The New 'Anti-Communism'
DONLEVIN, ROBERT
WRITERS and WRITING The New 'Anti-Communism' Fire in the Ashes. By Theodore H. White. Sloane. 405 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Robert Donlevin Associate Editor, "Pageant"; former INS correspondent in...
...He also writes that "a new facade was erected for Soviet foreign policy, behind which even its fundamental strategy seems in the process of changing...
...For him, Moscow made mistake after mistake...
...White, who evidently feels that the division of Germany and Korea was wise, recommends: "If, then, France desires, as the majority of the French Assembly seems now to desire, to negotiate directly with the Communists in Indo-China, or if it means that Indo-China must be split in two as most countries on the Communist border are...
...Addressing himself to the problem of Indo-China, Mr...
...The conclusion, presumably, is that those who regard the Iron Curtain as designed to hide the truth about the Soviet Union from the free world, and vice versa, are all wrong...
...As for the substance of Mr...
...The aroma might be too strong...
...He seems to feel that there has been a fundamental change of heart in Moscow since the death of Stalin, and that the post-Stalin purges are more a cleaning out of corruption than a continuation of past Soviet practices...
...It is the wide acceptance which it has gained in the United States through the good offices of the Book-of-the-Month Club and our leading critics...
...And Mr...
...But it is also true that the Soviet Empire has expanded to cover one-third of all mankind in a single decade...
...We can advance, and possibly ultimately get, the next proposal of our program, which is the promise of free elections in Czechoslovakia, the only people of democratic tradition in the Communist grip...
...But he holds forth this tantalizing thought: "By postponing the arming of the Germans, or yielding on it altogether, we can exact an enormous price...
...Writing of one of the recent shake-ups in Soviet Georgia, he recounts how "Mgeladze described with horror a situation in Georgia all too familiar to American politics—the party machinery was becoming simply a cloak for old mountain clans, whose cliques and families were packing the best positions and dominating local affairs...
...What they gained doesn't really count, because: "From the moment the Western world was forced to join Russia in alliance against Hitler, the West's ultimate victory was mortgaged by the geography of war to yield one hundred million people of Eastern Europe to the Russians...
...White's conclusion is that we must make a deal...
...then it is to our interest that this be done...
...Yet, the saddest thing about this book is not its detailing of one man's aberrations...
...We can exact, in the first instance, the reunification of Germany by free elections, which is necessary to bring the Germans wholeheartedly into European Union...
...Looking back over the last decade, Mr...
...Of such stuff is the new "anti-Communism" made...
...Not one big deal, like Yalta...
...Americans are so frightened by the evil in Communism," writes Mr...
...Only time will tell whether this means that the American people have been sufficiently softened up to swallow another, subtler, piecemeal Yalta...
...former INS correspondent in Paris The Book-of-the-Month Club has called this "the most important and the most enlightening book about Europe written in the past decade...
...The deal—made of the myriad little deals—is the easiest way of exposing them [the Soviet leaders] to the seepage of questions and perplexing alternatives which ultimately, we hope, will erode their system of politics, at home and abroad, into impotence...
...White condone them but he advocates a new Yalta today...
...The Anglo-American concessions at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam are too well known to discuss here...
...Suffice it to say that not only does Mr...
...White professes to have noted...
...White castigates those "Western amateurs of politics" who have held that the Kremlin made the most of every opportunity...
...Now Malenkov would have the Russian people, and the rest of the world, believe he thinks it possible to raise production nearly 50 per cent in two or three years...
...They seem to boil down to the sacking of the satellites, which could otherwise have been presented to the West as a "basin of political infection...
...White, "that they fail to see that the greatest danger is not the evil but the attraction in it...
...White's argument, Professor Vladimir Timoshenko pointed out in the January issue of Foreign Affairs that "the methods by which Malenkov expects to assure the "rapid upsurge of agriculture' remain the old ones and the promises are not quite new, during the 25 years of collectivized agriculture, the gross agricultural production increased only some 25 to 30 per cent over 1928...
...The accolade seems a little misplaced when one examines the author's analysis of the Communist challenge...
...No serious student of Soviet affairs would deny that Stalin made mistakes...
...The big worry of Western Europeans, he contends, "is that the Russians will sluice their vast productive increases into a proportionate increase in the consumption goods available to ordinary citizens, and that having done this, they will lift the Iron Curtain to amplify the appeal of Communism to the workers of stagnant or slowly expanding West European lands...
...Everything falls into place very neatly...
...On Germany, the author says he backs the European Defense Community and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...
...In other words, Stalin could have killed the West with kindness if he hadn't been so stupid...
...What, then, were the monumental errors which Mr...
Vol. 37 • March 1954 • No. 11
