Pious Patriotics
GEWEN, BARRY
PIOUS PATRIOTICS BY BARRY GEWEN NORMAN PODHORETZ is the most strident of the neo-conservatives. He is the cheerleader of the group, its street fighter and its hanging judge. Although his...
...What he did not mean was the flag-waving pieties of the Tories...
...And not the least of Podhoretz' critical virtues is his willingness to do his homework...
...There is no denying that Orwell saved his most venomous assaults for the intellectual Left...
...It is a Hitlerian power bent on global conquest and presenting the West with "only two choices: resistance or submission...
...Then the inquisitor takes over, and analysis yields to ideology...
...As is always the case, this policy is dictated by geography, the mother of history...
...Kissinger's sin, by contrast, was naivete in the face of the Soviet threat...
...Having turned away from the Left during the 1970s, Pod-horetz now fulminates and blusters with all the dogmatic passion of the born-again convert...
...Whoops...
...Those who are not with him are antagonists...
...Camus gets much the same treatment as The God That Failed authors...
...It may serve for Fourth of July speeches...
...It is also true, however, that Orwell was always careful to position himself between the fellow travelers and the conservatives...
...It is only when literary concerns cross paths with politics that the going gets bloody...
...Orwell's ruling passion, assuming he had one, was to stake out a position of decency against the might-makes-right mentality he saw all around him...
...Capitalism, Podhoretz insists, "was one of the indispensable constituent elements of Western democracy...
...Podhoretz claims him as an ally, arguing that Orwell's repeated attacks on the Leftwing intellectuals of his time and his hostility to pacifism in general would, were he alive today, lead him into the neoconservative camp...
...it is not the sort of thing ordinary people die for...
...But to grasp the difference between the two men, one need only consider what each understands by patriotism...
...Well, "all the evidence" indicates no such thing...
...In Orwell's terms, he has become a Blimp...
...In The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet (SimonandSchuster, 221 pp., $16.95), a collection of nine recent essays that appeared in such journals as Encounter and the New Criterion, he takes aim at some surprising targets, faulting, among others, Albert Camus, Henry Kissinger, F. R. Leavis, and the authors of The God That Failed for straying from the straight and narrow as defined by the editor of Commentary...
...In the past, Podhoretz lived closer to the ground, and his best writing—"My Negro Problem—and Ours," portions of Making It—display a human immediacy, genuine solidity...
...In the Soviet Union the traditional and historical thrust has always, in my view, been the dominant one...
...By 'patriotism,'" he wrote, "I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life...
...But since proclaiming his neoconservatism he has drifted higher and higher, like a hot-air balloon...
...The Nixon/Kissinger policy of detente assumed that the USSR was a state like any other, with traditional aims and interests in international affairs...
...The future seemed to him to offer only three possibilities, all bad: that the U.S...
...and the Hitlerian maniacs Podhoretz perceives in the Kremlin have gone unnoticed by numerous, probably most, policymakers and commentators...
...When asked to speak before an anti-Soviet group that professed to stand for freedom, he responded: "Icannot associate myself with an essentially Conservative body which claims to defend democracy in Europe but has nothing to say about British imperialism...
...Not quite...
...Had George F. Kennan and Hannah Arendt died in the 1950s, Podhoretz would be lighting candles for them as well...
...it "embodies a form of freedom and was on that account alone to be valued by all who valued freedom...
...The real question is why Podhoretz is so eager to wield a Procrustean ax in his case...
...He is holier than the Pope (a fellow named William F. Buckley Jr...
...To take two recent instances, here is, first, Helmut Schmidt: "Contrary to much nonsense one can read in ideological papers and books about the Soviet Union, the Grand Strategy of Moscow is 75 per cent traditional Russian strategy and only 25 per cent Communist strategy...
...Although his pronouncements on economic and foreign policy—support for free-market capitalism, opposition to arms treaties of any kind—place him somewhere in the vicinity of Jesse Helms and Jeremiah Denton on the American political spectrum, it is not the positions themselves that set him apart (and others' teeth on edge) so much as his manner in espousing them...
...Probably a sense of personal identification is a major reason...
...A more egregious distortion occurs where Podhoretz, arguing for his image of ahawkish Orwell, states: "He thought that 'the worst possibility of all' was that 'the fear inspired by the atomic bomb and other weapons yet to come will be so great that everyone will refrain from using them.'" Orwell as Curtis LeMay...
