Americans have shown a willingness to take most of their information about communism and Russia from a curious and shameless lot of renegades. Krebs ("Valtin"), Kravehenko, and Budenz have followed each other, in renouncing the cause loudly in the tencent press. But it seems strange that a mere turnabout should qualify these men as respected experts; if, before, they were conspiratorial and totalitarian minded enemies of America and democracy, why are they now suddenly eligible for cocktail parties and the better publishing houses?

Burnham, the ex-Communist, ex-Trotskyite professor who has recently been canonized by Time-Life, is a shrewder, slicker model of this type (top of his Princeton class, always a sharp dresser); his book is smart, superficially cogent, and therefore the more dangerous. His thesis is that the time is ripe for world empire by one power, and that the inescapable conflict is between Russia and the United States. Borrowing handfuls from historian Arnold Teynbee's arbitrary classification of civilizations (what are the criteria for a civilization?), Burnham sees America as the saviour of Western Civilization from the dynamic surge of communism, which he describes in a lurid Budenz-like chapter.

Most of it is appallingly--untrue. Burnham cries that we must first reach out to stop communism everywhere, supporting against it Chiang, France, a strong Germany. We should abandon all attempts to "get along" in the UN, make unilateral decisions and implement them with force. Next, we should take the offensive, drawing first Latin America and then other nations into our new "World Empire," suppressing communism as we go. At home, Burnham would have us illegalize the Communist Party and crush all its "fronts;" his black and white approach leads him to lump the Federation of Atomic Scientists with "The New Masses" in this category. Communism, he trusts, will die for good when once it is suppressed.

The holes in all this need not be pointed out, Burnham, who numbers an interest in the Machiavellians among his fads, in no mean "realist" himself, flluging "sentimental" and "irrelevant" at all reasoning but his own. On his own terms, then, by passing all the powerful "unrealistic" arguments with his policy, we can find a weakness in his plan that makes his whole book little better than a syllogistic tour de force: he believes the American Empire must build absolutely on monopoly control of atomic weapons by this country. Wishfully, he disregards or brands as communist rumors all statements by scientists that the Soviet has or can soon have similar weapons. This refusal to admit a fact invalidates his whole policy. Even on Burnham's amoral grounds, his plan is only a tragic joke.