A very contemporary dialogue with a blast from the past

At the end of February, finding myself in the unaccustomed position of watching my government increasingly implicated in what seemed a necessary and just war for the self-determination of the Ukrainian people, I went searching for a little book I hadn't thought about in decades.

My introduction to cultural critic Dwight Macdonald's 1958 paperback volume of essays, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, might give ammunition to our contemporary rightwing nut job book banners. In high school I had a student job delivering the daily New York Times to the 15 or so brainy, or perhaps pretentious, students and teachers who subscribed. Next to the office where I picked up the papers, there was a book rack containing an odd assortment of random paperbacks for sale, mostly for under $2. When I was handed my monthly $10, I would splurge on something from the rack. (Yes, I was a socially inept nerd.) And that's where, in my conservative high school, I ran across Macdonald's essays, probably in 1963.

I didn't understand a great deal of what Macdonald was writing about. I knew absolutely nothing of the 1930s intellectual leftist circles from which he had emerged and with whom he was still arguing. But one aspect of the book was revelatory: Macdonald included piece after piece demanding that those of us privileged to live in the United States recognize the conduct of the Allies fighting Nazis in Europe had not been blameless. Long before Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1969) brought home the terror of the firebombing of German cities, Macdonald wanted us to know what "we" had done. He didn't diminish the Holocaust or the crimes of Hitler's aggressive war -- in fact he was way ahead of many "responsible" authorities in foreseeing the murder of European Jews -- but he wasn't going to let anyone bask in victorious innocence about the war.  

We lived in fear of the Bomb in those days. The Cuban missile crisis had been the previous fall. The U.S. war in Vietnam was just coming on the radar of ordinary citizens. In Macdonald, here was someone trying to bring a moral lens to it all.

Much of the book is cultural criticism and I really didn't have the background to understand that. But this ferocious interrogator of his own country's war crimes concluded the political section with an essay from 1952, which I was drawn to when Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February pitched me into an unexpected political place. Macdonald explains his early 1950s choices in the snippets quoted here; material in italics is my dialogue with his essay.

"I debated Norman Mailer at Mt. Holyoke College; my position was summed up: 'I Choose the West.'"

I choose a West that supports a Ukrainian state and people which those Ukrainian people choose.

"I choose the West— the U.S. and its allies— and reject the East — the Soviet Union and its ally, China, and its colonial pro­vinces, the nations of Eastern Europe. By 'choosing' I mean that I support the political, economic, and military struggle of the West against the East. I support it critically... but in general I do choose, I do support Western policies."

All war is evil. Human freedom is good, although routinely abused. I choose freedom wherever people strive toward it.

"During the last war, I did not choose, at first because I was a revolutionary socialist of Trotskyist coloration, later because I was becoming, especially after the atom bomb, a pacifist. ..."

If curious about the Trotskyism, I recommend the original book. This aspect of Macdonald is a piercing vignette from a long-gone intellectual era. Atomic bomb pacifism of a secular character was quite common after the horrors of  WWII.

"I choose the West because I see the present conflict not as another struggle between basically similar imperialisms as was World War I but as a fight to the death between radically different cultures. ..."

Our terrified, imperial War on Terror -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Abu Ghraib and our complicity in Yemen and so many other places -- calls the moral value of our culture into question. This country was born in and thrives on racial and sexual domination. Still ...

"In choosing the West, I must admit that already the effects on our own society of the anti-Communist struggle are bad: Senator McCarthy and his imitators are using lies to create hysteria and moral confusion in the best Nazi-Communist pattern... In short, we are becoming to some extent like the totalitarian enemy we are fighting."

Still, more profits for the tech-military-industrial barons. Today's United States exiles its losers to tents on our sidewalks while anesthetizing its winners with mindless consumption of our irreplaceable planet. And a large minority of us were persuaded that it meant "freedom" to put a criminally unserious person in a position to use the Bomb.

"But (1) being on the road is not the same thing as being there already (though one might think it was from certain Marxist and pacifist statements), and (2) this malign trend can be to some extent resisted."

After the fact, we sometimes apologize and even aspire to make amends. We have sometimes put some of our mass murderers on trial. Citizens of Minnesota did convict Derek Chauvin. Not a high bar, but there it is ...

"... Ours is still a living, developing society, open to change and growth, at least compared to its opposite number ..."

Well, I hope so. And we do produce the likes of the Rev. William Barber, Stacey Abrams, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, climate activist Bill McKibben, Congresscritters Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna -- leaders who are neither entirely inside' nor entirely outside, the realm of power and who challenge us to find ways to make this colossus better. Is it enough? No. But the horrors of the invasion of Ukraine remind me, I choose the permanent struggle which is life and hope. 

To my surprise and delight, I found the entire text of Macdonald's little book of essays available for free download under the title Responsibility of the Peoples [pdf]. There's much more there, including my first introduction to the work of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. I'll be coming back Macdonald on the blog from time to time.