...Podhoretz, who thrives on embattlement, fancies that he is fighting the same Good Fight today—and being equally heroic...
...More than one academic career has been made by demonstrating the continuity of Tsarist and Soviet behavior...
...Extrapolating from positions taken 40 years ago is a dangerous exercise...
...In 1947, writing in The New Leader, he opposed the idea of suppressing the Communist Party as "calamitous," adding: "One has only to think of the people who would approve...
...He succinctly delineates Leavis' place in English letters...
...Every regulatory measure of this century designed to soften the brutalities of capitalism—wages and hours legislation, Social Security, Medicare, environmental protection—has been opposed in the name of economic freedom...
...it is also a continuation of an expansionist imperial tradition...
...APART FROM Solzhenitsyn,just about the only figure in The Bloody Crossroads who wins approval is George Orwell...
...Therefore," heconcluded, "aSocialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worthwhile political objective today...
...would launch a preventive war against the Soviets, that several countries would develop nuclear weapons and drop them on each other, or "the worst possibility," that a stalemate among the superpowers would ensue, with societies everywhere evolving along the lines later dramatized in 1984...
...Apparently, Podhoretz subscribes to the Mexican proverb that in politics all friends are false and all enemies are real...
...I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism...
...He was cowardly and dishonest for not embracing the Right...
...Along one of its two roads can be found some worthwhile matenal, since Podhoretz has not forgotten how to be a cogent literary critic...
...Opinions of this kind are simply brushed aside, so that Podhoretz can force the complexities and ambiguities of the real world into his either/or straitjacket...
...At his most extreme, Orwell even defended English cooking (though presumably with his tongue lodged deeply in his cheek...
...Piety is Podhoretz' middle name...
...And, second, Octavio Paz: "The Russian intervention in Afghanistan is yet another example of a well-known fact: The Soviet Union follows, in its broad outlines, the foreign policy of the Tsarist regime...
...In fact, Orwell probably fits most comfortably alongside Camus and the God That Failed authors...
...Orwell declared himself a patriot, and so, at every opportunity, does Podhoretz...
...A Podhoretz Doppelganger, on the other hand, would accuse him of being the worst character in the neoconservative chamber of horrors—an intellectual...
...The writers who put that anti-Communist classic together were not anti-Communist enough for Podhoretz, because they remained Leftists seeking to create a more equitable society...
...An example is Podhoretz' piece on The God That Failed...
...His patriotism is all abstraction—capitalism, freedom, middle-class values, anti-Communism—an idea existing exclusively in his head, nothing from any tangible time or place...
...Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism...
...An essayist at the intersection of politics and literature, Orwell heroically resisted the intellectual fashions of his day, including Europe's perennially trendy anti-Americanism...
...In the best essay of the collection, "The Terrible Question of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn," he performs the valuable service of sifting through the Russian's massive, daunting output to cull the essential reading...
...For Orwell, it consisted of cherishing the distinctive details of English life—heavy coins, bitter beer, bad teeth—all of those mundanities every Englishman had grown up with and felt in his bones as a matter of instinct and character...
...There goes Sweden...
...Those sentiments are familiar...
...But "all the evidence," says Podhoretz, indicates that the Soviet Union is not traditional...
...The anti-Communism of these writers," Podhoretz declares, "found no moorings in the real world and was cut loose to float in a Utopian void...
...A vast amount of political territory disappears with Podhoretz' either/or choice—social democracy, Fabianism, the welfare state, indeed, any position that does not accept capitalism in its American variety as a prerequisite of political freedom...
...Nonetheless, it is worth playing the game to correct a few of his half-truths...
...The book is not wholly a diatribe...
...The comments cited here come from an article entitled "Toward European Unity," written in 1947, when Orwell was at his most despairing about the prospects for democratic socialism...
...Their choice of democratic socialism was "intellectually insufficient," and their failure to go beyond warnings about the Soviets to acclaim for the American system foreshadowed the modern anti-nuclear and neutralist movements of Europe...
...To say, as Podhoretz does, that "Orwell'srulingpassionwasthefearandhatredof totalitarianism" is a plain distortion...
...Civilization's sole—and slim—hope, Orwell believed, was to achieve socialism over a large area that could counterbalance both the USSR and the U.S...
...To turn Orwell into an ur-neocon-servative, Podhoretz has wrenched his remarks completely out of context...
Vol. 69 • April 1986 • No. 7
