The Double Rejection
The Great Challenge.
By Louis Fischer.
New York, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946. 346 pp. $4.00.
In form, Louis Fischer's new book seems to be one more in the flood of journalists' distillations of wartime adventures. This is unfortunate because Mr. Fischer's journalistic practices do not take him into exciting adventures, except of the mind, and because the casual page-turner may underestimate the real importance of his book. Its core is the author's understanding of what is going on in Russia, of Russia's aggressive and expanding role in the postwar world, and of the relations between the three contemporary great-power systems. When he writes on England and the United States, his comments are those of a thoughtful but unsystematic commentator. Wherever he touches Russia, however, the book acquires a clarity and depth that raises it above its form to the level of genuine interpretation of the key to the problems of our time.
For the second quarter of the 20th century will be seen in retrospect as the period of the Russian Revolution and Stalinism, as the first quarter of the 19th is now seen as having been lived under the spell of the French Revolution and Bonapartism. There are curious analogies to contemplate. The break between Napoleon and Czar Alexander (made by Alexander) led to Russia's occupation of Paris and her entrance onto the stage of Europe as a great power. The break between Hitler and Stalin (made by Hitler) brought the Red Army to Berlin and Korea and made Russia the only great power on both continents. The old balance of power, that precarious equilibrium which alone maintained peace in the age of great nations, is gone. If one can still speak of a balance, it is only on a global scale, with its poles represented by nations traditionally outside the “European Concert.”
Fischer says little on whither the United States is tending, beyond giving a sketchy program on whither it should tend. His analysis of changing British economy and empire under the Labor government is much better. But his analysis of what is happening to the Russian Revolution and Russian foreign policy is easily superior to all the offerings of our wartime interpreters put together. Russia was not born for him, as for them, the day Hitler thrust Stalin into the Allied camp, nor is he moved by the bad conscience or apologetic intent of those who rejected the Revolution when its vision was most generous, only to accept and justify its later totalitarian degeneration. His The Soviets in World Affairs (1930) remains the authoritative exposition of the anti-imperialist foreign policy that renounced Manchuria, Port Arthur, Northern Iran, the Dardanelles, freed Poland and the Baltic Republics, fought Pan-Slavism and Czarist predatory alms. Prepared with the help of Foreign Commissars Chicherin and Litvlnov, that study gives him she perspective to interpret the complete reversal of all these policies in the days of Foreign Commissar Molotov.
There is an additional clarity which comes, not from mastery of events and documents, but from a moral attitude: the clear eyes which come from a clean conscience. Mr. Fischer's political term for it is “double rejection.” He opposes Russian aggressive imperialism, not as a defender of the American or British variety, but as a lifelong opponent of imperialism everywhere. Russophiles and “totalitarian liberals,” he warns, who justify what Russia does to her neighbors by what America once did to hers, are paralyzing the will to fight against our own evil deeds as well as Russia's. In short, his “double rejection” is a rejection of an all too fashionable double standard.
Yet, to this reviewer, there is a lack of precision and differentiation in his application of “double rejection” that makes the programmatic parts of his book blurry. There is gross danger in pairing evils to keep an even score. Thus it is not sufficient (as Fischer elsewhere recognizes) to “loathe Polish landlords and loathe Polish puppets.” For it seems to equate the London and Lublin governments, to ignore the sweep of pre-war Polish land reform, to cover the fact that the London government-in-exile was not a landlord government, but a coalition of Peasant, Socialist, and Democratic parties. One is trapped by the balanced equation into seemingly rejecting the more democratic government along with the puppet. One is left with a clean conscience, but no program for action.
Mr. Fischer falls into a similar trap in balancing the one-party system in “Mr. Byrnes's South Carolina” against the one-party system in Russia and the lands she has occupied. It is only necessary to watch an Arnall-Talmadge fight in order to recognize that there are real choices of programs and candidates in a Southern one-party primary. Southern Republicans and Socialists are weak for historical reasons, but they are not in prison, concentration camp, exile, or the cemetery. Poll tax, white supremacy, the “Solid South” mind-set, are the real evils, but before one can fight evils effectively, they must be distinguished and precisely defined.
Moreover, in our age of huge enterprise and total wars, all lands move towards ever greater state intervention in economy and social life, so that our central problem is: does man exist for the state, or the state for man? Here above all, a mere “double rejection” of the evils within an imperfect democracy and the evils inherent in totalitarianism will not do. It may suffice far a sense of righteousness, but it will not suffice for effective political action. Mr. Fischer's book closes with an appeal for just such action. I should like to see a sequel from his pen, defining the terms and conditions. It would not end, but begin, with “double rejection,” and go on from there. In the meanwhile, we must be grateful to him for giving us so much of the essential background and attitude we need for working out such a program for ourselves. That, I suppose, is “The Great Challenge” which gives the book its title.
