A Trotskyite's Slumming Trip
By Samuel Sillen
November 26, 1947.
The editors of The New Yorker, with grotesque humor, financed a sort of intellectual slumming trip by Edmund Wilson through postwar Europe. He left his Baedeker home, but not his Trotskyism. His report, published in his new book, Europe Without Baedeker, unutterably dull, is worth nothing except as a symptom of the moral decay of capitalist apologists.
Wilson felt most at home in a convent cell at the Hospital of the Blue Nuns in Rome, where he discussed with George Santayana his quaint "weakness for Mussolini." Wilson's militant, unabashed hatred of people naturally accompanies a hatred of the democratic upsurge in post-Hitler Europe. The author laments his departed friends Trotsky and Tukhachevsky, waxes homesick for Alexander Barmine, consoles himself that De Gaulle's big brain, Andre Malraux, is one of "the most valuable forces still alive on this devastated continent".
Then he scoots back to America with a dazzling proposal. He wants us to set up a Board of Breeding. We should not be so "foolish" as to allow Nazi failures to "discourage us with eugenics". Wilson offers this bright vista: "If we can produce, from some cousin of the jackal and the wolf, the dachshund and the Great Dane, the Pekinese and the poodle, what should we not be able to do with man?"
Fortified by this dog-theory of history, Wilson finds a new key to what is "wrong" with Socialist ideas. It is that Karl Marx was a Jew, "and, being a Jew, from a family that bad included many rabbis, he identified the situation of the factory worker with the situation of the Jew." Marx, says Wilson, mistakenly assumed that workers released from capitalism would behave in terms of "Jewish tradition". He did not foresee that "what happens, when you let down the bars, is that a lot of gross and ignorant people who have been condemned to mean destinies before, go rushing for all they are worth after things that they can eat, drink, sleep on, ride on, preside at and amuse themselves with."
Thus, in one stroke, the Trotskyite tourist for The New Yorker combines the Nazi view of Marxism as a peculiarly "Jewish" philosophy, the Bourbons' contempt for the masses as wild animals, and the hoary capitalist warning that we must not '"let down the bars"' to the working class.
This leads up to the inevitability-of-war thesis. Wilson goes a step further than your run-of-the-mill warmonger. Not only can't we get along with the Soviet leaders, but Americans "will never be able to co-operate as peoples" with the Russians. It is "ridiculous," says Wilson, to think of the Russian people today as "civilized".
Wilson, borrowing a cue from De Gaulle's Malraux, evidently aspires to be a braintruster of the fascist forces. It is not only moral and intellectual rottenness that we find in his book, but the savagery of desperation.
-- Michael Pugliese