Where the News Ends

...Not an economic sanction was imposed on the Soviet Union...

...While Hungary struggled and fell in unequal combat, not a man, not a gun came from the West...

...The only help the Hungarian freedom fighters got was from the unknown Soviet soldiers who saved their own honor by joining in the movement...

...But there is something fantastically wrong, morally and politically, with a "rule of law" that operates only against our natural friends and allies and never against our enemies, that has a sharp edge for Great Britain, France and Israel, but no edge at all for Nasser or Syria, well on the way to Soviet dependency, and none whatever for the source of most of the mischief that afflicts the world, the Soviet Union...

...One can only hope that in the blood of the Hungarian martyrs of liberty is the seed of much further disintegration of Communist rule in the satellite area, and in the Soviet Union itself...

...The very strong pressure put on these countries to withdraw from occupied positions was not accompanied, as it should have been, by equal pressure on Egyptian dictator Nasser to clear the Suez Canal and open it to all shipping under tolerable regulation, or on Syria to repair the wanton destruction of an oil pipeline running through its territory...

...The hundreds of signatories of "Hooray for Murder" manifestos, glorifying Stalin's extermination of his old Party comrades, are now, with few exceptions, heartily ashamed of what they did and only wish it could be forgotten...

...No one got up in the forum of the United Nations to denounce the disgusting farce of conceding further membership to a regime which had defied the United Nations on innumerable occasions, and most recently and outrageously in the case of Hungary...

...Especially damaging was the fact that workers were in the forefront of the anti-Communist fight, on the barricades as long as their ammunition held out and later using the workers' familiar weapon, the general strike...

...But very ominous for the future is the widespread mood in the West that the lesson to be drawn from the orgy of Soviet terror in Hungary is to tread softly, hold one's breath and try to propitiate the Soviet tyrants as soon as possible, for fear of precipitating World War III...

...Morally, to be sure, the Soviet Union lost ground by its merciless repression of the Hungarian demand for liberty...

...This double standard is now out of fashion...

...Hungary reduced the fellow-traveler species in the United States and in Western Europe to its hard core of incorrigible freaks, like the Red Dean of Canterbury...

...What happened in Hungary was a much bigger and more demonstrative Kronstadt...

...Anyone who wants extensive and precise documentation as to how dismally the American Left failed in its moral and intellectual obligations at this time can find it in Eugene Lyons's The Red Decade and Peter Viereck's The Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals...

...But when the Soviet Union committed a most flagrant act of geno-cidal aggression, overthrowing the legitimate government of Hungary and substituting a puppet regime, ruthlessly crushing over a period of many weeks the active and passive resistance of the overwhelming majority of the Hungarian people, nothing happened except the passing of a series of plaintive, utterly futile protests by the UN...

...Leaving the Soviet Union in 1934, fresh from the horrors of slave labor camps, the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," the political famine of 1932-33 and the succession of phony political trials which preceded the judicial murder of the old Communists, I was horrified at the unrestrained, uncritical enthusiasm for the Soviet Union which then prevailed among many radicals and liberals...

...Unless there is a speedy rejection by this country of the assumption that the Soviet Union may commit aggression at will unpunished while free nations have no right to defend themselves against indirect aggression, the stage will be set for some sorry scenes of Soviet^sponsored political blackmail in the months and years ahead...

...It would be an ideal state of affairs if every country, however powerful, were obliged to submit its international differences to some universally applicable rule of law...

...If it is to be assumed, as this craven and stupid theory assumes, that aggression is always to pay off in political blackmail, one must expect the Soviet Government to resort to aggression with alarming frequency in the future...

...But a new and perhaps still more dangerous double standard seems to be emerging from the Middle Eastern and Hungarian crises...

...This may be summed up as follows: When three free countries, Great Britain, France and Israel, resorted to arms to redress grievances which neither the processes of diplomacy nor the United Nations had given any promise of redressing, they were duly censured with bell, book and candle...