Couch Liberalism and the Guilty Past
Rosenberg, Harold
I What is remarkable about the manufacture of myths in the twentieth century is that it takes place under the noses of living witnesses of the actual events and, in fact, cannot dispense...
...It takes devotion to compile so gross a statement...
...Everyone is familiar with the Communist method of transforming the past...
...If we in turn take over this process and forget about justice because we are dealing with "made" people, we are making our own contribution to the nightmare of the twentieth century...
...The effect of Fiedler's application of his sensibility to the public showcases of criminals, liars and corpses is that the history of the past two decades appears ultimately as a two-character melodrama...
...Out of the solitude of his dungeon he marches in an ensemble of comrades into the full tableau of pre-fabricated history...
...In the United States psychoanalysis assumed the function of the secret police...
...Feeling themselves on The Stage of History, they were prepared to execute the particular atrocities assigned to them, while keeping one eye on a post in the future International Power, the other on the present Good Spot in the government, the university, Hollywood, publishing...
...When the act was committed no one was that serious...
...he confesses for the guilty "we" without an "I...
...I could not grasp especially why these messages appeared under the name of liberalism...
...Signed by 34 writers, it denounces the "so-called cultural organizations under control of the CP" as "the most active forces of reaction among advanced intellectual circles in the United States...
...They outlaw all dissenting opinion from the Left, they poison the intellectual atmosphere with slander...
...contrasts the Rosenbergs, weren't saved by their innocence or their human reality...
...Chambers himself, that witness of witnesses (one almost slips into calling him The Supreme Witness) , came close to breaking under the ordeal of gaining the notice of people whose vital interests he was determined to defend...
...The final result was that a neo-liberal became available to admit the justice of any accusation, no matter how ridiculous...
...Undoubtedly, there were individual sympathizers whom this image does not fit, professionals too busy to look beyond the Communist explanation of events...
...Army in a pamphlet on how to detect subversives through their habitual use of key words like "struggle" or "imperialism...
...Had Hiss testified according to his suggestion he would have deserved another five years...
...he is invited to make full use of them in portraying himself...
...certainly not illusions, if my impression is correct that he was a typical government Communist or top-echelon fellow traveler...
...Is Fiedler, in his idolization of Chambers, simple-minded enough to believe the Witness' yarn that it was the light of God glowing through his offspring's ear and not an argument drummed in his own by his anti-Communist radical friends that first revealed to him what was wrong with Communism...
...Did not his friends, his wife, his children, exist in the facade of common agreement...
...Nor were the attacks all from one side...
...That some who signed it have, shrinking from the word "socialism" in the title, today adapted their past to the Couch Liberal distortion, does not alter the fact that such demands of the Left upon the intellectual conscience cost • The manifesto also attacked the mounting power of conventionality and academicism in American art and literature, the censorship of movies by the Catholic Church, heresy hunting by the government, etc., all this during the Roosevelt Administration which, according to the current myth, was the Utopia of radicals and crackpots...
...And if so wrong about the issue of the age might we not be equally wrong about everything else...
...In accordance with the recipe for recasting history, all threw themselves into the same melting pot, were changed into the same Person and assumed the identical guilt...
...In its sense of Cold War "responsibility," Couch Liberalism had learned to mimic the toughness of Red Front liberalism with its why-rock-the-boat cynicism...
...This pathos Fiedler brought out very well...
...Fiedler's "common recognition of complicity" is simply slander, ex-Communist style...
...When the appetite of the ex-radicals for at least a spear-carrying assignment exceeded their stock of misdeeds, they were compelled to draw upon a psychological reserve of guilt, the confession of dangerous frames of mind to which "we the intellectuals" are prone—what had been called in totalitarian courts moral responsibility for sabotage or assassination performed by strangers...
...Guilty ex-radicalism has even evolved out of its Freudian researches a new GUILT BY RHETORIC, consisting of a contaminating passion for certain words and phrases...
...In this project Fiedler is aided by his approach, which consists of a literary criticism of events...
...The Rosenbergs themselves, Fiedler contends, believed in their fictional counterpart so completely that they neither had any conscious guilt for having stolen the atom secrets nor any cause which they could openly champion...
...but yet they, who have erred out of generosity and open-mindedness (!) , cannot feel even yet on the same side as Velde or McCarthy or Nixon or Mundt...
