An Anatomy of Folly
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
An Anatomy of Folly A Better World: The Great Schism-Stalinism and the American Intellectuals By William L. O'Neill Simon & Schuster. 447pp. $17.95. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Author, "A...
...Alas, his message went unnoticed...
...They include Dwight Macdonald, Sidney Hook, Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy and Irving Howe...
...But whatever our mistakes, I do not believe we did our country any harm...
...dedicated to the interests of foreign countries...
...Smedley died before democracy came to China, as perhaps we all shall...
...On Agnes Smedley: "And most of all she looked to the Chinese Communists...
...He is quick to point out their excesses, their mistakes, their harsh treatment of friends and critics alike...
...O'Neill goes on to argue: "Except in rare cases...
...And he might have answered that, thankfully, they never got the chance...
...The heroes here are the anti-Stalinists, who demonstrated "that being an intellectual is a function not just of mind but of character too...
...And I think they did...
...Space precludes more than three brief examples...
...On balance, says O'Neill, these people were not only correct about the great issues of their time, they were also honest in dealing with them...
...Without hesitation he concludes that the progressives and pro-Stalinists viewed events there accurately...
...They did not believe that the end justified the means, nor did they employ a double standard on civil liberties...
...These were unfortunate accidents that had to be lied about, evaded or ignored for the sake of world revolution and / or world peace, which would ultimately redeem them...
...Thus we have Vice President Henry Wallace describing Siberian prisoners as volunteers "wisely working with nature...
...he had captured the spirit of Stalingrad in an instant...
...hoped...
...The Communists do not merely make raids-they dig deep, uprooting feudalism completely, planting democracy...
...O'Neill, frankly partisan, defends his views with clear logic, biting prose and mountains of research...
...As luck would have it," writes William O'Neill, "Wisconsin farmers, not previously known for their avarice, seldom read PM...
...They were the men and women of the 1930s and '40s who believed "the urgency of their cause was so great that it excused lesser lapses, such as the crimes of Stalin...
...He had been wondering about the Red Army's great victories when suddenly a revelation hit him...
...The complexities of his heroes do not escape O'Neill...
...On the National Guardian: "The Guardian was anti-American and pro-Soviet...
...Owen Lattimore was right in claiming that Chinese Communism was an indigenous movement...
...The final chapters of A Better World respond to those who, like Lillian Hell-man, said of the anti-Stalinists: "Such people would have a right to say that I and many like me took too long to see what was going on in the Soviet Union...
...And sociologist Robert Lynd dismissing "Stalin's defects" on the ground that "national planning" caused "problems" that had to be dealt with "bluntly...
...We meet dozens of other "uncritical progressives" in the pages of this brilliant new book...
...cooperative witnesses revealed little that was scary...
...Still, he is unwilling to canonize unfriendly witnesses or to characterize their reticence as a heroic devotion to principle...
...His chapter on China is a case in point...
...The moral is clear, Hellman notwithstanding: "A strong Left, if there is to be one, will have to be an American Left, democratic, loyal, and with no compulsion to admire or emulate foreign tyrannies...
...The most controversial chapter in A Better World concerns the testimony of witnesses before Congressional committees...
...O'Neill is remarkably restrained in dealing with this polemical nonsense...
...Most important of all, he blames the Stalinists for discrediting responsible anti-Communism and destroying Left-wing politics in America...
...Lerner was a democrat, as the Nation said, and his pro-Soviet enthusiasms were nourished by his odd belief that he and Stalin thought alike...
...Had there been a genuinely independent and democratic Left of consequence in the 1960s, the worst national misadventures might have been avoided, or at least scaled down...
...benefits no one," he writes, "not even itself...
...But this means endless labor and much time.' Too much in her case...
...And columnist I.F...
...A Left...
...Ler-ner had done it again...
...The good work went forward anyway...
...On poor Max Lerner: "In the past Lerner had rationalized the crimes of Stalin, and he would do so again...
...He might have asked whether Hellman was congratulating her Stalinist friends for failing to construct an American Gulag...
...It was unfriendly witnesses who promoted hysteria, for their silence was always taken to mean guilt, complicity in vast schemes to overthrow the republic...
...fueled the Red Scare and obscured truth...
...In the spirit of the Popular Front, it had no enemies on the Left save democrats...
...Anything less would be flawed and, the record indicates, futile too...
...Secondly, because many others took the Fifth Amendment, thereby encouraging unscrupulous politicians like McCarthy, who thrived on silent witnesses...
...In the midst of the Midwest's abundance, he was struck by "the sharp contrast between people who organize their resources by greed and haphazard planning, and people who have learned to plan production for the use of the whole people...
...that witnesses have an obligation to tell the truth...
...And publisher Bennett Cerf urging a boycott of all books critical of Russia...
...They understood that one could not swallow Stalin's "revolution" without apologizing for mass murder, forced labor and the denial of human rights...
...While condemning both the blacklist and the political opportunists who dominated the House Committee on Un-American Activities, O'Neill insists that the witnesses often brought pain and punishment upon themselves: First, because many who testified lied shamelessly about their Stalinist sympathies, portraying themselves as wounded patriots or champions of free speech...
...and that silence is invariably a disastrous strategy in situations of this kind...
...Stone relying on Radio Moscow to set him straight about world events...
...His description of progressives and their folly are worth the price of the book alone...
...But unlike Frederick Schuman he had to deceive himself before misleading others...
...Instead, he focuses, on the ethical damage they did, the harm to truth through their insensitivity to mass suffering and their slavish devotion to a dictator...
...Aronson and Belfrage remained proud of their editorial record, seeing themselves as part of the great tradition of American radicalism personified by Eugene Debs and others to whom they bore no resemblance...
...O'Neill is hardly oblivious to the moral dilemma confronting non-Communists and former Communists who wanted to protect themselves and their friends...
...Silence...
...At the end of 1947 they were not doing so well militarily as she...
...After much thought on the issues, he maintains the government has a right, however much it is abused, to investigate disloyalty...
...It was the friend of Mc-Carthyism, not the enemy that progressives believed...
...His position was more intelligent—and historically defensible—than those of his enemies at Commentary and The New Leader...
...Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy" (to be published in May) One spring day in 1944, Max Ler-ner, then a columnist for the defunct newspaper PM, was driving through the rich farmland of Wisconsin...
...Lerner was not alone, of course...
Vol. 66 • February 1983 • No. 4
