Partisan Reviews

Why we’re still arguing about the old battle between East and West.

During the Cold War, the libraries of America’s public school system were stocked with books explaining the history and dogma of Communism to young readers, as inoculation against the subtle wiles and baleful influence of our enemy. It has been 30 years and more since I read them. Even during the Carter years they seemed a bit dated; they paid no attention to detente, and some of the authors were clearly suspicious that the Sino-Soviet conflict might be a ruse. But one odd element of these anti-Communist manuals has proved strangely durable–even somewhat useful in thinking about the Cold War itself–and that is the account they gave of something called dialectics.

This was surely the most arcane part of Communist theory. You learned Karl Marx had derived dialectics from a German philosopher named G.W.F. Hegel, who maintained that the world kept moving through a three-phase process. First there was something called a “thesis,” which in due course was confronted by something called its “antithesis.” They fought it out until there emerged a “synthesis,” combining aspects of both. Eventually the synthesis turned into a thesis, whereupon the whole thing started over again. It all seemed very abstract, and the authors of primers themselves often seemed unclear as to why it was important, except that it was supposed to be the key to Red strategy. Evidently troublemaking Communists were running around trying to provoke antithesis, and if they prevailed the Soviet army would be in your neighborhood, forcing everyone to march in a May Day parade.

Whatever its merits as a philosophy of history, this notion actually has scant roots in the work of Marx–and none at all in Hegel, who mentioned thesis/antithesis/synthesis just once, with sarcasm. A few American right-wingers remain fascinated with its explanatory power. (To judge by talk radio and certain Internet forums, Obama-lectics is the basis for health-care reform.) Otherwise the dialectical triad might seem a rather dubious fossil of Cold War culture. And yet its three stages actually provide a pretty good description of how the Cold War itself has been understood over the years, at least on this side of the Iron Curtain.

The original thesis, so to speak, was that the Cold War was a conflict in which democratic societies faced an expansive, totalitarian system where ideological passion fueled military aggression. It was a defensive combat, with the West protecting itself from the East, freedom resisting tyranny. This was something liberals and conservatives could agree on, and we might even call it the consensus interpretation.

A body of revisionist historiography–most of it appearing in the antithesis-minded 1960s and ‘70s–challenged this perspective by stressing the economic interests and sheer military power of the United States and its allies. A certain amount of Soviet behavior could be put down to historically justified paranoia; and after all, the Free World was somewhat selective in its outrage at violations of democracy and human rights. Cold War revisionism tended to treat the conflict as a fairly deliberate campaign by rich countries to squelch the drive of underdeveloped countries to attain national independence and economic sovereignty.

Thesis, in other words, and antithesis. Then, around 1990, the cunning of history worked its strange magic; a chapter closed, and the archives opened, or at least some of them did. Revisionism itself had to be revised. A global showdown that had dragged on for decades started to look less like a matter of world-historical forces than a series of battles in which each side tended to misunderstand the motives and rationales of the other–thereby reinforcing the tendency toward conflict, since the fog of war clouded the distinction between aggressive and defensive maneuvers.

After the Cold War, formulating a grand narrative about it became more complicated but also less polemically urgent. Indeed, much of the scholarship on the Cold War over the past two decades reflects the “cultural turn” in historiography in general. It is not just that cultural artifacts (books, films, broadcasts, etc.) are analyzed along with diplomatic feints, shooting wars, and so on. Now the very concepts that governed the thinking of participants in the conflict–“containment,” “totalitarianism,” “imperialism,” “anti-imperialism” and so on–are subject to cultural questioning. They are no longer explanations for what happened. They require analysis themselves as elements of the culture of the period. The old conflicts, the clashes of thesis and antithesis, come together in a synthesis–one in which the Cold War itself grows cold, and reflection on it “paints gray on gray,” to borrow a phrase from Hegel himself.

And so John Fleming’s The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War is an anomaly in a number of ways–not least of which is the way it unearths and repeats the anti-Communist triumphalism of the Cold War era, an easy tendency that too often blocked any absorption of the real lessons of the Cold War (the dangers of ideology, the limits of hard power) by the American public. The author is a professor emeritus of literature at Princeton University who has specialized in medieval and Renaissance literature. Having wandered so far beyond his usual neighborhood, he feels at liberty to ignore certain local nuance, and even to treat the Cold War as if it is still underway.

The experience of undertaking a book “so different in its subject from any I had written before,” he says in the introduction,

encouraged me also to write in a different manner. The Anti-Communist Manifestos seeks a general educated audience rather than a guild of professional scholars or specialists. I have accordingly suppressed the apparatus of note citations and bibliographies required in specialized monographs, though I from time to time cite a few particularly helpful or even indispensable sources.

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