...The new Good Citizen cannot change his ancestry by forgetting his disreputable father...
...Precisely in these wider radiations of his guilt lies the reward of the confessor...
...In the end, the Adversary had to have the face of almost anybody...
...If my remarks are somewhat milder than they would be today, it is because in 1953 I still naively believed I was criticising the idiosyncrasies of an individual mind rather than of the spokesman of a trend...
...Granted that the Rosenbergs were justly convicted, and I don't question that any more than any other liberal, they did not seem to deserve the electric chair...
...To be able to dissolve segments of time is at least as important in modern politico-military struggle as the capacity to devastate areas of space...
...Instead of preserving the objectivity and abstractness of law, the government took up the slack in the law by creating its own fictional person, that of the fiendishly efficient underground incendiary capable of setting whole continents on fire...
...Without an appreciation of slapstick, in both its absurdity and cruelty, it is impossible to recall these "innocents" accurately...
...Whom Fiedler is here describing, except possibly repentant Communists who haven't confessed yet, I defy anyone to specify...
...by holding these two feeble tools responsible for starting the Korean War and for the potential death of millions of Americans, in opposition to the statements of atomic scientists that the Rosenbergs could not possibly have transmitted, by the means alleged, information worth a good goddamn . . . The scandal of the Rosenberg Case would not exist if, as Fiedler contends, the United States had simply failed in the opportunity to save the defendants from their own masquerade as patriotic Americans...
...Naturally, Fiedler is not interested in the "first," or actual, case...
...11 Though confessing in America lacked the fatal finale of Iron Curtain confessions, it was not without its difficulties...
...Obviously, the exposure of such data was as urgently needed as of dates and places when packages of film were passed...
...His arrest had been but the physical confirmation of his removal from society...
...His meat is the legendary one that placed before the world the fiction of a pair of persecuted innocents...
...MODERN HISTORY-CHANGING needs the help of persons prepared to make a gift of their own pasts to the new one under construction...
...Save for occasional contributions by Congress and the Attorney General's office, most of the work of changing American history has been carried on by volunteers...
...On the contrary, boycotting, informing against or condemning to the executioner socialists, anarchists, Trotskyites, POUMists, strengthened their patriotic disguise...
...In being forced to accuse himself the distracted dissident is given a chance for uniformity...
...at the bottom of their hearts, they did not finally want him to admit anything, but preferred the chance he gave them to say: He is, we are, innocent...
...If the Communist intellectuals were merely "mistaken" so were the gauleiters...
...The same people who as Communists persecuted free opinion continued to do so with the same vehemence after they had turned themselves inside out and become organizers of anti-radical penance...
...Instead of political ideas, Fiedler relies upon "a sensibility trained by the newer critical methods...
...In a rhetoric in which the kettles predominate, Fiedler laments Alger Hiss's refusal to confess as a defeat for all of "us...
...Beyond the facts, each repentant Communist or radical has contributed his bit of himself to the collective protagonist of subversion and vanished into the common life...
...The "idealism" of this sodden group of Philistines, distinguished from the rest of their species by their more up-to-date smugness and systematic malice, can be emphasized only by one who ignores its function in hiding from themselves the cynicism which hardened their minds against any human plea or valid idea embarrassing to the Party...
...Because of this disproportion the government itself, the press, the whole "official" U.S., had to be the first to resort to psychology and the "moral imagination," that is, to unreality . . . This monstermaking, which took place before the Communists countered with their own milksop Frankenstein, is something quite different from "political innocence" or an "incapacity to accept Communists as human beings...
...There are in the country," he explained, "semiTrotskyites, one-eighth Trotskyites and...
...How desperately," exclaims a characteristic document, "they [the guilty liberals] wish in each case that the Hiss, the Lattimore who speaks their language might be telling the truth...
...The Enemy is one—the effect of a com posite of self-accusations, each of which, through fitting into the rest, exceeds the specific guilt assumed by the accused...
...His opposition to the regime, no matter if it consisted only of an occasional doubt, isolated him through having the tonality of his individual conscience...
...Models of guilt are placed before him...
...The reason for this overlapping was made clear by Radek in his last plea, after indicating in his testimony that he was the Fermi of psyche splitting...
...especially if he was not part of an organized conspiracy his hidden criticism burdened him with the full weight of subversion...
