Does It Hurt When You Laugh?
H., I.
The confusion of modern politics runs so deep, the breakdown of those traditional responses which held together a more or less "enlightened" public is so complete, that one no longer knows what...
...Well, here may be one answer to the questions that readers are likely to ask of DissENT: what is your purpose...
...Now, finally, the Attorney General has filed a "bill of particulars" against the ISL...
...I refer, of course, to those sophisticated liberals who read Commentary and think of Sidney Hook as their intellectual spokesman...
...Would Sidney Hook trouble to mention this case in one of his innumerable articles in the Sunday Times...
...We do not live in "a reign of terror," and when Bertrand Russell carelessly says that we do he plays into the hands of those with a stake in consistently underestimating the danger to our freedoms...
...This, the Attorney General implies, is enough to make it "subversive...
...American radicals can do at least this much: together with those liberals who have not become, in the phrase of C. Wright Mills, "crackpot realists," we can try to raise the traditional banner of personal freedom that is now slipping from the hands of so many accredited spokesmen of liberalism...
...This disgraceful amalgam with Stalinist organizations has done the members of the ISL considerable harm...
...A member of the State Textbook Commission had demanded an investigation to see whether the Robin Hood story spreads Communistic propaganda, since, as everyone knows, Robin robbed the rich to help the poor...
...Or consider the clash between the state of Indiana and Robin Hood...
...The group is not even accused of favoring "the violent overthrow" of the government...
...What is far more finWinter 1954 • DISSENT • 5 portant is that the commitments at the deepest levels of feeling, the responses that really and evidently matter, are not, for people like Hook and the political writers for Commentary, aroused by the problem of civil liberties...
...Ordinarily this would be great fun, a prime example of nativist ignorance...
...so has everyone of any intelligence...
...For example...
...The group around The Nation cries wolf day and night, never troubling to make elementary distinctions between native know-nothingism and full-fledged fascism...
...in substance and apart from the gross ignorance of the Attorney General's charges, the ISL is accused of nothing more than being Marxist and desiring the abolition of capitalism...
...But wait: the philistine reference to "the outside" comes not from the American Legion but from the New School, the New School which began as a refuge for liberalism and freedom...
...Did any of them suggest that one reason for the deep-seated "neutralist" feeling on the continent may be a resentment against precisely the kind of fact that Churchill revealed...
...That they have lost their capacity for integral response, not all but all too many, is important...
...Well, Dr...
...Or take the problem of civil liberties...
...Are you likely to find such things if you read a score of Commentaries...
...The confusion of modern politics runs so deep, the breakdown of those traditional responses which held together a more or less "enlightened" public is so complete, that one no longer knows what feeling an event is likely to evoke among people of some political sophistication, particularly among people of political sophistication...
...Did it "express" that philosophy when it was first unveiled...
...What do you think radicals can do in America today...
...Doesn't it take place in an atmosphere where little idiocies quickly lead to big disasters...
...Simons, one is sorry to say this, but the mural is not merely "a problem of the school...
...For six years now a conspicuously powerless group called the Independent Socialist League, in political complexion Marxist and premature anti-Stalinist, has been on the Attorney General's "Subversive List...
...That the liberals have changed or modified their ideas is not important...
...and one would be delighted to go back where one came from: New York...
...Everyone knows that in difficult times minor injustices are unavoidable, and besides it is such an insignificant group...
...A few days earlier there had appeared in the New York Times a chapter of 4 • DISSENT • Winter 1954 Winston Churchill's memoirs which bluntly described how he and Stalin had carved up Eastern Europe...
...Does anyone --except to his honor, Norman Thomas—speak up...
...Hans Simons, president of the school, "does not express the philosophy of the faculty...
...Is it really funny...
...TAKE ANOTHER EXAMPLE...
...How easy it is to offer the "sophisticated" notion that Stalinists have no claim upon civil liberties because they are intent upon destroying them . . . but what if someone asks: should the McCarthyites be deprived of their civil liberties because they too are intent upon destroying them...
...I.H...
...Yet, it is sad to say, The Nation provides more necessary information about violations of civil liberties than any comparable American journal...
...What follows is hardly a full or sufficient answer but it is not at all insignificant...
...Now I do not mean to say that Sidney Hook is indifferent to the problem of civil liberties, or that he is "against" them...
...The American Committee for Cultural Freedom recently held a conference in New York on European-American relations, at which a large number of distinguished intellectuals tried to find out why Europe doesn't love us...
...The mural, explained Dr...
...Yet hardly a voice has been raised in the official circles of liberalism to fight against this injustice...
...And what is most disheartening is not 6 • DISSENT • Winter 1954 that the reactionaries attack but that the liberals hardly remember how to counter-attack...
...Did any of the intellectuals in New York think to make a connection between their "problem" and Churchill's revelation...
...Were one to read only a journal like Commentary today, one would hardly be aware that there is a serious threat to civil liberties in America, though one would certainly know that certain Stalinoids are inflating and exploiting this threat for their own purposes...
...Simons said that the mural was "a problem of the school" and did not concern "the outside...
...One is not shocked at this, the language is familiar enough, go a step further and you have the American Legion or the DAR telling one to go back where you came from...
...For what does it matter...
...Last summer the New School for Social Research decided to hang a yellow curtain over an Orozco mural in its cafeteria, because the mural included portraits of Lenin and Stalin...
...In reply to protests, Dr...
...How easy it is to attack and destroy "the ritual liberals," those, that is, who favor unconditional civil liberties without regard to the Stalinist problem...
...But surely the borders of the mind are contracting in America, not through physical terror or force but through built-in fears, through hesitations and cautions which are not without a genuine basis in reality...
...To be sure, there are some quarters that don't feel worried at all, that seem to imply, in fact, that there is no need for concern until Sidney Hook is accused of robbing the rich to help the poor...
...That it uses this necessary information to further the disastrous position of quasi-appeasement of Stalinism, merely emphasizes all the more the failure of the other, more powerful wing of liberalism to do its job...
...but can one, should one laugh today...
...The liberals are bewildered...
Vol. 1 • January 1954 • No. 1
