Books in Brief

The Communist World and Ours, by Walter Lippmann (Little Brown, $2.00). These columns of Mr. Lippmann’s, which describe and comment on his interview with Khrushchev, were available to the readers of scores of American newspapers for 15 or 20 cents. Now that they have been slightly amplified, put between hard covers and placed on the market at two dollars a throw, the 54 pages of large-type text are not worth any more than they were then; and that is precisely nothing—unless two or three cents value is to be allowed for the light they cast on the working of Mr. Lippmann’s mind. His error (like the error of too many of his betters) is to fail completely to understand that Communist actions proceed from the secular religion of Communism and that anything said to the unbeliever is said to him for reasons of tactics or of propaganda, not for his enlightenment. If Mr. Lippmann and the hordes of Soviet experts who infest the Establishment would recognize that the first principle of Communist politics is the destruction of all non-Communist civilization, what they write might have some relation to the reality of a world where a powerfully armed apocalyptic force is on the march, a force that knows not the pallid reasonableness of positivist Liberals.

F. S. MEYER

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The Communist World and Ours, by Walter Lippmann (Little Brown, $2.00). These columns of Mr. Lippmann’s, which describe and comment on his interview with Khrushchev, were available to the readers of scores of American newspapers for 15 or 20 cents. Now that they have been slightly amplified, put between hard covers and placed on the market at two dollars a throw, the 54 pages of large-type text are not worth any more than they were then; and that is precisely nothing—unless two or three cents value is to be allowed for the light they cast on the working of Mr. Lippmann’s mind. His error (like the error of too many of his betters) is to fail completely to understand that Communist actions proceed from the secular religion of Communism and that anything said to the unbeliever is said to him for reasons of tactics or of propaganda, not for his enlightenment. If Mr. Lippmann and the hordes of Soviet experts who infest the Establishment would recognize that the first principle of Communist politics is the destruction of all non-Communist civilization, what they write might have some relation to the reality of a world where a powerfully armed apocalyptic force is on the march, a force that knows not the pallid reasonableness of positivist Liberals.

F. S. MEYER