You’ll likely think of the old saying about the pen being mightier than the sword if you choose to read John V. Fleming’s recent book, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War.
Fleming offers relatively brief descriptions of each book (Arthur Koestler’s Darkness At Noon, Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night, Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom, and Whittaker Chambers’ Witness), but he spends much more time examining the response those books generated in the United States and Europe.
A recurring theme involves intellectuals’ unwillingness to confront the facts of the Soviet Union’s failures. In the chapter on Kravchenko’s book, Fleming discusses a lawsuit the author filed in 1948 against a left-wing French publication:
To understand the importance of the action brought by Kravchenko it is necessary to encounter the invincible ignorance on the part of a large section of the Western intelligentsia with regard to the state of civil liberties in Stalin’s Russia. The theory of Soviet Marxism demanded the most draconian abolition of the most fundamental of human rights: economic freedom. It insisted that all individual aspirations of entrepreneurship and all local concerns for self-betterment or family prosperity were simply “bourgeois” markers socially constructed by the junked capitalist system. It was perfectly correct to destroy people with bourgeois attitudes and to create people with proletarian attitudes. The phrases “class war” and “building socialism” were not mere metaphors. Both the destruction and the construction were vehement and coercive.
Under these circumstances Western leftists, had they had the inclination to criticize the Soviet Union, could have had plenty of grounds for doing so. But in general all the minor tyrranies of which they disapproved ? suppression of the freedoms of speech, of the press, of assembly, of religious practice, and so on ? could be forgiven or at least tolerated on account of the huge economic tyrrany of which they approved. Thus Harold Laski, for instance, was well aware of the absence of most civil rights, the want of habeas corpus, the system of administrative justice, and other essential features of the Soviet system. He wrote about them, but he was able to regard them as venial and transient flaws that did nothing to vitiate the desirability of the “workers’ state.”
Readers interested in learning more about Western intellectuals’ admiration of “economic tyrrany” will find a thorough discussion of the topic in Amity Shlaes‘ The Forgotten Man.
