HARRY, YOU'RE PLAYING THE SOVIET SMEAR GAME'
Eastman, Max
'Harry, You're Playing The Soviet Smear Game A Letter of Protest to Harry Elmer Barnes By MAX EASTMAN Dear Harry: IWAS truly astonished to see you advertise me as a "renegade" in a recent issue...
...Enough Cheap Talk It is public enlightenment exactly—the principal achievement and the principal task of Western Civilization— that you so lightly cast aside in backing the professional manipulators of opinion with your glib, superficial party slogans disguised as "realism about Russia...
...Lenin planned it all out...
...Now you grin at "the unfortunate Mexican expedition," and join with the Slanderers-on-Principle in delivering the most unjust and injurious stab conceivable at his magnificently independent character by saying that he "fell into the hands of Trotskyites," and is "apparently still in their toils...
...9 is a surrender to the communist propaganda...
...You have forgotten that, in order to justify those purges, Trotsky—so "ideally suited for the role" of "organizer and enthusiast"—was accused of having worked with the German Intelligence since 1921 and the British Intelligence since 1926, that Krestinsky was a German agent in 1921, Rosengolts a German agent in 1923, British in 1926, Rakovsky British in 1924, Japanese -in 1934, that Trotsky also, together with Buk-harin and the Social Revolutionaries, plotted against Lenin's life in 1918...
...No honest and informed student of recent Russian history can doubt," you propound, "that sabotage, intrigue and treason were rife in the Soviet Union in the mid '30's...
...The Soviet Union and its great leader, Josef Stalin," "the greatest social revolution in all history"—these emotive phrases are the key to your state of mind...
...That, Harry, is an old, old story, which you can find repeated a thousand times in The History of Western Civilization, if you remember that there is such a book...
...It is time for a little realism about Russia...
...He took command of the whole proceeding in Mexico, to the astonishment, considering his age and supposed immersion in abstract ideas, of everybody concerned...
...MAX EASTMAN Chilmark, Mass...
...Dewey is in nobody's toils and never was...
...No shred of evidence has even been adduced, even by Trotsky in his paean of praise in The Revolution Betrayed to her economic achievements, that she would not have accomplished it faster and better under a system of free enterprise...
...But never mind—there has been "a Vastly impressive mechanization" and "military preparations without equal in history...
...What has happened to you ? Are you deliberately, or only by accident, adding your voice to the smear campaign in the communist press ? Are you reading In Fact, the New Masses, the Daily Worker, ignoring that those boys all believe on principle in party-controlled slander in place of debate...
...The whole stupendous construction of superhuman criminality hangs unsupported in the air —or rests solely, rather, upon the will of mush-heads and muddle-heads, the purveyors of the totalitarian infection, to believe it...
...There_is, of course, no arguing with a man whose religion lives by a faith in the miracle-stories told in the Moscow trials, but I do want to comment on the passage in which you confess your faith: "Stalin's purges were certainly necessary, even if carried out with unjustifiable savagery at times, but we can hardly be final judge on this latter point...
...If Norman Thomas had been in Uncle Joe's shoes he would have shed just as much blood . . ." There is enough of that cheap talk in the world, Harry, without any help from the intellectuals...
...402), "for the utter destruction of the liberty of thought and speech, and the sanctity of the individual...
...You are telling the American liberal and labor movement the full set of bedtime stories that Moscow wants them to believe...
...Even your Joe Davies (in his pre-Hollywood phase) had more civilized values than that...
...You have some scientific conscience left—enough to fold in the most incredible parts of the myth before you swallow it...
...In short, in the controversy about Stalin and the Soviet Union, the proof of the pudding is in the eating...
...You have forgotten it because you know that had it been true, there would have been no Soviet regime...
...Only one of all that generation of great idealists was loyal to the ideal, and he, by the oddest chance, the one who came off with the power...
...Under a pretense of cool realism about Russia, you are an exalted True Believer in the abstract idea of "socialization...
...Only two years ago you concluded our friendly correspondence by saying that, notwithstanding your disapproval of my present opinions, you had a bottle—or rather, I think it was a whole case—of wine in your cellar for me if I should pass your way...
...What is the eating that justifies this bloody pudding...
...You have forgotten that in the third and most important, and most cynical, of those trials the "intrigue, treason and sabotage" confessed to was not committed in the mid '30's, nor the '30's at all...
...Stalin carried through a vastly impressive mechanization of an impoverished, demoralized and undeveloped economy...
...Stalin's purges were necessary"—and to what end...
...Do you remember that essay...
...In the evolution of Soviet Russia," you tell us, "the successive leaders were almost ideally suited for the roles they were destined to play...
...That is one thing you can really count on in "the distant future...
...But your whole article in The Progressive of Aug...
...How Do You Know, Harry?' You are playing, in every point that is essential, the communists' game...
...But of philosophers who, while recognizing that standards are relative and their merit lies only in the effective control of real fact, can nevertheless stand by them with inflexible will in their day of dimness and adversity and shame —i>f those there will always be too few...
...A rotund pronouncement which you make for the sole reason that your optimistic emotion requires a belief in the justification of Stalin's purges offered in the Moscow Trials...
