Fromm's Logic of Surrender

...Many people wearied by the apparently endless burdens of the cold war will welcome his promise of an ultimate harmony beyond the din that engulfs us...

...And a doctrine, even in the hands of those who have betrayed it, may still be potent and real—perhaps, because ideology is a weapon used to preserve party power, especially in such hands...

...to provocations from the West and Peking's fear that the fulfillment of the country's economic needs are threatened by hostile nations in the region...

...Yet Fromm's descriptive definition of Soviet society as non-revolutionary actually sheds little light on how seriously or sincerely ideology is adhered to in Russia...

...But perversity gets the best of him, and he accuses the United States of accepting the validity of Hitler's "thesis that it was Germany's function to save the 'Christian culture of the West' from the "barbarian hordes of Bolshevism.'" Of course, Fromm is convinced that there are no such hordes, or none who act as such...

...Somehow the ideology has to be shown to be important, dynamic, and capable of expansion and conquest...

...And as expected, it is "the special interests" of the armed forces and the corporations who have, through manipulative "doublethink," silenced the voices of sanity...

...If we act, as Fromm would have us do, believing that they can be wished away or fused into a spurious harmony, we shall be left hopelessly unprepared for the very real political battles that are yet to be fought...

...In each of these areas a large audience has taken his pablum for the real stuff, but fortunately sounder minds still maintain greater sway...

...In the end, Fromm's analysis must hinge on a conspiracy theory...

...Where Socialist ideology and internal reality conflict, as Adam Ulam has pointed out, the "restlessness in the search for a justification of ideology, a rationale for continued totalitarianism opens up incalculable dangers for world peace...

...Fortunately, however, Fromm does indicate the type of conciliatory solution he would approve in the contemporary world: A reasonable decision in the Congo "would not have excluded the Soviet Union so brusquely from having any influence...

...But it has much graver faults...

...One has the sense that each of his progressively more outrageous books has escaped critical justice only because of the deference accorded the author of a highly suggestive volume published over two decades ago...

...It is urgent, in other words, that the struggle for a disarmed world not be a panicked flight from death but a determined search for the kind of life a world at peace will allow us to live...

...True, he has not neglected the pious affirmations of belief in the viability of democratic alternatives...

...The extent to which Fromm has assimilated the cliches of the traditional Soviet critique of American foreign policy is most manifest in his discussion of the German problem...

...An idea, particularly one whose time is thought to have come, can be possessing and obsessive...

...He urges that, since war is unthinkable, an anticipatory set of compromises worked out between the competing powers would be a rational escape from the atomic stalemate...

...Russia, the author insists, represents the "logical end" to the process of industrialism...

...To disagree with Erich Fromm is not to demur from the goal of general disarmament toward which he directs the focus of his book...

...In May Man Prevail?, his first major excursion into the field of public policy, Fromm enters upon a stage cluttered with pessimism and fatalistic warnings of the dawning apocalypse...

...But until that goal is achieved the nuclear deterrent, against which the author inveighs so heatedly, remains the best weapon we have for preserving the peace...

...By refusing to acknowledge the inevitabihty of the revolutionary triumph, it is we who are responsible for the perpetuation of the disastrous arms race...

...the "1000 flowers period" when he intends "100 flowers"), inaccurate in reference, and sophistic in argument...

...Repeatedly, we are assured that, under Stalin and Khrushchev, the USSR has finally become a conservative, managerial society, shorn of its inner idealism and its expansive impulse toward world domination...

...This is a sloppy book: not only awkward in style but incautious with fact (Fromm writes, for example, of Jacobeans when he means Jacobins...

...Nothing less will suffice to explain how "reason" and "truth" have been kept from the American people...

...In these pages, Fromm effectively identifies himself with the newest fashion in cynical realism, the apotheosis of totalitarian and industrial efficiency...

...This raises the question of what values Fromm does not think illusory, and whom he would have compromised...

...Apparently aware that his case for the peaceful intentions of the Soviets may not be entirely compelling, Fromm embarks on a fresh tack...

...Fromm's gambit is a familiar one: The diverging ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union mask a growing and fundamental congruence in the reality of life in the two countries...

...It is all part of the consistent logic of surrender...

...This is not the place to argue his meliorist psychology or his enlistment in the ranks of the loving, his particularly offensive treatment of Freud or his bowdlerized version of Marx...

...And long after a disarmament agreement is reached, the basic conflicts that have animated these dark years will still be with us...

...The Jews...

...Even China is trying only "by example, persuasion, and economic help to become the leader of the colonial revolution in Asia, Africa, and Latin America...

...By now, Fromm's scheme is perfectly predictable: Let others beat a grand pattern of retreat so that China may feel secure from the possibilities of response to her aggressions...

...The reasons for such a policy are clear enough...

...it is easily transformed into an "armed doctrine...

...More sympathetic and understanding than Khrushchev himself, Fromm ascribes China's assertively militant posture, and what he calls its "limited pressures" on India and Laos (why not Korea and Tibet...

...The Poles...

...within the confines of the new necessity, however, they are hardly convincing...

...Reviewed by MARTIN PERETZ Department of Government, Harvard University Erich Fromm has made a habit of taxing our intellectual endurance well beyond reason...

...Against this background, his calm and simplistic denial of basic reasons for political conflict between East and West seems as alluring as a temptress —and as deceptive...

...Once again it is Fromm's "tendermindedness" (to use William James' highly appropriate phrase) which makes him most attractive...

...At bottom, though, the promise is as reassuring as an old-time nostrum...

...Not surprisingly, he is fixated exclusively on the haunting and partially fictitious specter of powerful revanchist and irridentist elements within the Federal Republic...

...Moscow's guilt seems largely secondary and reactive...

...A similar compromise, he suggests, would also have been possible prior to the outbreak of World War II...