On the Scene: The Post-Cold-War World

IT IS an all too common experience to feel disappointment at the results of even the giddiest triumph. Slackness succeeds to tension, sadness to joy. Thus the conference, assembled in East Berlin—and the very location spells out the measure of the achievement—to discuss “A Last Encounter with the Cold War,” was notably lacking in triumphalism and full of forebodings about the future. Europe and the world have sobered up since the happy days of the piercing of the Berlin Wall and the almost daily fall of Communist dominoes. The achievement of the monthly review Encounter (1953-1990) and its brilliant editors, Irving Kristol and Melvin Lasky, was celebrated, but precious little else.

Yet the West did win the cold war, and all sorts of things and people were responsible for that, from Robert Conquest’s powerful account of the truth about the Soviet purges to President Reagan’s increasing of the pressure on the leadership of the Soviet Union. How was the West able to defeat what had been a military and political threat to its existence for over forty years? Professor Richard Pipes gave the lapidary answer that Soviet Communism was, in a profound sense, unnatural. In denying the role of religion in society, in denying the right to private property, in suppressing free speech, this regime set itself against a whole series of fundamental human characteristics. This was a battle it could not win. Orwell’s terrible image of the future as a boot on the face of humanity forever proved not to be true, but it was as well to have it proved. I can remember with what relief one greeted the Hungarian uprising in 1956, not because it looked like succeeding—it did not—but because it showed that human beings could not be brought to believe the Communist myth, even by an organized system of propaganda and terror.

AH

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Anthony Hartley

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IT IS an all too common experience to feel disappointment at the results of even the giddiest triumph. Slackness succeeds to tension, sadness to joy. Thus the conference, assembled in East Berlin—and the very location spells out the measure of the achievement—to discuss “A Last Encounter with the Cold War,” was notably lacking in triumphalism and full of forebodings about the future. Europe and the world have sobered up since the happy days of the piercing of the Berlin Wall and the almost daily fall of Communist dominoes. The achievement of the monthly review Encounter (1953-1990) and its brilliant editors, Irving Kristol and Melvin Lasky, was celebrated, but precious little else.

Yet the West did win the cold war, and all sorts of things and people were responsible for that, from Robert Conquest’s powerful account of the truth about the Soviet purges to President Reagan’s increasing of the pressure on the leadership of the Soviet Union. How was the West able to defeat what had been a military and political threat to its existence for over forty years? Professor Richard Pipes gave the lapidary answer that Soviet Communism was, in a profound sense, unnatural. In denying the role of religion in society, in denying the right to private property, in suppressing free speech, this regime set itself against a whole series of fundamental human characteristics. This was a battle it could not win. Orwell’s terrible image of the future as a boot on the face of humanity forever proved not to be true, but it was as well to have it proved. I can remember with what relief one greeted the Hungarian uprising in 1956, not because it looked like succeeding—it did not—but because it showed that human beings could not be brought to believe the Communist myth, even by an organized system of propaganda and terror.