Books Won't Burn

...French dissidents can count on an independent press to state their views above the heads of party leaders...

...Yugoslav leaders Milovan Djilas and Vladimir Dedijer have, during the last four years, been in all four of these positions...

...Stalinists and Trolskyites jailed at various times under the Smith Act for "conspiracy to advocate" overthrow of the Government are hardly in the same position as French Socialist Andre Philip, prevented by the Mollet-Lacoste leadership from addressing his comrades in the party press or at party congresses...

...Thus Djilas, Tito's Partisan comrade, will reach precisely the same position as the Imre Nagy whom Tito once befriended and whose seizure Tito's aides protested...

...Refusing this, they were stripped of opportunity to earn a living, then forbidden to write—not only in Yugoslavia but outside it...

...and even silence will not help the Hungarians...

...And there is also a difference between him and the Russian writers Vladimir Duclintsev and Margarita Aliger, against whom the entire stern apparatus of Soviet Communism is now being mobilized...

...Like the late Chancellor of the Third German Reich, Tito and Khrushchev imagine that they can destroy ideas physically...

...and when he wrote on Hungary for The New Leader last November, he was jailed...

...The fact is that we have advanced from the 16th century, though Hitler, Tito and Khrushchev have certainly been little improvement on Cardinal Pole and the Dukes of Guise...

...Expelled from the party, they were then enjoined to silent compliance...

...The fact that the builders of modern democracy understood the necessity of unfettered criticism enables us now to draw a dividing line among the cases mentioned above: It is the line of peaceful reversibility...

...What remains to be seen, however, is whether Djilas and Dedijer—any more than Nagy and his comrades—can count among their friends the Government of the United States...

...permitted to travel abroad (without his family), he became the target of new threats when he repeated Tito's old criticisms of the Soviet Union after Tito had made his peace with Khrushchev...

...It was the American Revolutionaries' understanding of this tendency that gave us the Constitution's separation and division of power and the firm freedoms of the Bill of Rights...

...Djilas is now being tried again, because his manuscript, The New Class, was smuggled to the West...

...Dedijer, meanwhile, was subject to insidious harassment at every turn...

...Unless Western governments act decisively to prevent it, his present sentence (which expires in December 1959) will probably be extended to the statutory maximum of 15 years...

...Finally, even they, because they can still move about Moscow, are not in the position of Imre Nagy, Geza Loaonczy, Tibor Dery, Gyula Hay and other Hungarian writers and political leaders now in Communist jails...

...The Soviet writers, on the other hand, must work silently for the very overturn of the system...

...There are, of course, considerable differences from case to case: The U.S...

...Nor is there recourse, in "People's Yugoslavia," to an independent supreme court for the protection of Djilas's liberties or to the press for uninhibited discussion of his ideas...

...Sometimes, indeed, even ideas long forgotten are revived by a new settings—as we saw syndicalism reborn last fall in Hungary and Poland...

...For the Smith Act prisoners could rely—against a hostile public and legislature—on the ultimate protection of the Constitution by our Supreme Court...

...At first dissidents within the ruling Communist party, they were restrained from a trial of strength with Tito among the party's rank-and-file...

...When Djilas gave interviews to foreign newsmen, he was placed under court sentence...

...Today, even the books refuse to burn, and their heroic authors have more true friends around the world than their jailers...

...If all unsuccessful rebels, inspired or misguided, are to be squelched, then among the discontented the creative rebels must yield to the cruel destroyers...

...For as long as an idea can be received freely somewhere in the world, it will be nurtured and spread until history at last demonstrates its irrelevance...

...All over the world, but particularly in the third of it subjected to Communism, one finds books banned, speeches barred, authors harassed by formal or informal sanctions because their ideas are "dangerous"—i.e., unpopular or loo popular...

...The sales of Djilas's book abroad (and the Nagy and Dudintsev books have equal potential) show how futile this approach is...

...and the "outs" when they get power become worse than the original "ins...

...In those clays, men were burned, and ideas still lived...

...To consider all these cases alike leads one to the resigned fatalism of Ecclesiastes...