...The scandal exists, not because of lack of humanity, but because of human-all-too-human passions not properly restrained by law but on the contrary making use of law...
...There was, and is, something hideous and unbelievable about transposing the act from the loose atmosphere of the time in which it was committed, when RESTRICTED DOCUMENTS used to lie around Iike leaves, to the tense one of the 1950s...
...In this scholasticist apologia, shuffling between psychological speculation and the author's insulting pose of moral conscience—for what but apology could induce the exile from humanity of a pair of corpses —Fiedler supplies a model of how to becloud historical events and the issues arising therefrom...
...Yet the sales resistance of the dumb outsiders to these more refined services could never be quite overcome...
...Here I insist that it was Chambers who shared with Hiss, not "all liberals...
...all who demanded of him that he speak aloud a common recognition of complicity...
...to the antipathy officially demanded by the Party toward its foes on the Left, the sordid leftish mass willingly added its own spite toward the outsiders who undermined their revolutionary conceit, especially in the days when the Party had traded in revolution for Defense Of The USSR...
...In denying the appeal for clemency, President Eisenhower devoted his statement entirely, as I recall, to overcoming the disproportion between the crime and the legal penalty and to justifying the death sentence...
...but in the political confession the "I" of the confessor is not the genuine interest of either the accused or his prosecutor...
...Since under our free system the government undertakes enterprises only when private initiatives fail, our official investment in mythology has so far been a limited one...
...They were, as a type, middle-class careerists, closed both to argument and evidence, impatient with thought, psychopaths of their "radical" conformity...
...The law defines a man by his act...
...Fiedler is exactly wrong...
...His confession will not only bestow upon him solidarity with other confessing culprits, it will supply him with a community definition...
...At the time this statement was issued Fiedler's bullies were more concerned with what they could sweat out of a Federal roadbuilding contract than with the truth about the USSR...
...What shocked liberal opinion was the objective factor of the disproportion between the crime as charged, and for which the defendants were convicted, and the death penalty...
...Communists on this level belonged to the Party's apparatus of intimidation and bribery...
...Looking backwards, paying dues to the Party or following its line were only deeper shadings of criticizing capitalism, questioning the motives of certain of America's foreign policies or making distinctions between Red and White totalitarianism...
...Since there was no one effectively to extract confessions—even the threats of McCarthy fell far short of propelling the ultimate self-doubt that was the specialty of Russian interrogation—the potential confessor had to supply his own heckling...
...Under the radiations of the fused "we," facts have grown bulbous, lost their outlines, finally dissolved...
...For him the contrasting "myths" of Left-wing and public opinion have a wonderfully complex existence...
...The Trotskyite Assassin or the Titoist Agent Of Imperialism who emerges from the judicial vaudeville changes events after they have taken place...
...Fiedler's essays blend the new fake-liberal anti-Communist with that of the old fake-liberal fellow traveler to produce a "liberal" who shares the guilt for Stalin's crimes through the fact alone of having held liberal or radical opinions, even anti-Communist ones...
...An act at once individual and collective, his confession, besides giving effective vent to his resentment against those both less and more guilty than he, becomes the means by which he rejoins society...
...When I first read some of these political articles, together with pieces like them by other writers, I must confess (it's contagious) that I did not grasp what was happening...
...A couple of Red cardboard cutouts were burned...
...Thus they died as neither heroes nor martyrs—more important, they were not even human...
...the rest of the book consists of literary essays with a strong discovery-of-the-true-America motif...
...I An End to Innocence adds perhaps the final dimension to penitence...
...The unpalatable truth we have been discovering is that the buffoons and bullies, those who knew really nothing about the Soviet Union at all, were right—stupidly right, if you will, accidentally right, right for the wrong reasons, but damnably right...
...gave us help...
...But from the point of view of liberals and independent radicals the activities of the Chambers-Hisses when they were Communists were never "mistakes...
...THE CONFESSION ERA in the United States is about over...
...Despite the handicap of the Bill of Rights, our fugitve radicals succeeded admirably in making themselves victims...
...As one of our new volunteer cultural ambassadors "explaining us" to the Europeans, Fiedler must have done as much as anyone to confirm the belief that everybody in America lives on a billboard...
