THE FELLOW DEFENDERS - PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF 'CONFUSED' LIBERALS'

...Their propaganda has linked him closely to themselves, making him believe that "he will be the next victim...

...1.1 * * IN CONTRAST TO GENUINE PACIFISTS who believe, and always have believed, that no danger whatsoever could justify a war, and that armed preparedness always attracts war...

...While it is certain that the number and influence of American fellow-travelers have considerably decreased since the war and first postwar years, probably to less than half of their previous strength, their potential influence should not be underestimated...

...Different from the traditional fellowtraveler who saw in the Soviet Union a successful social experiment, and in the ^native Communists a group of efficient radical progressives, the new fellow-traveler is not so sure about both points, and he may even admit his ' dislike for both...

...might have a certain feelingr of identification with the Communists...

...If, according 1?o Gunnar...

...Max Lerner (in 1940, it is true), "ideals and ethics are important in politics as norms, but they are scarcely effective as techniques...

...THE FELLOW-DEFENDERS, the Third Sex of contemporary politics, turn their feelings of fear, confusion and guilt into aggressiveness against self-evident facts which, were they not distorted by Communist advertising claims, would cut off their argument at once...

...their size, their context, and the chance to correct them, those coefficients are eliminated...

...After all, there is an immense difference between the Communists and the Nazis...

...Whoever followed the accounts of Soviet aggressions and their technique in latter years, whoever' knows the blueprints for world conquest designed and used by the Comintern and the Moscow leaders, whoever heard a radio commentator report on the violent advances of the Soviets in Europe and Asia, must be aware that, if unchecked, the Soviet Power will create the "clear and present danger" of war, against which this country must defend itself by building up its power to resist...

...Myrdal, the American dilemma consists in the inability to live up to the high moral precepts on which the republic is founded, the democratic dilemma may show itself in occasional difficulties, to uphold peace and liberty in defense against their mortal enemies...

...Actually, the fellow-traveler of 1949 seems somewhat different from the fellow-traveler of the previous era which ended between 1946 and 1947, and the Communists are using him in different ways for new objectives...

...In some cases it may be true that there are advantages for, say, musicians or ballet dancers to exhibit the same fellowtraveling opinions as their mighty newspaper critic who happens to go all-out for the partyline...

...The reason is that the liberals are the defenders of the minority rights per se, . and therefore take every curtailment of these rights more seriously than other people, whether these other people might think these curtailments to be necessary or not...

...In many cases, they are the products of a conflict, an insecurity, an anxiety which has been mobilized by and for Communist propaganda, 'and which leads to a rather clear-cut case of a political neurosis which we may understand like mental disturbances of a more personal character...

...For the sake of peace he has to oppose American resistance to Soviet violence and war-mongering abroad, and for the sake of liberty he has to defend the right of Communists to conspire against, and spy on,' the American republic...

...IT IS AN OLD POLITICAL TRUISM, stated by Edmund Burke, that principles which are utterly inflexible in all cases are bound to prove impotent and self-stultifying...

...This difference is the test of the fellow-defender as a product of Soviet propaganda...

...THE STRANGE CONTRADICTIONS of the fellow-defender, as we should like to call the new fellow-traveler, have deeper roots...

...Among professional people, professors, Protestant clergymen," among artists, actors, authors and millionaires the Communists still have lots who themselves don't know that they are being "had," and that the Communist mind-catchers processed great, noble • ideas, into little, ready-made ideas in brder to catch them...

...He did not protest when Nazis or alleged pro-Nazis were curbed in this country...

...evils that Congress has a right to prevent...

...This feeling of guilt, latently existent in every liberal believer in • peace and justice, is the psychological basis* from which" the Communists i can proceed to the production of their fellow-defenders...

...He is, like Professor Theodore Brameld, a sponsor and defender of the Waldorf Parade, unable to make up his mind between American and Communist positions, methods, goals...

...Wallace, - who, in short, have turned into full-time fellowtravelers, are not just "politically naive," as is sometimes explained with a shrug of the shoulders...

...y ¦ To mobilize the conflict in the minds of the fellow-defenders, they must lead them into the belief that their noble political principles arc violated by the American.treatment of Communism...

...Since the majority of the country has recovered from this somewhat hysterical blindness to the Soviet facts, the propaganda of Soviet harmlessness would have little chance to affect larger groups...

...Therefore, defenders must seem concerned with the preservation of allegedly threatened civil liberties and allegedly endangered peaceful relations to mobilize the national bad conscience which can be disturbed more easily than the national faculty of rational perception...

