The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Enjoyment Of Marxism BOHN Often I think of the dreary luncheons, dinners and so-called banquets which the Socialists, liberals and general-utility reformers...
...Most of them would have held essentially the same theories and taken about the same positions if old Karl had never been born...
...There always will be...
...Max does seem to forget now and then that freedom is threatened from more sides than one...
...I must express appreciation of the fact that Max does not even once refer to the much-publicized bristly beard...
...How joyously he played prestidigitatorial games with all the slogans, classes, splinters and theories of the kaleidoscopic Left...
...Max saw in Russia how blind devotion to the ideals of security and equality led to the throttling of liberty...
...And if our poetic and humorous author rather overdoes the anti-Marxian business, I am not inclined to blame him...
...One point about this aspect of the book should excite wide interest...
...It should at least liberate a man from the duty of being bored to death...
...In general, he did not cut as much of a figure in human history as many of us are inclined to assume...
...It is only now that we learn what a mean cuss Marx really was...
...These quotes are worth the price of his book...
...That is one little thing that is wrong with it: anyone who wants to find out about socialism had better go to another shop...
...But I speak of them in the past tense because now I am never among those present...
...But he expresses the nearness of our peril with such poignancy that I am ready to forgive him all of his sins...
...They accepted his teaching to varying degrees—dictated by their own temperaments or environments...
...Among the hucksters of Park Avenue, he would, no doubt, have been a blazing star...
...But however mean and generally unpleasant Marx was, it seems to me that Max gives him too much both of credit and blame...
...But Max still coruscates...
...Max Eastman is more conscious of this danger than are the rest of us...
...There is one thought which keeps re-appearing in various connections...
...What fun he used to have talking about all the sacred cows and other cattle of the radical groups...
...Those who follow them unmindful of liberty will land in heartless and hopeless dictatorship...
...Versions in English have always been expurgated...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Enjoyment Of Marxism BOHN Often I think of the dreary luncheons, dinners and so-called banquets which the Socialists, liberals and general-utility reformers and do-gooders used to have around New York...
...He suffered so much, he saw so many of his friends tortured or murdered, that he is impelled to cry out over and over again that these are only bitch goddesses...
...He still gets the old sort of fun out of human idiocies...
...How far into the night we listened to the speeches...
...The only thing which would have been different if the world had been forced to plod on without him would have been the slogans...
...As a sloganeer, he was a brilliant success...
...Age should bring certain indulgences...
...But to assume, as Eastman does on page 87, that Lenin and Stalin committed bank robberies well along in the twentieth century because Marx wrote a certain sentence away back in the nineteenth is stretching a pretty long bow...
...The leaders of socialism in Europe and even in America were far from being mere followers of Marx...
...I mention the subject now because I have just been reading a little book by Max Eastman, and it reminds me with what joy I used to discover his name on the program of one of these exhausting rituals...
...Old Karl has been so much adored that it will take a lot of fault-finding to restore the balance...
...Certainly, Lenin, Trotsky and their friends, terrific thinkers and men of action that they were, could have got on without the help of a man who was in his grave well before they played their parts...
...Since those days, both the world ?and Max Eastman have grown older...
...There are lots of things in this last little book of his (Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, Devin-Adair, $2.75) with which I do not agree...
...He does, however, go into the old boy's personal failings in a detailed manner which suggests that the process was not unpleasant...
...The fun he will have while he is being enlightened will be an extra dividend...
...As scientist and politician, the man was a failure...
...I gather from certain announcements and invitations which come my way that such sad ceremonies are still going on...
...There have always been people, leftists, rightists or middleists, who thought they knew just how to run the world...
...Some of the dirtiest quotations from Marx's letters—passages proving that he was anti-Semitic and anti-Negro—are taken from Russian translations...
...But they deal with many things and in different moods and by different methods...
...The intellectual flashes collected between these covers were published at different times, for various purposes and in all sorts of journals?some of the best of them in The New Leader...
...When such people get power in any sort of government, they are dangerous...
...But he who seeks insights into Communism and would like to take in some brilliant splashes of thought about different sorts of radicalism which have sprouted during the past century—this is the book for his money...
...How long we waited for our food...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 13