...The liberal sentiment for radical equality and freedom was, in fact, the single intellectual mooring that held against the powerful drag of the totalitarian "we," supported by the offer of a heroic part, social scheming and material reward...
...If Russia has purloined our nuclear know-how, we have evened the score by mastering her technique of psychological fission and fusion...
...Fiedler's line is: We have been guilty of being innocent...
...Their respectability did not conflict with their support of Communist treachery and violence against non-Party Leftists or radical democrats throughout the world...
...although various Republican Party leaders have indicated their bafflement at their Administration's refusal to use to the hilt a weapon which has been proved so effective...
...This most continuing liberals, as well as ex-Communists and former fellow travelers, are prepared to grant in the face of the slave labor and oppression and police terror in the Soviet Union...
...get ting in between he lets his "sensibility" quiver with their possible mean ings...
...I, too, believed that Hiss was guilty, but so had the jury, he was in jail—so why these profound evocations of his perfidy and of Chambers's ordeal and triumph by a "liberal...
...How else than through "our" instruction could a cop or a congressman understand and guard against the obscure mental processes of an Oppenheimer...
...I think it is gruesome and a bit cowardly to drag out the corpses of Communists in order to show that there are no dead bodies here but self-constructed dummies incapable of bleeding...
...I have before me a manifesto of the "League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism," published in the Partisan Review in Summer, 1939...
...It is possible that without the inspiration of the Russian originals, as an earlier generation was inspired by the Moscow Art Theatre, the entire effort would have failed...
...Let me reemphasize that the loser is not the Communist "liberal"—besides being "innocent" he has become also "generous and open-minded...
...Undoubtedly, among the very high brows to whom we owe this attempted contribution to the defense of freedom, the Times is regarded as still suffering from liberal illusions...
...Fiedler's method is to place facing each other the popu lar and fellow-traveler stereotypes of Hiss, Chambers, McCarthy...
...To whom could he communicate its exact nuance...
...The first law of the spurious "we" is its malice...
...Half of Fiedler's book is devoted to an essay apiece on the Hiss Case, the Rosenberg Case and McCarthy, in each of which it turns out that whoever suffered deserved what he got for not confessing and that we intellectuals with our "shorthand" that the people cannot understand are deeply implicated...
...in terms of its bad poetry...
...Although I was a contributor, my letter was not published...
...their example of Do-ItYourself initiative ought to convince Khrushchev that prisons and torture are obsolete and that the cellars of the Lubianka may as well be re-fitted as a game room...
...One recalls, for instance, the international libel let loose against Andre Gide when he published his account of his trip to the USSR...
...One character speaks in refined tones and idealistic abstractions in favor of the CIO, the New Deal, Socialism, defense of the Soviet Union, the dangers of Fascism—the other mutters "Dirty Reds...
...How could we intellectuals, asks Fiedler, have been so wrong about Communism, as against its lowbrow enemies...
...Justice requires only that he shall not be made to personify an act that he did not perform...
...Fiedler . . . was shrewd to deal with Stalinism (is this still the right word...
...Conversion alters the world in which a man acts...
...Instead of Communists, fellow travelers, liberals and radicals in one lump, the reality of the period lay in its battles...
...IV Fiedler's "Afterthoughts on the Rosenbergs" appeared originally in Encounter, the international magazine published in London by the Congress for Cultural Freedom...
...The Rosenberg case was the absolutely deadly mixture of American corn and Moscow mash...
...This question of timing was implicit in Justice Douglas' desire to review which law applied...
...Nor did confession ever purge these agents of power of their passion to browbeat critics of their historical mission...
...Fiedler is gumming up the issue with misplaced profundity He is talking about psychology, morality and "myth," when we are confronted primarily with a question of injustice, the injustice of applying the death penalty in this case...
...If the Communist executes not men but devils and animals that is his basic crime...
...The psychological question regarding the inability of many people (including myself) to feel sympathy for the Rosenbergs as individuals . . would never have arisen had it not been for the disproportion I • Despite its derelictions, Partisan Review deserves credit for publishing in a recentissue Hans Mayerhoff's dissection of Diana Trilling's Couch Liberal resume of the Oppenheimer Case...
...His theorizing about American politics derives from a vision of wrestling stereotypes, Right and Left wing, in which the col lective Left sinks under a bad conscience...
...out of the same default of historical truth that caused the Communist sympathizers to cling to this title...