...He had, as you might easily have ascertained, no more than momentary contact with any Trotskyite, with the exception of Trotsky himself, from the beginning of the Inquiry into the Moscow trials to the end...
...You do not pretend that there has been a betterment of living standards in Russia, because you know there has not...
...I find it hard to belieVe that those sentences were written by an American liberal, a lifelong advocate of peace and of the rights of man...
...The evidence, on the other hand, that there was an intrigue of the Stalin clique to avail themselves of the evident safety and tranquillity of the country to rid themselves of those loyal to the program of workers' democracy, and establish an absolute dictatorship, is piled high in the libraries, if you cared to read it...
...Stalin's purges were certainly necessary . . . Revolution is no polite affair . . . Dewey is in the toils of Trotskyites...
...You are excommunicating heretics, not debating with opponents...
...They were all renegades...
...Nor has any student of the history of England, Germany, France, or Japan presented the slightest evidence that any person in these countries instigated, assisted in, or so much as heard about, the acts of sabotage and treason alleged to have been perpetrated by arrangement with their governments...
...And in comparison with these transcendent values, what are liberty of thought and speech or the sanctity of the individual...
...The off-hand decision to give Totalitarian State Socialism the credit for Russia's advance—which, after all, has probably not been more rapid relatively to the state of machinery than Japan's was in the 19th Century (nor is her boasted "literacy" comparable to Japan's)—derives not from the study of history, but the State of Faith...
...What have I done in the meantime to change you ? I have published no book, no article, endorsed no movement, joined no organization, performed no act indicating a change of political opinion...
...The Power and the Glory stick together...
...Confession Of Faith No student of Russian history has ever presented the slightest evidence that there was, or any special reason why there should have been, sabotage or treason in Russia in the mid '30's...
...A genuine realist would also wonder why, if Stalin's crimes against life and liberty are justified by his withstanding "the onslaughts of the mightiest army in all history," Hitler's are not justified by his creation of that prodigious army...
...Pipedreams...
...Dewey was immersed in his Logic, the Theory of Inquiry when the request came out of a clear sky to head the Commission of Inquiry, and after a few days reflection—in the face of extreme opposition from his immediate family—he accepted...
...A Big Hole In Your Realism' Nor is there any a priori probability of this, even according to Marxian theory...
...Your insult was like a mine exploding in one's face when strolling a neighbor's garden in the hope to steal a few strawberries that are riper than one's own...
...Trotsky organized and defended it...
...He has stated his motives—if you would do him the elementary scholarly justice to read his report: "I have given my life to the work of education, which I have conceived to be that of public enlightenment in the interests of society...
...If I finally accepted the responsible post I now occupy, it was because I realized that to act otherwise would be to be false to my life work...
...You are even rocking them to sleep with Marxian legends about world revolution in "a distant future.'.' How do you know, Harry, except as you breathe it in with an atmosphere of Christian eschatology mixed with Hegelian-Marxian dialectic buncombe, what is going to happen in the distant future...
...When you call me "renegade," there is a personal pain which I could take care of without protest...
...You are defending the creed, not discussing facts...
...There is a big hole in your realism, Harry, and it is filled—for all your anti-religious protestations—by an act of emotional faith...
...Mechanization and militarization...
...No pressure was put upon him, no persuasions were instituted, no toils devised...
...The surest proof of this is your passing along the Communist Party's rubber-stamp smear against your teacher, John Dewey, whom you once praised so fervently—and exactly because he refused to isolate philosophy from politics...
...No physical betterment of living standards could possibly compensate," he wrote in Mission to Moscow (p...
...His forces successfully withstood the onslaughts of the mightiest army of all history, commanded by great strategists...
...Stalin "fulfilled the promise of the revolution...
...Your whole article, which you pretend is so sceptically hard-lieaded, is based upon the balmy assumption that man is traveling onward and upward with a necessity, or assured good luck, which can only be properly named Divine...
...But that is not true...
...The defeated are always renegades—and the intellectuals are always there to prove it...
...A genuinely unsentimental realist would remark that the mechanization of Russia, her prodigious leap forward into the machine age, began in about 1911...
...Harry, You're Playing The Soviet Smear Game A Letter of Protest to Harry Elmer Barnes By MAX EASTMAN Dear Harry: IWAS truly astonished to see you advertise me as a "renegade" in a recent issue of The Progressive— a paper to which I subscribe and in which some of my best political friends publish their ideas...
...You pretend by calling it "Realism on Russia," and by sneering a little in each direction—at Joe Davies first and John Dewey next, and a crack to wind up with at Norman Thomas—that you are taking a cool and objective position...
...There will always be plenty of highbrows apologizing for those in power...
...Fuzzy thinking...
...Could you have predicted 28 years ago the things we have on hand today...
...He worked out military preparations without equal in history, when the obstacles are reckoned with...
...The fact that Lenin denounced Stalin as disloyal and broke off all "comradely relations" with him on his death-bed, that Stalin had Trotsky murdered with a pickaxe, having previously put to death Lenin's other colleagues and captains to the last man, has no significance for you...
Vol. 7 • October 1943 • No. 41
