WHO DOESN'T FIGHT FOR FREEDOM?
Mayer, Milton
The Two Worlds Who doesn H fight for freedom? by MILTON MAYER This is the last of a series of three articles by Milton Mayer, whose recent and extended travels took him and his family not only...
...Next month he continues his European report with "The Germans Again...
...What do you think he is—an egghead...
...No," she said, "in our office we all eat in the company dining room and we pay sixteen cents for the midday dinner," and she recited the menu...
...But for a man to come from Belgrade or Bratislava or Krakow with idiotic and ruinous ideas like growing corn where the potato farmer has always grown potatoes—always smaller potatoes— or, worse yet, rye for a cover crop when he doesn't use rye, or, worst of all, nothing at all for two years and letting the land rest, that's bad...
...He's dissatisfied, but he always was...
...No get-up-and-go...
...He studies Marx in his overalls (and his children in their rompers...
...The Communist dictatorship everywhere breaks it in order to increase production...
...Here's where the cemetery is, where his ancestors (and some of his descendants) are buried...
...But what are they censoring that I'll fight to read...
...Three times in the wars my house was burned and three times I rebuilt it...
...And the fellow in the Declaration of Independence tells us not to mistake his grumbling for revolutionary redeye: "All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are suf-ferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed...
...Svit is a company town, built right straight up on the Slovakian flats at the foot of the mountains...
...Totalitarian control of the mass media—sure...
...No pioneer...
...It wasn't built for tourists, though...
...The proletarian dictatorship," said Lenin, "is the bridge to the socialist society...
...The Communists fight him back—no freedom to plant those potatoes—and he has to give up...
...He discovered the simple fact"— this is Engels at Marx's grave— "that human beings must have food, drink, clothing, and shelter, first of all, before they can interest themselves in politics, science, art, religion...
...But there's nobody to snap your fingers at...
...The man in the room next door— not only in Svit, but in Brezno and Modra and Zvolen—was wearing overalls...
...I met a Jewish woman in the most anciently anti-Semitic of all the Communist countries...
...I knew...
...You tell him the land is actually the collective's, or the state's, and he says, "I farm it...
...A lot of things don't work, and when you ring the bell, the bell doesn't work...
...I said...
...It's using it that makes it mine...
...Nobody knows what the worker thinks," said the steel boss...
...That was for freedom from the foreign tyrant, which isn't the same thing as freedom pure...
...We never had a dictatorship that was...
...not for American tourists...
...The Son of Man said that those who fed the hungry would go to heaven and those who didn't would go to hell...
...Tied to his own country, and to his own language, and his own traditions, and his own religion, and his own friends...
...An American columnist says he was just in Lidice, and an old lady had a picture of Stalin above her bed...
...If the state is that landlord—good...
...Besides," she added, "my husband is buried here and we've always lived here...
...I didn't ask him why he didn't get out of that ravaged defile in that ravaged pass...
...My ancestors fanned it...
...And it dosn't pretend to be a free society, so there isn't so much hypocrisy as you might think...
...I met an Italian in a cave in the Futa Pass...
...I found out something else about him...
...Me, I like to jingle the change in my pocket and snap my fingers and say, "Boy, take this," or, "Boy, bring that...
...But that's nothing," says Maria Comberti, who knows die perpetually very poor...
...You know how it is...
...That's nearly everybody everywhere...
...I've never been to the city...
...The proletarian worker— the man without property or the illusion of property—is the man Marxism likes...
...And in the poor countries of immobile people, it isn't even a country...
...It will have to get a lot worse before he fights for freedom, and the fact is that it's getting a little bit better all the time...
...At the end came the all-out propaganda plug for the peace-loving democracies building socialism while the atomic imperialist race-hating warmongers were wrecking the world, but as soon as the plug began the audience was moving toward the door...
...Too many low-production farms in these old peasant lands, not enough factories...
...It's very tough...
...But man had known it all along...
...I found out that he isn't fighting for freedom...
...I am sorry to have to report that until 1948 the other two thirds either had to get out somehow or live somehow—or die somehow...
...At the same time collectivization gives him the use of machinery and lets him keep "his" land...
...She is widowed and alone...
...If the landlord enables him to improve "his" land—good...
...He fought in the Slovak uprising against the Nazis in 1944...
...We were Svit's first Americans...
...After that," he said, "we shall see...
...Have we decided what freedom is, and, when we have decided what it is, where to put it on our shopping list...
...Hungary was Austria's breadbasket for a millenium, and Slovakia was Hungary's breadbasket for a millenium, and Poland was everybody's breadbasket (including Sweden's) for a millenium, and China and India were England's dish of tea...
...I wouldn't go into this elementary matter at all here, except that the technician in Svit went into it with me...
...If we didn't we'd have no quarrel with Marx, would we...
...And the labor isn't as cheap as it used to be...
...And there money means shoes, "the immediately requisite material means of subsistence...
...I asked a steel boss in the Ruhr—where everybody's rich now except the unemployed and the pensioners—what the Dusseldorf worker is thinking these days...
...What Marx discovered, or, more properly, argued, was that freedom itself—and science and art and religion—had no real meaning apart from the condition of a man's stomach...
...Otherwise it lets him alone and he lets it alone...
...He's still against the system—or against system...
...How often does man actually confront the state—and the issues of freedom—in the world of the rich...
...The hotel in Svit—there is only one—is less than fifty years old and not at all bad...
...The poor man there—remember, most men are poor there—is a Marxist without knowing it or even knowing that he isn't...
...freedom is freedom to plant those potatoes...
...She enjoyed the gifts, but she didn't break down and weep the way people did right alter the war...
...Here in eastern Europe—and in Asia and in Africa and in Latin America—is the totalitarian state...