...after affirming that he was not a Communist, the old fellow-traveler used to add: "But the Soviet Union is a great step forward, and the Communists are fine people," while now he prefers to explain: "But we endanger, world peace'if We don't give in to the Soviet Union, and we endanger our democracy if we won't let our Communists alone...

...and'thjs paradox cannot be explained ' by surface reasons, such as lack of intelligence and honesty...

...Just as the hypocrite suffers "from a blackout of selfcriticism, the fellow-defender, an inverted hypocrite, suffers from the enjoyment of his chronically fact-blind, badly inflated bad conscience...

...In a great republic, there are constantly evils occurring requiring remedies which must be effiicacious in proportion to the importance of the occasion...

...The Fellow Defenders — Psychopathology of 'Confused Liberals' By Norbert Muhlen "There are-some neurotica in whom, to judge by all their reactions, the instinct of self-preservation has actually been reversed...

...Roosevelt to travel to Berchtesgaden and to "settle his differences" with Hitler...

...This was the era of Communist penetration, advance and conquest in this . country...

...Let us be clear about' one thing," explained Mr...

...With^ the Soviets attacking and this country resisting, so-called neutrality of liberals means support of the Soviets...

...By a sort of conditioned reflex, mentions of Soviet faults are immediately associated, and thus crossed out by mentions of American faults...

...We may assume that those Nobel Prize winners of peace, literature, medicine and physics, those eminent teachers of psychology, law "and mathematics, those great pianists and painters who sponsor the Cultural Cominform Congresses, who sign telegrams of welcome to the sacrilegious heresiarch of Canterbury, who become ward-heelers for Mr...

...Here again, we * see a victory of Communist advertising over American realities...

...There is often an element of personal experience in this attitude: after cooperating with the Communists in progressive and "antiFascist" causes and committees, he is reluctant to break every sentimental tie with them, just because their comrades in- this country advocate treason, or because their party in Hungary or in Bulgaria murders dissenters...

...they have to see American resistance as a persecution of the Communist minority and...

...This formula, in its wise and very American pragmatism outlined the limits within which the principles of liberty and peace might be adjusted to the reality principle of self-preservation without damage to these political principles themselves...

...If„ the fellow-traveler seems unable to grasp the meaning of the headlines, it must have causes above and behind his rational, intellectual capacities...

...Our analysis shows that it is not legitimate concern for liberal and pacifist principles which makes the fellow-defender protest against our policies, but his distorted, unrealistic image of Ihe Communists, his emotional unwillingness to see them for what experience and evidence show them to be...

...To quiet his doubts about the realities and to appease his critical powers, the Communists have developed for his use a technique of distortion based on the formula that the Mote equals the Beam, the mote being of course in the eyes of America...

...While the traditional feUew-traveler has been a secret instrume^Larfcf objective of Communist advance, the newone is mainly used as an open weapon of Communist defense...

...but—just as in the life of individuals—a healthy society finds its way to preserve itself as well as its political conscience, as this country has shown in the last three years...

...This in his Introduction to the works of Machiavelli, who himself had set down in his last Dtscours: "A republic that desires to maintain her liberties needs daily frosh precautions...

...IN THE YEAR OF LENIN'S BIRTH, the Communist fellow-traveler and his place in the plot of revolution were described with precise prophecy by Dostoevsky, in his novel' "The Possessed": "Our party," the madman Verkhovensky, underground organizer of the great upheaval, said eighty years ago, "our party does not consist only of those who commit murder and arson, fire off pistols in the traditional fashion, or bite colonels...

...the Cemmunists took control of his political actions by inconspicuous and elaborate techniques, and exploited, in ways which were not always easily discernible, him and his socially desirable ends as means for their own, quite different, dictatorial ends...

...He seeks doggedly for "reasons"—rationalizations of deeper, purely emotional feelings, as a psychoanalyst would immediately (and correctly) suspect—to show that, if all is said and done, "the Brown Fascists were much worse than the Red Fascists," He mjght have personal reasons to feel more threatened by the former than by the latter...

...ALTHOUGH The Nejv Leader has repeatedly opposed irresponsible "smear" campaigns, we intend to pursue more vigorously than ever our policy of exposing Communist front organisations...

...and he...

...In a few other cases a fellow-traveler may . believe in the possibility of an ultimate victory of Communism and wants to play safe while risking little...

...Do you know how many we shall catch' by little,\ready-made ideas...

...Churchill recently reminded us, better teachers than are mere words...

...In future issues we will present articles on some of the new, decoptlve fellow-traveling gimmicks of the Communist party which have never been exposed before.— The Editor...

...nor did he ask for an understanding with the Third Reich, or for Mr...

...They seem to have nothing in view but self-injury and self-destruction" —Freud...

