SCIENCE, FREEDOM AND PEACE

...Internationally known as an uncompromising fighter for freedom and democracy, he was one of the main organizers of Americans For Intellectual Freedom, which provided the only effective counter-demonstration to the Soviet-inspired Waldorf "peace" conference last March...

...Hitler and Stalin have written in fire over the skies of Europe this message: Socialism without political democracy is not socialism but slavery...

...It is sometimes said that the present world Crisis is the result of conflict between two world powers—the Soviet Union and the United States...

...Because I am a socialist and democrat I wish to prevent the outbreak of war which always imperils freedom and destroys the human and material resources of the economy...

...This attack on even the possibility of objective truth strikes % fatal blow at the prospects of international peace and understanding...

...After hostilities, it withdrew its forces from the troubled regions of Central Europe too soon, thus making it possible for Russia and its satellites to replace the terror of the Nazis with their own terror against democrats and socialists who refused the badge oLCommunist servitude...

...Karl Haushofer urged that "the vhole scholarship of the people serve the leaders of the National Socialist movement...

...If we make a sober survey of the world today, we will find that it is primarily in the Soviet Union that the worker is an appendage of the machine^-and'in the most literal sense...

...Behind it is the logic of power* Where the mind if enchained by the state, it is easier for the state to keep the body enchained...

...But they permit the possibility of solving these problems by the Europeans, within the framework of a set of civilized values without which life has neither meaning nor^ejRvor...

...The result is enslavement worse than the chattel slavery of old...

...A dramatic illustration of the scientific purge in the Soviet Union is the cold pogrom against geneticists on a question which, however controversial, is a matter for scientists to decide, not politicians and policemen...

...Karl Marx predicted that with the development of capitalism and technology, the worker would become an appendage of the machine...

...Buchenwald still exists...

...Science by its very nature recognise...

...Professor Sidney Hook is chairman of New York University's Department of Philosophy...

...a e IN THE STRUGGLE to resolve this issue, conventional terms like "right* and "left" are not reliable guides...

...It accepted Soviet assurances of "free and unfettered" elections with great naivete...

...e SUCH A PROPOSITION is demonstrably false...

...This Is a dangerous error...

...We pledge ourselves to work for a better and freer America, and for a better and more democratic world...

...Today in the Soviet Union, and gradually in all other countries behind the" Iron Curtain, similar obscurantist views are being imposed on all scientists, writers and artists...

...The heritage which unites us all U threatened by an ideology which I identifies the welfare of humanity with the interests of one nation...

...The most serious consequence of the Soviet belief in national, class and party truths is that it makes the quest for objectivity, at the very outset, altogether impossible...

...And because I wish to diminish the possibilities of war and increase the the possibilities of peace, I personally support both the Marshall Plan and the Atlantic PacJ, The first can help Europe achieve the social and industrial reconstruction necessary for greater economic justice and lay the foundation for a united socialist Europe...

...He is also the author of many books on philosophy and politics...

...As a result of this belief in class and party truths, a continuous puige has been raging in the Soviet Union in the fields of music, letters and science...

...In enlisting ourselves in behalf of this struggle, we Americans for Intellectual Freedom do not regard ourselves as partisans of American cap...

...It was not so long ago that the mad nationalism of Hitler proclaimed that all science cculd be divided into the true German science and false Jewish science...

...We present here the major part of a speech he delivered before the assembled delegates...

...The most menacing threat to free inquiry and creation eomes from the interference of the state in the lives of the individual by the imposition of dogmas which would convert the common goods of humanity into the possession of a favored state or class or party...

...The laws of science do not change with national boundaries...

...To maintain that there are class truths in science is to turn the screw of intellectual madness still tighter...

...and the rule of a class with the dictator* ship of a Politbureau and a secret police...

...WHAT EXPLAINS THIS Soviet attack on the preconditions of elementary truth and the quest for a durable peace...

...The color of the intellectual strait jacket is different but not its cut...

...When new resources are found in remote places, workers are rounded up and dispatched at short notice to work them...

...rice and prosperity in a nation with the totalitarian rule of one class...

...AH professors in Germany denounced formalism in art and music...

...Where there is no freedom of thought, it <¦ easier to prevent freedom of physical movement, and to destroy the basic freedom of choice necessary for a free society...

...As Americans profoundly conscious of our cultural debt to Europe, and of the fact that we constieute one civilization in and through all our differences, we pledge curselves to help keep alive the perennial fight for freedom...

...and a society which, with all its imperfections, provides the possibility for criticism, and for transformation of all social relationships along progressive lines...

...It throws mankind back to the primeval era...

...We know the awful result of this cultural barbarism...

...ifalism...

...Neither the Marshall Plan nor the Atlantic Pact guarantees the solution of European problems...

...It suggests that the competing claims of doctrines are to be settled not by logic and experiment, but by class struggle and war...

...This struggle is not between capitalism and socialism (the Soviet regime is just as bitter hostile to socialist Britain as to the United States), but between a culture which permits the advance towards democratic socialism and one which is totalitarian...

...Attempts to get working solutions are hard enough...

...In the Soviet Union, trade unions are creatures of the state, interested primarily in increasing production, not in protecting the workers...

...Between Pravda and the MVD, mind and body are ruthlessly controlled...

...When factories are transferred from one part of the Soviet Union to another, workers are often herded together and their families sent after them...

...Scientists like Lenard and Stark proclaimed that "Jewish formalism in national science must be rejected by all means...

...The second will prevent the expanding Soviet dictatorship from overrunning the West before Europe recovers and stabilises itself in a democratic, socialist economy...

...In a recent issue of the Soviet official journal, Problems oj Philosophy, we read: "Marxism-Leninism shatters into bits the cosmopolitan fictions concerning supra-class, non-national, 'universal' science, end definitely proves that science like all culture in modern society, is national in form and class in content...

...only what follows from evidence and what does not...

...If the partisans of Stalin's police state are leftists, then I am no leftist...

...unless we can make some objective estimate of the consequences of any proposed policy, no intelligent resolution of problems can be made...

...Professor Hook was one of three American delegates at that conference...

...For unless we can agree, no matter how roughly upon the facts in any situation...

...In fact, objectivism, formalism, and internationalism—now called cosmopoitanism — are regarded as the greatest heresies in the Soviet Union...

...which many of us strongly I oppose, but as children of the Amer- I ican Revolution, the French Hevolu- I lion and the European Enlightenment...

...In most other countries of the world, the worker is protected by free trade unions...

...THE PATH TO ANY PEACE worth having depends upon keeping the channels of free inquiry and communication open...

...As a socialist, ] have more in common with a democrat who differs with me on economic questions but who- believes in civil rights and a peaceful method of resolving our economic differences, than with any professed, socialist who would seize power by a minority coup, keep it by terror, and take orders from 'i foreign tyrant...

...As an American, and therefore free to criticize his own government, I must confess that the American government in the past has made many errors which have emboldened the Soviet regime to threaten the liberties of Europe...

...The plain truth is that in making science, art and industry matters for the police, Russia and its satellites are at war with the traditions of a free culture which have painfully survived other totalitarian threats...

...but if the whole idea of objective truth is scrapped, as official Soviet doctrine demands, th,en the danger is increased and what cannot be solved by reasoning will be settled by fighting...

...campaign of semantic corruption waged by the totalitarians shows that not all who call themselves socialists or democrats or pacifists are such...

...During the war, it did not plan properly for the freedom of Europe after the war...

...The conflict is between two world systems—between a society based on total error...

...As the great French historian of science, Pierre Duhem, once put ft: "The extent to which a science is national marks the extent of its deficiencies...

...only the guards are new...