Co-Existence That Failed

before replaced the old-fashioned word peace in our thinking and parlance, a most serious effort to co-exist freely was made on the Central European periphery of Soviet communism. The publication in Britain of the translated Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Benes is a timely reminder of that pathetic episode which was meant to be, in the optimum case, the prolegomena of a better world. It does not detract from the value of the Memoirs to say that they are incomplete (both in the time coverage and in substance the latter because of diplomatic and political considerations at the time of the original Czech edition in 1947), and that they require some interpretation and fitting into the overall personal and political context. In the contemporary mind, Benes, though not forgotten, is probably not as closely associated with the political conception of co-existence as others who have recently caused concern and irritation on this side of the Atlantic. But, he was the first, the most comprehensive, and the most ambitious. Many contemporaries reflect Benes's ideas on co-existence formed often long before the Second World War, although they do not necessarily plagiarize them. Especially those, who see democratic roots and potentialities in Soviet communism, are close to one of Benes's cardinal assumptions. First-class philosophers, political theorists and writers are among them: Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, India's Vice-President and thinker of world renown, who believes in the possibility of democratization of communism on the premise that good will win over evil and that individuals tolerate the suppression of civil liberties only when they are very hungry; Professor Talmond of Hebrew University, concluding in his recent Totalitarian Democracy that communism is only a deviation, not an antithesis, of liberal democracy; Isaac Deutscher, who took time off from writing his excellent biography of Trotsky to predict, after Stalin's death, a progressive political westernization of the Soviet system

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