...To put him into this role, to organize him into that part of American public opinion which opposes the present policies, to create the Sixth Column of voluntary non-Communist defenders of the Communist Fifth Column, the Communists had to twist his mind into a new turn...

...On -a point of fact, the bona-fide fellow-traveler (Jo be sharply distinguished from the secret party member with or without membership card) can be recognized by his sincere, stubborn refusal to" admit that the Communists manipulate, and exclusively bene' fit from, his political behavior...

...And this ^significant difference in his attitude proves that it is not a particularly rigid conscience but his distorted estimation of the Soviet realities which makes him a defender of the Communists...

...a. militaristic provocation of the Soviet Power-rin other, words, offenses against the rigid principles of liberalism and pacifism...

...APPARENTLY THERE IS A PARADOX in the fact that people sincerely believing in peace and liberty criticize every.lawful, democratic, peaceful measure in defense of peace and liberty...

...With the recent change in Soviet-American . relations, with the increasing determination of the American public to resist Moscow after it had been seduced and tricked into submission to Moscow, with the new image of Communism prevalent in this country, there was bound to evolve a new type of unwitting American auxiliaries of the Communist secret battalion...

...Neither can the apparent paradox be explained by blaming the new fellow-traveler's attitude on self-seeking calculations and moral baseness...

...We don't knowlhe whole story," he is likely to acquiesce...

...In the present era, however, the Communists, being forced to defend their positions against American resistance, must protect their agents at home and their power abroad against American counter-measures...

...The Possessed of 1949 may still secretly boast of a similar success...

...remarked at the World Congress for Mental- Health in London, in August, 1948...

...as a matter of fact, he was in heartfelt agreement with every measure against Hitler Germany which curtailed the Bill of Rights or which meant war...

...despite the lack of evidence that Communist opinion has been suppressed or that liberals unjustly accused of being Communists have been wronged, he is caught by the Communist scare-appeal...

...While he once defended his cooperation with the Communists for a great many objectively good causes, he now has to defend the Communists themselves in the name of good causes —of peace and civil' liberties...

...but the majority of the new fe>» low-travelers are hardly motivated by opportunism, as so many actually had been in the previous years when among numerous, and especially intellectual groups, fellow-traveling had been the right—and rewarding—thing to do...

...he resents the "oversimplified conclusion that we are faced with a black-or-white, either-or choice...

...They represent a morbid self-criticism which, in times of strain, might prove infectious...

...what he has to believe • and proclaim now is that neither the'Soviet Union nor the American Communists are a threat to this country, and that they have a right to act the way they do, while we have no right to oppose them, even if we dislike them...

...Oliver Wendell Holmes gave, in a famous opinion in the year 1919, the formula as to when the freedom of opinion may be constitutionally curtailed: "The question in every case is," he wrote, "whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive...

...there is no general prescription, no all-around recipe valid in and for every case...

...As if this choice had not been created by what is called Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism and its Moscow practitioners, he blames those Americans who have chosen to defend the democratic "or" rather than the dictatorial "either" for their "destructive attacks...

...p « « THE TRADITIONAL FELLOW-TRAVELER was caught by his discontent with one or several features of democracy, by his will to change, by his enthusiasm for social improvements...

...They are as intelligent—politically and otherwise—as the great mass of Americans who" have learned the truth about Communism through those human events which are, as Mr...

...Among officials and literary men we have lots, lots and they don't know it themselves...

...The liberals always have more guilt feelings than other people," Dr.'Margaret Mead, an American anthropologist...

...and in contrast to sincere liberals who defend everybody whose civil rights they believe infringed upon, the fellow-traveler defends only the Communists, and opposes armaments only, when directed against the Soviets...

...To borrow a mot coined years ago by Claire Booth Luce, both of them are "Commybuts...

...Whoever read the reports of the Canadian spy cage or the revelations of Soviet undercover work in this country must be aware of the fact that' disloyal officials are able to bring about the "clear and present danger" against which the Government must protect itself by investigating its employees and eventually firing those who seem sufficiently suspect...

...It is a question of proximity and degree...

...While, there is today at least as much evidence of concentration camps, persecutions, suppression of every liberty, militarization and mass killings in Soviet Russia as there was known abroad about the same things in Hitler Germany, the fellow-defender refuses to accept it fully, and prefers to accept the words, signs, symbols and appeals of Soviet advertising which, the realities to the contrary notwithstanding, seem to him close to his own way of thinking...

...The fellowdefender, cultivated by Communist propaganda on the soil of democracy and its discontents, will be a relatively lonely figure as,k>ng as the democratic dilemma exists not as a real fact, but only in his imagination...

...He sees the Communists as prodigal bjrothers rather than mortal enemies...