...By acting as if there were a core of personal reality inside these self-made nothings we could have appeared before the world as champions of humanity...
...Vishinsky's counter-revolutionary Mad Dog had to resemble equally the desperado with the bomb, the ideologically skeptical professor, the gossipy and all-but-innocent clerk...
...In a word, the end of innocence is a guilty return, as with the Moscow defendants, to the defined community—the address of "responsibility" is not the library, the study or the cafe but Main Street...
...Or an assault on people who, conceding the guilt of the Rosenbergs, opposed their electrocution...
...Far from being goaded to their parts by police agents hidden in the wings, the American guilty had to all but force their way on to the stage...
...At their trials, the condemned Communists are still making history—only this time backwards...
...there was nobody to feel sorry for, and the liberals who protested the electrocution were dupes...
...Its political and social morale belong to the days of McCarthy's putsch, when yesterday's vanguard saw itself blinking in the footlights with a pistol at its head...
...But reality, the Soviet Union, for example, as the most baffling social, political and historical fact of our civilization, is so bare of literary suggestion, so obvious, that it may be left to the judgment of those who know nothing...
...New ideas, modern art and literature, non-conformity in taste, behavior, morals, inevitably produced in them a venomous recoil...
...Like their master in Moscow, the Communist intellectuals in America detested above all, not capitalism nor even fascism, to both of which the switching Party line taught them to accommodate themselves— their one hatred which knew no amelioration was that toward the independent radical intellectual...
...Massachusetts did not experience them as "people" either...
...But to accomplish this, former builders of the future must agree to destroy their personal pasts in order to substitute the one offered them by the political police...
...But the spurious "we" is also the basis of modern terrorism...
...Pretending to represent progressive opinion, these bodies are in effect but apologists for the Kremlin dictatorship...
...It was only after I had noticed that these ideas were appearing in concert that I recognized that a collective person was in the process of formation which named itself "liberal" • Guilt By Rhetoric was introduced recently by the U.S...
...Chambers who was never a liberal, who in his book gives no hint of having ever criticized the Communist Party in his radical days from a libertarian position and who after he broke with Communism become something quite different from a liberal...
...In the United States, too, recent history is being re-made...
...A leadership mania centering on a dream of the power that would fall into their hands after a new Ten Days That Shook The World staged under their direction transformed these sorry bourgeois into sleep-walking social highwaymen...
...The guilty "we" being fashioned at his trial had to cover all of these...
...their knowledge remains one of the mysteries of Bolshevik dialectic...
...Yet hasn't the Russian prosecutor since Crime and Punishment been rather easily recognizable as the personification of an inner voice...
...But these innocents, if it be innocent to be made a tool through phrases and flattery, were in a minority...
...These slippery arguments that directed themselves against persons who had already been punished by law, that complained about "our" over-fussiness on the subject of civil rights, that while believing McCarthy was a crook placed under suspicion those who called him one, seemed to me simply odd...
...Through a series of public confessions a new collective Character is created, retrospectively responsible for the way things happened...
...Hiss "failed all liberals,, all who had, in some sense and at some time shared his illusions (and who that calls himself a liberal is exempt...
...And the Couch Liberals, with their repentant "we," are bringing more innocents of this stamp into the world...
...It seemed to him there was too little humanity in the Case, instead of too much, because he looked at this affair as if it were a stage performance and compared the Rosenbergs as bad actors to Sacco and Vanzetti as genuine personalities...
...In time, we know, the barriers went down and whoever had a story to tell found a campfire waiting...
...The important step here beyond mere Guilt By Association is that to be incriminated it is no longer necessary to know Hiss or Lattimore personally.* THE QUOTATION ABOVE regarding complicity through language with persons with whom we may violently disagree is from Leslie Fiedler's An End to Innocence, a collection of "essays on culture and politics," recently published by Beacon Press...
...anything with Mr...
...Through symbolist elaboration Ken neth Burke used to find endless sociological and psychological clues in a cigarette ad...
...and that the punishment shall not be cruel and inhuman and shall fit the crime...
...One of the few serious discussions concerning the Bolshevik conception of ends and means was begun by John Dewey around the time he went to Mexico to sit on the commission of inquiry before which Trotsky crushed the Moscow Trials and permanently damaged the revolutionary pretensions of international Communism (no, it was not Fiedler's buffoons who did that) . The totalitarian liberals were too "responsible" to let the fate of an individual get in, the way of the prestige of the USSR "just when we are fighting fascism...
