Beria and McCarthy

...It is a moral achievement insofar as it rests upon a triumph of honesty over dishonesty in dealing with competitor or foe...

...the fact that the method of liquidating political opponents has not changed is illuminating for the political logic which governs a tyrannical state...

...while today many give their covert or overt sympathy to McCarthyism because they think anything is justified if it is opposed to Communism...

...Thus, the charge grows in implausibility by its more and more extravagant implications...

...McCarthyism has proved inter alia that the motive force of indiscriminate accusations against a political foe is dishonesty...

...Perhaps it should be added that dogmatic assumptions are just as fertile of indiscriminate judgments and accusations as is dishonesty...

...But the tyranny is bound by some inner compulsion to charge the unsuccessful oligarch not only with treason against the regime but with connivance with its enemies...

...It is not possible to work out a program against a government without challenging government per se, as a tyranny identifies the very principle of government with the existing regime...

...More likely, the phenomenon is more Communist than Russian and is, in fact, a phenomenon which transcends Communism and applies to all tyrannies and all forms of government which rely on indiscriminate formulae and oversimplified definitions of the issues before men...

...The fact that there is no way of opposing a regime without the use of conspiratorial methods gives added plausibility to such a charge...

...We must place a much higher estimate upon integrity than we have been accustomed to...

...It is one of the embarrassing similarities between tyranny and a corruption in a democracy that these outrageous charges create an atmosphere in which the most implausible charges are believed...

...Thus, Beria is charged with plotting the return of capitalism, as the victims of the Moscow Trials were charged with connivance with "Trotskyite and Fascist wreckers...

...The discriminating judgment by which democratic health is maintained is an intellectual achievement insofar as discrimination represents a triumph of empirical wisdom over dogma...

...The charge gains in implausibility when it is claimed that contrasting enemies, such as Trotsky and Hitler, were in cahoots through the machinations of the alleged traitor...

...But it would also be foolish not to note the similarity in technique and temper between McCarthyism and the tyrannies: The indiscriminate accusation, the identification of any hated foe with any feared treason, the lack of meticulous standards of justice ¦— these similarities must be obvious to anyone...

...Perhaps another similarity ought to be noted...

...This matter is of more than academic interest when one considers that, only yesterday, many so-called "liberals" were soft toward Communism because they thought anything which was opposed to fascism was good...

...The demagogue takes advantage of the enemy by leveling any charge against a political foe which will seem most damaging...

...Incidentally, the ironic fact that two contrasting creeds, Nazism and Communism, so different in ostensible policy yet so similar in temper, produced such identical fruits of cruelty and terror, should have instructed both the Right and the Left in the camp of democracy that the temper and the integrity with which the political fight is waged is more important for the health of a society than any particular policy, however necessary it is to fight for political policies which seem to us to embody the best hope of justice...

...It took the French Socialists a long time to separate themselves from the Communist plotters against their civilization, because they followed the Marxist dogma that it was important not to break "the solidarity of the working class...

...These were, and are, tyrannical systems, while McCarthyism is only a corruption in a democratic society...

...The democratic slogan should be: "Choose your bedfellows with discrimination on each issue in which you are interested...

...It is the connivance of otherwise "honest" and respectable people with a political movement whose methods they do not approve because it fights a foe whom they fear...

...What can be the purpose of this strange liturgy of tyrannical jurisprudence...

...To begin with, one must assume that the charge of "treason" against a fallen oligarch in a tyranny has a priori a modicum of truth...

...Some of the crimes which were fastened on him clearly antedated his rise to power in the Communist hierarchy...

...For it is becoming very clear that discriminating judgment is the basis of democratic health and sanity...

...What propels a tyranny along this road of implausibility...

...It would be indiscriminate to identify McCarthyism with either fascism or Communism...

...We are supposed to see in all this some glimpses into the strange enigma of the "Russian soul," which we could understand the better if we read the novels of Dostoevsky...

...Perhaps each more excessive implication is made necessary by the effort to hide the absurdity of the previous implication...

...Another Marxist dogma colors the vision of even non-Socialists in France and the whole of Europe when looking at America...

...We make many mistakes, but none of our virtues are appreciated, because we are looked at through dogmatic spectacles which color all realities by the assumption that a "capitalistic" nation must by nature be "imperialistic...

...Discrimination is required to know that an opponent on one issue is not necessarily an opponent on every other issue...

...In previous purge trials, the victims were usually made to confess that they were never really loyal to the regime, and to attribute their treason to the taint of a hitherto secret "bourgeois" origin...

...The creed demands absolute distinctions between friend and enemy in both domestic and foreign affairs...

...In any case, it is quite clear that the logic involved in these trials stands at the opposite end of the kind of reasoning which sustains a democracy...

...In Beria's case, he is accused of plotting with the Mensheviks in Georgia in the Twenties, when the Communist official history had previously assigned him an heroic role in the struggle against the Mensheviks...

...This middle ground is preserved not so much by particular policies as by discrimination in judgment and by integrity in observing basic standards of justice...

...According to the theory, we are supposed to be embarrassed if, let us say, on some foreign-policy question we have a "bedfellow" who does not agree with us on a domestic issue...

...This is merely an American version of the fateful European pattern of fascism justifying itself as an opponent of Communism and Communism justifying itself as an opponent of fascism, the one seeking to draw the Right and the other the Left from the democratic middle ground...

...Beria and McCarthy McCarthyism is not fascism, but—like Communism—it labels every opponent a total enemy and would make perpetual disgrace the price of defeat By Reinhold Niebuhr When the Soviet Government published the "confessions" of Beria, the fallen secret-police chief, it appeared not only that he had confessed to all kinds of horrendous crimes of "treason" and to the purpose of restoring "capitalism," but that the pattern made familiar in the purge trials of the Thirties was faithfully copied...

...Perhaps it is merely the logic of a system working its way to its final absurdity...

...For indiscriminate judgments are only partly due to ignorance and the incapacity for making discriminating judgments...

...Actually, we were saved from Nazism because people of the most diverse domestic views could unite on their foreign-policy objectives, while those who were blind to the Nazi danger also belonged almost equally to the Right and to the Left...

...It must therefore prove an enemy to be an absolute enemy...

...Many things have changed in Russia...

...Beria was made to confess that he had been a traitor from the beginning...

...Von Papen, whose pathetic record of connivance with Nazism was recently published, might be put down as the classic type of this sort of respectable capitulation to evil...

...The latter is merely the corruption raised to the nth degree...

...This similarity proves that a corruption in a democracy does have some frightening analogies with tyranny...

...One remembers how, in the purge trials, some of the real heroes of the Revolution and the leading philosopher of Marxism, Bukharin, confessed that they were traitors at heart even while they were risking life and limb in the revolutionary struggle...

...The implausibility of the charge grows by the further assertion that the crime is of very long duration...

...The "bedfellow" theory of politics, so popular in certain liberal circles, must therefore be strictly outlawed...