JUST A LITTLE FASCISM
Mayer, Milton
Just A Little Fascism By MILTON MAYER SOME of my liberal friends, without being particular iv just, sleep the sleep of the just, achieving- this great blessing by repeating to themselves, while...
...There is trouble everywhere...
...CO's, it said, are slackers...
...Liberals Can Sleep Time got its facts from the officials...
...I am sure that the editors of PM, the Nation, and the New Republic are even now stirred to the very shallows of their being by the words of Voltaire, but where were they when Charley Coughlin was being suppressed and Lizzie Dilling railroaded...
...it did not even try to interview the men...
...CO system which exists in England and Canada...
...They are not the liberties of Silver Charley Coughlin or Lizzie Dilling...
...Among the persons outside the pale of civil liberty are the conscientious objectors, both those in the camps, who were able to prove religious objection, and those in the penitentiaries, who were either unable or unwilling to prove religious objection...
...1 now have a report which contains the facts that Time distorted, exaggerated, or falsified completely...
...The CO's are referred to as "trouble-makers, thumbing their nose at all authority," "declining to work...
...They want, as a substitute for the camps, a system of individual assignment, in which they may serve their country productively according to their abilities...
...To fight for the liberties of people we do not like is to disrupt national unity...
...Oh, but—in a word—we will defend to the death the rights of those who agree with us...
...The system grinds down assignees and administrators alike...
...Men are troubled...
...Time did not add, since it wanted to inflame its audience, that these men refuse to fight because they have convinced their draft boards that they love their fellow-men too much to kill them...
...A few weeks ago, however, Time Magazine, bursting with national unity and no regard for either the truth or the liberties of men, got a tip on a story at the Civilian Public Service Camp at Germfask, Mich., where, under stupid conditions, 75 men—men who, to begin with, are in the most difficult of all political situations —were kept at a stupid job which, according to the project director himself, required no more than 15 men at the outside...
...But the noises have been little, and the liberals slept on...
...Where was the American Civil Liberties Union...
...Those in the penitentiaries, except when an occasional one or two go on a hunger strike, are buried out of sight and sound...
...The Time story bore immediate fruit...
...There is trouble in the Army...
...Of course there is trouble in the CO camps...
...The Time story was written to start a pogrom against a group of miserable and friendless men, described, by Time, as "refusing to fight or help fighting men to fight...
...They refuse to fight or help fighting men to fight...
...Why, civil liberties are the liberties of people we like...
...There is trouble in jail...
...These "trouble-malcers" want in America the civilized...
...Publisher Luce's fellow-liberal, Publisher McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, at once embarked on a campaign, also based on indifference to fact, against the CO's...
...But we liberals do not like them...
...The "trouble-makers" at Germfask are demanding the abolition of the degrading CPS system of unpaid, unproductive labor...
...but Charley and Lizzie were impeding the war effort...
...See letter by R. S. Brainerd, People's Forum, Page 7...
...But the fact remains that the only true civil libertarian is the one who takes Voltaire's historic doctrine as his slogan: "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it...
...But men who have undertaken to stand against the community for the community's good are, above and beyond the rest of us, men whose rights are especially sacred...
...Just A Little Fascism By MILTON MAYER SOME of my liberal friends, without being particular iv just, sleep the sleep of the just, achieving- this great blessing by repeating to themselves, while the rest of us count mutton, the assertion, "There is no violation of civil liberties in this war...
...Time has the report, too...
...In this view my liberal friends may sleep on, and sleep well, because in this view, there being no civil liberties, there are no violations...
...Yet, compare the judicial impartiality of this statement of the CO's at Germfask with the hysteria of Luce and McCormick: "The disintegration of personality acts on the camp officials, perhaps not to the same degree, but in a subtle manner that is just as disturbing to us who value so highly the human personality...
...The result was a story whose facts are not only lies, but malicious lies...
...Oh, but Charley and Lizzie were disrupting national unity...
...Because, while we believe in civil liberties, we want to sleep, and we would not sleep if civil liberties were violated...
...They get liberally delirious, however, when you ask them what they mean by civil liberties...
...They want to work like men and work for their country...
...The Tribune went the whole hog...
...Those in the camps have made little noises for 4 years now about unpaid forced labor...
...We liberals, since it is sleep we want, may not go as far as McCormick and deny that they have any rights to be defended, but we will go as far as Luce, and call them dirty names...
...The CO is necessarily a man who, as a dissenter from the whole organized community, is almost certain to become neurotic, if not actually mad...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 14
