviet strategy in the last few years...

...Therefore, it would attack, and the limited divisions of Western Defense, never strong enough to withstand the Soviet armies, would still be strong enough to carry out an orderly retreat, a withdrawal so orderly that every factory in its path would be razed and the earth scorched clear to the Atlantic Ocean...

...Politically, however, this is not possible...

...It is the need for plunder, economic plunder, which has forced its expansion since the war...

...A man as well as an animal can be worked to death, and the horror which besets the Soviet bureaucrat is the recurring breakdown of economic arithmetic...

...To invade Western Ei,rope is equivalent to destroying it (even if America should be in a position of isolation at such a time, its military necessity would be to retaliate), and the destruction of Western Europe represents the end of any chance for Soviet production to extricate itself from its crisis and its anemia...

...the United States is faced with the conflict of West Germany and France, the first eager to be a military power but geographically an island, and France the natural foundation of any defense, lethargic at best and antagonistic at worst...

...Before such a prospect he feels impelled in the words of Dwight Macdonald to "prefer an imperfectly living, open society to a perfectly dead, closed society...

...With an increase of consumer goods, the rate of increase of production would finally rise, and the USSR would possess at last the potentiality to overtake the United States...