Europe and America: The Meaning of “Western Defense”

For the liberal, the problem of defending the West is perhaps even more critical a question than for the socialist, since it is the liberal who eschews Utopias and therefore finds himself without an exit. On the one side he is becoming increasingly depressed, if indeed not terrified, by the movement in America toward conformism, hysteria, and McCarthyism; as an alternative he can only see the heavy danger of “Soviet Imperialism.” Before such a prospect he feels impelled in the words of Dwight Macdonald to “prefer an imperfectly living, open society to a perfectly dead, closed society.”

I would argue that the mistake is precisely in so establishing the choice, and that the implement of this choice—Western Defense—has the ultimate and most abominable meaning of Western annihilation.

I must add that in support of this I will present no documentation nor any research. Such a project would be not only beyond my capacities, but I see small purpose unless it were done on an heroic scale. I offer this argument therefore in all modesty. I am neither wholly convinced of it, nor confident of my political insight. Still, it is a thesis I have held for several years, and I have found it, for myself at least, a not unfruitful hypothesis by which to understand events.

The nominal reason advanced for Western Defense is that it is the bulwark of civilization against the predatory and aggressive aims of the Soviet Union. If one inquires why the Soviet Union is “predatory,” the answer is almost always the descriptive and circular response that it is in the nature of totalitarian regimes to be aggressive and imperialistic. Which of course answers nothing at all.

One finds it perfect that our third-rate imitation of Stalinist distortion of history, our government by public relations, should have coined the phrase, “Soviet Imperialism.” It is a wonder the next page was never borrowed from Stalin’s book which would give the USSR the credit for inventing imperialism. Whatever the Soviet’s crimes and horrors and total perversions of socialism, and we know the list unbearably long, they can hardly be accused of imperialism.* The guilt for imperialism belongs to the West, that chalice of civilization, and not all the public relations from here to the millennium can word it away. Imperialism, since one is forced to go back to the ABC’s of these things, is still the employment of excess surplus value to create new markets, dominate backward countries, superintend partial and specialized development of their industry, and establish spheres of influence. For a modern example, Venezuela comes to mind. What must be emphasized is that imperialism is exclusively the problem of finding investments for the collective idle profit of monopoly capitalism, and it has been the difficulty of finding such markets and backward countries which has dominated the histo...