...It is hard to imagine anyone adding facts likely to prove useful to the government's prophylaxis...
...I What is remarkable about the manufacture of myths in the twentieth century is that it takes place under the noses of living witnesses of the actual events and, in fact, cannot dispense with their collaboration...
...actually, of their journalistic carica tures...
...I shall have a few words to say about these "innocents" later...
...Fiedler, however, cannot avail himself of Lenin's epistemology...
...Nothing is left but a conflict of opinions...
...This omission in itself would be almost enough to prove that Couch Liberalism is a Communist Party spirit that has changed its spots...
...His thesis is "that there were two Rosenberg cases," the actual case and the legendary one concocted by the Communists...
...All criticism by any one but the "buffoons" was met with the stare of the social climber or busy man of affairs...
...Soft to the point of servility to its foes on the Right, the Stalinist front never varied in its violence against those who struck in any form against its vanguard hijacking...
...people who from liberalism...
...And yet...
...we," including Oppenheimer, may as well own up that we are unreliable types and deserve to be fired, regardless of actual service to the country...
...He had been taken over completely by a false or assumed "we"—which is the basis of mystification in our century...
...Or why a "liberal" indictment of Lattimore to supplement that of the Attorney General's office...
...I suggest that in doing so they have been laying the ground for future confessions.* I reproduce below excerpts from my letter to Encounter...
...His demand for self-surrender and intellectual abdication has nothing behind it but the will to move to the right side...
...The New York Times protested in an editorial and the next day announced that the booklet had been withdrawn...
...the formula for the production of historical fictions is no longer any more secret than for the atom bomb...
...I am aware of no such oppositional documents in Commentaryduring the past few years...
...An End to Innocence is already out of date...
...by his confession he dragged down unnumbered others...
...it does not change his character...
...Fertilized by left-wing sophistication and by Freud, Fiedler's essays are confessions on another plane than autobiography...
...Some leading confessors have probably never even been interviewed by the FBI...
...have mentioned between the crime, in its specific quality as an act, and the penalty...
...The Communist intellectual, as a distinct figure produced by the movement, was innocent in one sense only: the non sui juris of pathology...
...The dramatic imagination, with its power of creating the person it judges, supplemented the law and replaced the creature with the creation...
...Most of the pieces in it have appeared during the past five years in the leading organs of this sect: Commentary, Encounter, Partisan Review...
...the Communist Party dear each time it swung at the end of the tail of the Moscow bureaucracy...
...But in return for these compliments to the fakers, fools and position-seekers of yesterday, all intellectuals are urged to crawl under the cloak of a spiritualized Hiss who would capitulate to the club wielder who was "right...
...Hiss, including automobiles or apartments...
...That in this incredibly shallow farce the Rosenbergs were playing for their lives was, of course, pathetic...
...That the scene is a hoax matters less than that he is no longer alone and has a role to play...
...Number Two wins the argument by throwing Number One in the clink...
...3) The most significant falsification of the ex-Communist confessional is the suppression of the account of the struggle that raged on the Left during the epoch of Communist influence in America...
...If Americans spoke in order to escape from a dungeon, it was from the dungeons of their own selves...
...The characteristic of our time is that corn can be killing...
...The moment this physical threat vanished the posture was bound to appear ludicrous...
...Perhaps from the point of view of the Department of Justice or of Couch Liberalism Hiss made a "mistake" by not confessing as Chambers did...
...Only by confessing will we terminate our culpability...
...The very absence of the bludgeon created special problems...
...I cannot, however, accept the explanation that the execution represented merely a negative failing on the part of the United States, the absence of a higher humanity, resulting from "political innocence," a "lack of moral imagination" and a "certain incapacity to really believe in Communists as people...
...A single full-scale blast and the years 1932-1952 could have been turned into the desert of "twenty years of treason...
...Just the same, Fiedler argues, it was an error to kill them, since America could have won a moral victory over Communism by sparing them...
...Still, the fact that one had possessed a radical bent did not of itself make him the star of a Congressional hearing nor supply him with a list of interesting names...
