Then As Now

Today we have our anti-Zionists, our progressives, our liberal-radicals.

And then, in the last generation and a hhalf?

The had:-

I. F. Stone

Sir, – James M. Murphy writes a measured review of D. D. Guttenplan’s hagiographic treatment of the man who called himself I. F. Stone (January 1). Thus he misses, by his very even-handedness, the central perversity of the Communist fellow travellers of the last century. Stone was a perfect exemplar of the group.

Refusing to declare themselves openly Communist, yet unfailingly apologist for the Soviet regime during its darkest days, they (and he) ceaselessly denounced each and every mote of “capitalist” society, rarely if ever noticing the beam of the Gulag. They (and he) were often genial, smooth, full of phrases that endorsed democratic values on such matters as race and peace and justice for the underprivileged. But their (and his) calculated blindness to the Gulag promoted moral disarmament vis-à-vis the dark forces of European totalitarianism, both “Left” and “Right”.

WERNER COHN
PO Box 021591, Brooklyn, New York 11202.