Back in the late'40s, when he was slowly divesting himself of his earlier pacifism and becoming a reluctant Cold Warrior, Dwight Macdonald felt called upon to explain in print whether there was any daylight now between his position and that of President Truman.
Macdonald explained that there still was; and it consisted chiefly in the fact that the means by which the U.S. government proposed to prosecute the Cold War were wrong, in his view—because they would make enemies of those he called "the chief victims of Stalin's system"—"namely the people of Russia."
He had in mind not only the fact that any realistic "hot war" that could break out between the two powers would make no distinction between the Soviet government and the people who were subject to its rule—often against their will; but also the fact that the West at the time, in his view, was doing far too little to aid Russian refugees who managed to escape Stalinist tyranny and had no wish to go back.
"A nation which refuses to permit more than a token immigration of DP's [displaced persons], and that only under the most humiliating conditions, offers little encouragement to such dissident potentialities as there may be inside USSR today," he writes.
I often feel the same way about our geopolitical rivalries with Russia and China today.
If you ask me whether I think the U.S. has a better system than either of these countries, I have no trouble saying yes (though Trump is doing his god-awful best to make that less true by the day).
In that limited sense, I have no trouble in saying with Macdonald—"I Choose the West"—as he famously put it in a debate with Norman Mailer. It is not hard to see that even with the many injustices and wars of aggression and stupidities that this nation is committing, it remains a more open society than Putin's Russia or Xi's PRC. And it is surely better, as Macdonald puts it, to have an "imperfect democracy" than a "perfect tyranny."
As Koestler wrote in a similar vein at the time: the struggle between the Trumanite West and the Stalinist East was a war between a "half-truth" and a "total lie." The half-truth of our democracy is that it is only half a democracy. "Ours, like theirs, is an unjust society," writes Macdonald; "Ours is an imperialist state, like theirs." Putin's war in Ukraine finds its analogues in the U.S.'s invasions of Iraq and Venezuela and Iran.
But Macdonald's and Koestler's point was that we should still choose the half-truth over the total lie; the imperfect democracy over the perfect tyranny; if choose we must.
This doesn't mean—Koestler wrote—that we should accept everything in our own system—quite to the contrary. But neither should we fall victim to the habit of thinking we have no right to protest against what "the other side" is doing, just because we are flawed ourselves.
This Koestler calls the "soul-searching fallacy"—one of his "seven deadly fallacies" of political morality. He cites as an example a journalist who once told him the U.S. government couldn't possibly do anything to help countries in Eastern Europe that feared being absorbed into the Stalinist orbit because of our own "dirty hands."
One hears the same sort of thing today from those who somehow conclude we ought to do less to help Ukraine or Taiwan just because our own government is meanwhile fighting imperialist wars of aggression in Venezuela and Iran. This is indeed a "fallacy," as Koestler put it.
... the worst of all / Deceits, as Louis MacNeice writes in his "Autumn Journal," is to murmur 'Lord, I am not worthy,' / And, lying easy, turn your face to the wall.
One should certainly strive with all one's might to stop the illegal U.S. wars in these countries. But their existence does not mean that we Americans (who ourselves did not choose and do not support our government's ongoing atrocities) are any less entitled to object on moral and legal grounds to Putin's illegal war in Ukraine—or to any threatened annexation by force of Taiwan.
In this limited sense, I too want the West to "win" our current global competitions.
But how are we currently doing on the metric of "encouraging such dissident potentialities as there may exist" inside our authoritarian rivals? Macdonald faulted the Truman government of his time for doing far too little to actively welcome Soviet refugees to the United States. They had admitted only a "token" number, he protested, and that only under "humiliating" conditions.
One could only imagine, then, what Macdonald would say to our current government's approach—which has shut down the refugee program fully, to all but white South Africans, and which is not only failing to admit enough asylum-seekers and dissidents from our geopolitical rivals—but actively locking them up and deporting them straight back into the clutches of the tyrannies they fled.
The New York Times two days ago reported on the case of a Chinese human rights lawyer whom ICE has arrested and detained, even though he has a pending asylum claim here in the U.S. The article notes as well that there are a number of Uyghur refugees in U.S. immigration detention right now facing potential deportation—even as the Chinese government is inflicting mass internment on their whole ethnic group.
So too, large numbers of Russian asylum-seekers have been warehoused in the notorious Dilley family detention camp. And even as the U.S. has waged wars against the governments of Venezuela and Iran—it has meanwhile deported asylum-seekers from both countries to secret prisons in third countries. One recent lawsuit even credibly alleges that the U.S. government has been sharing private information on Iranian dissidents with the Islamic Republic authorities they fled.
Koestler wrote with withering irony—of his internment at the hands of French authorities at the outbreak of World War II—that it was a bit odd that the French government seemed to think "that the first thing to do in a war against Hitler was to lock up all the notorious anti-Hitlerites." So too, it is perhaps a bit self-contradictory that the U.S. government, in its conflict with such authoritarian regimes as Maduro's Venezuela, the theocrats' Iran, Putin's Russia, and Xi's China, seems to think it a wise and just policy to lock up, torture, brutalize, and expel all the people from these countries who most oppose these regimes!
Such policies of mass detention and deportation are inhuman, immoral, and inexcusable on their own terms, and as wielded against any country's nationals. But they are also completely self-defeating. They are a needless self-own on behalf of the supposedly democratic "West" (less democratic by the day, alas), and for the same reason Macdonald cited—that is, they are scarcely likely to "encourage such dissident potentialities" as exist under these authoritarian governments we claim to oppose.
All of which leads one to suspect that what was true of the French authorities in Koestler's day may be true of our officials today—they actually see the true enemy as within, and they are happy to make a great capitulation to our anti-democratic external rivals. I suspect ICE officials trying to deport refugees to the hands of their torturers in fact feel they have a lot more in common with Putin, Xi, and the Islamic Republic, after all, than they do with the ostensible principles of our own Bill of Rights...
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