The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Truth About Communist China ON OCTOBER 27, 1958, I devoted my column to Edward Hunter's hot little Black Book on Red China, which contains a wealth of...
...At that time he spoke in the teeth of the evidence as extravagantly of the joyful and happy life of the masses in the Soviet Union as he now does of China...
...Now I have received confirmation of my judgment from Sidney Hook...
...he claimed the deportations, executions and tortures were anti-Soviet canards...
...Nearing could have learned the truth about the Chinese terror by talking with and interrogating Chinese refugee youth and scholars in Hong Kong, most of whom are non-political...
...By the time the Chinese get around to admitting the facts about their brutal repression, Nearing will probably be singing the praises of another totalitarian regime...
...Nearing's critical judgments are reserved only for the United States...
...Nonetheless, a sufficient number of victims escaped from Germany to make the denial of these invited visitors that concentration camps existed sound very hollow indeed...
...I have never been in China or anywhere in the Far East, but I was expected to judge as to who was telling the truth...
...Scott Nearing saw in China what the Communists permitted him to see, just as the visitors to Hitler's Germany after 1934 saw only what the Nazi showed them...
...On January 26, 1959, I quoted from a volume by Helen and Scott Nearing exultantly entitled The Brave New World...
...Nearing's defence of the current terroristic regime in China reminded me of a debaie I had with him in the '30s, just after the Moscow trials, under the auspices of a student club in the School of Education at New York University...
...I was especially irritated by the fact that to them the boys and girls of mainland China seemed to be more intelligent, more beautiful and altogether more attractive than the youngsters of wicked capitalist lands...
...Years ago, when Nearing was a distant neighbor of mine in Vermont, I passed a gravel pit where he was wrestling with a large stone...
...who just returned from a visit to East Asia...
...I said nothing but kept watching...
...I have not seen any retraction or disavowal on Nearing's part despite Nikita Khrushchev's partial revelation at the 20th Congress of the Russian Communist party of how intense Soviet terror was at the very period when Nearing praised the Kremlin for its humanity...
...Scott's Utopia is too good to be true...
...The two books placed me in an embarrassing position...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Truth About Communist China ON OCTOBER 27, 1958, I devoted my column to Edward Hunter's hot little Black Book on Red China, which contains a wealth of practically official material about life under the Peking Government...
...He denied all allegations of Stalin's terror...
...It was during the honeymoon period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Nearing was consoling himself with the ouija board and spiritualism...
...Old propagandists never seem to fade away...
...Both authors have good credentials...
...They traveled by invitation through that wide and thickly populated land, and found everything just too, too wonderful...
...Words are no more dishonest than stones...
...I stopped to watch...
...Whatever political criterion Nearing used to characterize the U. S. as a Fascist state would apply preeminently to the Communist states he admires...
...Words are such dishonest things...
...The author sums up in this way: "Red China's crimes against humanity, its own people as well as foreigners, are perpetrated on such a broad canvas and with such sweeping strokes that a normal person fails to grasp their enormity, but is inclined to think of them as a figure of speech, unrelated to reality...
...I was told by Professor Takahashi of the University of Kuyushu, who happened to be present at a talk Nearing gave at International House in Tokyo last year, that Nearing had characterized the U. S. as a Fascist state...
...He took time out to write: "I am catching up with my reading after a long absence and have reached the column you wrote which contained quotations from Scott Nearing's book, The Brave New World...
...Or should we say that they are as honest as those who use them...
...He was unable to explain to Professor Takahashi why, if the U. S. was a Fascist state, he was permitted to travel abroad in order to denounce it...
...I find on my return to the U. S. that since Anastas Mikoyan's visit many of the old flock of Party-line appeasers and apologists are crawling out of their holes into which they crept after Khrushchev drowned the Hungarian revolution in blood...
...Scott is an accredited economist...
...After a while Nearing said: 'I feel honest when I work with stone...
...I can't bear to speak or write any more.' "It is a pity that Nearing overcame this repugnance to the use of words...
...They chose the bitter bread of exile rather than an uncertain and degraded life under the regimented terror of Communist China...
...Ed, when he worked on the staff of the New York Post, was known as just about the most eagerly honest man in the business...
...Nearing looked up expecting me to rub his nose in the dirty political news...
...I decided against the brave new worlder on general principles...
Vol. 42 • March 1959 • No. 13
