Madison, Wise. A student at the University of Wisconsin, bright, pretty, un-jeaned and with a keen sense of history, has been hard at work along with a small group of fellow-students who together succeeded in collecting no less than 6,000 student signatures in support of President Johnson’s policies in South Vietnam. She is flushed by the one-shot success, but on the whole gloomy about political developments on her campus, which are presumably not significantly different from political developments on other large campuses. “What we face is a radical left that doesn’t know that the history of Communism is an expression of the nature of Communism,” she said.
So it was during the thirties in American colleges, when Soviet Russia was worshiped by the radical left as the Bethlehem of the new order. When the Redeemer Stalin began killing people all over the lot, including almost everyone of his long-time apostles, disillusion set in among the most sensitive of his admirers. When he then signed a pact with Hitler, others broke ranks. The crushing of the Budapest freedom fighters, quickly followed by Khrushchev’s speech before the 20th Congress denouncing his predecessor as a sadistic megalomaniac, was, for the hardy majority, the final blow: and for a half dozen years the Communist Party was deeply hurt— irreparably hurt, as far as the middle and other generations were concerned. For them it had become clear that the venality of Stalin and Khrushchev and their associates was not a human accident, a human accretion on the purity of revolutionary socialism, but a metaphysically necessary development arising out of the totalitarian structure of Marxist socialism: the development of the New Class of bureaucratic exploiters identified as such by the disillusioned —and therefore imprisoned—Yugoslav Marxist, Milovan Djilas.
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