On the Right

New York, Jan. 24—Although it is likely that more academic and philosophical attention has been devoted in the last fifty years to the flowering of Marxist thought and to life under Marxism, it is astonishing how little thought is given to the great residual paradox. It is expressed in the antipodal manifestos of our time. The first is the voice of Solzhenitsyn, a single voice to be sure, but it is the voice of baptized humanity. What he said is that there is probably not one believing Marxist in Moscow. The contrary voice is the voice of—the Politburo: a great assembly of lords secular, disposing of three thousand silos armed with hydrogen bombs, the world’s greatest army, navy, and submarine force; commanding the greatest satellite empire since Rome’s. They are fighting for the most penetrable idiocies in the history of superstition; and yet on and on they go.

What would the Soviet Union be, if you stripped it of its ideological pretensions? The answer to that question is most easily given, one supposes, if it were asked of, say, Machel in Mozambique, or Castro, or the Ethiopian sadist; or those grisly impostors in France and Italy and East Germany. There are three typhonic vectors in the postwar world. One of them is nationalism. The second—related—is anti-imperialism. The third is Marxist imperialism. Although every nation represented in the United Nations, ourselves included, will vote against imperialism, very nearly as many (subtract a dozen) regularly vote to ratify the Soviet Union’s de facto imperialism. Although every nation will swear out a blood oath against tyranny, the majority will back tyranny—as long as it is done in the holy name of Marx. Find yourself any old country, impoverished, agricultural, illiterate: by rigorous definition laid down by Marx himself, lacking the constituent parts to pass over into Communism. But you need only require that the prevailing tyrant declare himself to be a Marxist, and the propaganda war is half-won. If Machel of Mozambique had said everything he had said, done everything he had done, but announced that he was just a good old-fashioned bourgeois despot, he’d have been the target of universal obloquy from the beginning, in 1974. He has only to say that he is a Marxist, and he is accounted blessed among the ignorant, and the cynical, of this world.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

William F. Buckley Jr.

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New York, Jan. 24—Although it is likely that more academic and philosophical attention has been devoted in the last fifty years to the flowering of Marxist thought and to life under Marxism, it is astonishing how little thought is given to the great residual paradox. It is expressed in the antipodal manifestos of our time. The first is the voice of Solzhenitsyn, a single voice to be sure, but it is the voice of baptized humanity. What he said is that there is probably not one believing Marxist in Moscow. The contrary voice is the voice of—the Politburo: a great assembly of lords secular, disposing of three thousand silos armed with hydrogen bombs, the world’s greatest army, navy, and submarine force; commanding the greatest satellite empire since Rome’s. They are fighting for the most penetrable idiocies in the history of superstition; and yet on and on they go.

What would the Soviet Union be, if you stripped it of its ideological pretensions? The answer to that question is most easily given, one supposes, if it were asked of, say, Machel in Mozambique, or Castro, or the Ethiopian sadist; or those grisly impostors in France and Italy and East Germany. There are three typhonic vectors in the postwar world. One of them is nationalism. The second—related—is anti-imperialism. The third is Marxist imperialism. Although every nation represented in the United Nations, ourselves included, will vote against imperialism, very nearly as many (subtract a dozen) regularly vote to ratify the Soviet Union’s de facto imperialism. Although every nation will swear out a blood oath against tyranny, the majority will back tyranny—as long as it is done in the holy name of Marx. Find yourself any old country, impoverished, agricultural, illiterate: by rigorous definition laid down by Marx himself, lacking the constituent parts to pass over into Communism. But you need only require that the prevailing tyrant declare himself to be a Marxist, and the propaganda war is half-won. If Machel of Mozambique had said everything he had said, done everything he had done, but announced that he was just a good old-fashioned bourgeois despot, he’d have been the target of universal obloquy from the beginning, in 1974. He has only to say that he is a Marxist, and he is accounted blessed among the ignorant, and the cynical, of this world.