On the Right

Portland, Maine, Aug. 26—Concerning the end of the dream in Czechoslovakia, a few comments: 1) Although there is no pleasure to be taken from the embarrassment of the ideologues of appeasement, it is at least relevant to note that the Soviet Union’s intercession in Czechoslovakia blows into pieces the sentimentalist dream of the end of “monolithic Communism.” During the years since the showdown in Cuba, the theologians of appeasement have softly whispered at us that there is no such thing as One Communism. A few venturesome students of the world situation repeatedly pointed out that the worldwide undertakings of the Soviet Union were inexplicable other than on the hypothesis that Russia continues to be seized by a redemptist vision of world Communism. The savage assault on Czechoslovakian separatism means one of two things, a) that the economic and geopolitical usefulness of Czechoslovakia is something that Great Russia dares not be without, in which case it can merely be charged that Russia is in the worst tradition of imperialist countries; or b) that the separatist impulses of Czechoslovakia frightened the Soviet Union, which viewed them as a harbinger of the effective dissolution of the Communist ideological enterprise.

Let us assume, 2), that it is the first of these, that Russia is merely imperialist in the sense that, say, Napoleon was, or the Czars. Question: How is it, in an age of anti-imperialism, indeed in an age when the religion of anti-imperialism is primarily preached by the Communists, that the Soviet Union should undertake such a brazen act of imperialism?

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William F. Buckley Jr.

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

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Portland, Maine, Aug. 26—Concerning the end of the dream in Czechoslovakia, a few comments: 1) Although there is no pleasure to be taken from the embarrassment of the ideologues of appeasement, it is at least relevant to note that the Soviet Union’s intercession in Czechoslovakia blows into pieces the sentimentalist dream of the end of “monolithic Communism.” During the years since the showdown in Cuba, the theologians of appeasement have softly whispered at us that there is no such thing as One Communism. A few venturesome students of the world situation repeatedly pointed out that the worldwide undertakings of the Soviet Union were inexplicable other than on the hypothesis that Russia continues to be seized by a redemptist vision of world Communism. The savage assault on Czechoslovakian separatism means one of two things, a) that the economic and geopolitical usefulness of Czechoslovakia is something that Great Russia dares not be without, in which case it can merely be charged that Russia is in the worst tradition of imperialist countries; or b) that the separatist impulses of Czechoslovakia frightened the Soviet Union, which viewed them as a harbinger of the effective dissolution of the Communist ideological enterprise.

Let us assume, 2), that it is the first of these, that Russia is merely imperialist in the sense that, say, Napoleon was, or the Czars. Question: How is it, in an age of anti-imperialism, indeed in an age when the religion of anti-imperialism is primarily preached by the Communists, that the Soviet Union should undertake such a brazen act of imperialism?