...2) The intellectuals and fellow travelers who remained with Communism through the execution of the old Bolsheviks, the extermination of POUMists and anarchists in Spain, the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the fight of the Communist International against French and British resistance to the Nazis, the partition of Poland, all of which took place in public and behind no curtain of any kind, were not innocent, to say nothing of "generous and open-minded...
...To his question "Who is exempt...
...Like the Couch Liberals they were also too "responsible" to take thinking seriously...
...Mystification has been quarantined in the quarters where it originated: the colony of the ex-radical intelligentsia...
...Confession is a species of autobiography...
...His "all liberals" is a made-up character with an attributed past...
...I raise my right hand and reply that I never shared...
...Granted that no permanent victory could have been won by intellectual means alone, the FBI, the courts and Committees have not assured that victory either...
...Since Oppenheimer gave money to aid the Spanish Loyalists, it mattered not that at the height of Russian-American cooperation he unequivocally rejected the approaches of Communist agents...
...Moreover, the sentiment of freedom alone presented Marxism itself in its living intellectual form, that is, as a problem...
...When McCarthy attempted to bully James Wechsler and spread his invented history into the headlines, the confessing liberal showed his objectivity by conceding that "we" never tendered names to the FBI unless we were forced to and are, consequently, "McCarthyites of the Left," in fighting distortion with distortion...
...One recalls Lenin's incognito discussions with peasants who knew as against the damnably wrong intellectuals...
...After reading his article, I wrote a letter to Encounter pointing out its distortions...
...Most of their assignments were intellectual crimes, the concoction of arguments and boycotts to cover up acts of the Party anywhere...
...The attempt to change past history has probably failed, largely because of the two-party system and the common sense and boredom of the public...
...Which category they had belonged to made little difference once the confessions began...
...During the Spanish Civil War, Left professors and party-givers identified themselves with Malraux and Hemingway as ruthless franc-tireurs of the International...
...In America the part of the repentant history maker has been played by the ex-radical intellectuals, some, former Communists, others, liberals and rebels who could no longer find any substance but antiCommunism in their earlier dissent...
...Let the Cold War give way to an era of East-West trade and collaboration, and Russian caviar and contracts, citations and free trips, will begin to count their ideological votes...
...He has no facts to relate—one does not learn that he ever did anything in politics...
...John of the Couch, Whittaker Chambers, to the effect that History will get you if you don't get it first...
...For Fiedler all liberals are contaminated by the past, if by nothing else than through having spoken the code language of intellectuals...
...The Communist who "passed" from Red to Ex is himself, very often, the product of this criticism...
...Hiss's drama of Hush Or Tell could have cleansed us all had but its protagonist acknowledged his "mistake...
...This book is as representative of what I hereby christen Couch Liberalism as anything one may hope to find...
...I will leave to Fiedler the explanation of how a man can be "right" without knowing anything about his subject...
...The photo of the final verdict is not of a collection of individuals but of a single "we...
...Yet as a major intellectual current in the United States Communism had been rather decisively defeated long before a single ex-Communist had voided his memory from the witness stand...
...1) Whatever its weakness in understanding Communist power and techniques, liberalism was in no sense responsible for Communist vile ness...
...The guilt he assumes is that of an essence...
...This caricature, which caused every act of the defendants to take on an enormous magnitude, was needed to enable the court to render a brutal decision and the officialdom and the press to justify it...
...Sure, it was easier to perpetrate this injustice because Communists de-humanize themselves But Sacco and Vanzetti, with whom Fiedler...
...Ought we not therefore abandon our intellectuals' ghetto and take our place in the citizens' non-intellectual America...
...Before he confessed the GPU chief Yagoda executed countless dissenters...
...A problem of intersecting planes and contrasting hues and light values...
...This is demonism, not just an absence of Christian charity...
...The fact is that no defendant is a "person"—nor ought to be...
...and its meditations on the evils "we" have wrought are headed by a passage from that St...
...V To impede the process of turning American intellectual his tory of our own lifetime into a comic-strip encounter between a cock eyed egghead and a right-thinking goon, I beg leave to cite a few data...
...It is false to say that a belief too naive in freedom, equality, in dividuality, induced adherence to the band, with its underband of party bosses, spies and masterminds...
...It is now definitely in our power to alter at will the contents of the past twenty years...
Vol. 2 • September 1955 • No. 4