...But always taking orders, that's bad...
...Unless he's a criminal or a soldier his actual confrontation of the state occurs once a year, on the 15th of April...
...in the country, Communist and non-Communist, she has her old equality as a beast of burden still...
...American gentiles were, as usual, a little slower in getting the idea...
...No fight—or even flight—for freedom unless you've got to fight or you've got to flee...
...Censorship—sure...
...That's the way it is in the Communist world, outside the tourist centers...
...It caricatured the Americans indecently...
...I don't mean that it isn't tough...
...And these are most of the people—the middle class was always small—in the recently unindustrial-ized Communist countries...
...Mercy is enjoined upon us by an absolute and unchanging God...
...It's the land, of course, that's been on him, but there's no use arguing...
...You don't see me fighting for freedom from the Parent Teachers Association or the Community Chest...
...So he's only dissatisfied—always grumbling about the long hours and the low wages and the hard work— but he always was...
...For freedom...
...In Poland one rainy Sunday afternoon you see one of these career girls, barefoot in the muddy road, with a load of wood on her back that would break your own...
...And you stay because you stay...
...You and I have shoes enough...
...Your brother would really like to have you there, "I said, "and he has a lovely home...
...Communism has revolutionized the lot of woman by giving her equal access to every job in the city, high and low, that a man has...
...Now, a man has to have something to call his own...
...Here is the heart of peasant resistance...
...You can go a couple of miles farther to Poprad—it's on the map—and from there into the Carpathian High Tatra...
...I supposed that he was a skilled mechanic...
...What's the government got to do with it...
...My children will farm it...
...An expert," with a sneer...
...It implies that these latter must be explained out of the former, whereas the former have usually been explained as issuing from the latter...
...Now I live in this cave...
...Contributions you're expected to make—sure...
...Who doesn't fight for freedom...
...Its area in the life of this poor man is small...
...Democracy" there means shoes...
...Second," he went on, "they say that the machinery makes the work easier...
...They always had the Crucifix there, he says she said, but the Crucifix isn't allowed any more...
...What do you...
...The truth isn't in the American columnist—unless there are two Lidices in Czechoslovakia...
...Change is all right with him...
...Suspicion—sure, pervasive suspicion...
...That's what we believe, isn't it...
...You're always taking orders...
...It dictates to a man that he must crawl and fawn and lie and steal and murder and work as a furnace man in a Nazi death camp and join whatever party promises bread or gives him a crust...
...Until then, she's tied...
...And this was the answer of the woman who'd just said, "He's all I have...
...I'm not even hungry," she said, "when I go home...
...The idea," said the technician in Svit, "is that it's a bridge to something...
...I've always lived here," he said...
...We believe that it is wrong for the poor to steal bread from the rich...
...It makes this job or that job easier, but then they work you all the harder...
...The state wants his money...
...And exactly who has to...
...To be tied to the land meant, and means, to be tied, "progressively," by serfdom, sharecropping, and perpetual debt...
...Rigidly restricted freedom to travel— you bet...
...I asked her about food...
...I have never met a dirt farmer anywhere who didn't like to wiggle his toes in the dirt and say, "It's mine, my very own...
...It doesn't...
...But that's the end of Czechoslovakia...
...Here," and he gestured around the little defile...
...But what does he read the paper to read or turn on the radio to hear...
...His memory goes back to after-the-war and no further...
...What makes you think that it is much more obtrusive than that in the land of the poor...
...But who's got the price of a ticket...
...They don't stay for that," said our local friend...
...He is fighting for freedom to eat...
...The Editors...
...You used to have a little time to loaf in the winter...
...But it isn't that tough that Joseph J. Doakes is going to man the barricades...
...Everything's organized...
...But the term "totalitarian" is misleading...
...We believe that to let the poor man off is to give him mercy, not justice...
...And the longer you stay, the longer you go on staying...
...It's still a company town, but the Republic of Czechoslovakia owns the company...
...He resists to protect "his" land...
...No...
...It's the rye instead of potatoes that he fights...
...It depends," said the boss, "on whether he's got a job...
...We saw an East German movie about the Chennault buccaneers who flew (for money) for the French in IndoChina...
...The production of the immediately requisite material means of subsistence, and therewith the existing phase of development of a nation or an epoch, constitute the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal outlooks, the artistic, and even the religious ideas, are built up...
...What I did find out from him was that his father never saw the inside of a hotel—or of a room with a floor—no matter what party he joined...
...But the dictatorship of hunger is said to be a hard dictator, too...
...Meetings and lectures you're expected to attend— sure...
...First," said a Slovak peasant, "you're not your own boss any more...
...They just want to see a good movie...
...Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will, including," with a gesture eastward, "them...
...It has to...
...His politics, science, art, religion are, as Marx would say, built on his shoes...
...They've got a big do-it-yourself movement on...
...At the Rotary Club or the neighbor's...
...None of these four birds of passage —the horse is the fourth bird—lifts his head...
...When you've gone to Svit, you've gone about as far as you can go...
...Everybody's nice...
...I know," she said, "I was there on my holiday last year...
...No fight for freedom...
...Among those present in eastern Europe who do not fight for freedom are the people who are tied to the land...
...So do you...
...a barefoot chauffeur is on the box behind the bony horse...
...More hammer, less sickle's the word...
...Another man who doesn't fight for freedom is the man who is tied to his own country no matter what kind of country it is or what kind of government it has...
...There, as here, the state means money, unless you're a criminal or a soldier...
...I was—on his behalf—to try to persuade her to come to live with him and his family...
...It's that way in the world of the poor, where, in Wenceslaus Place, the elegant old main street of elegant old Prague, there are used shoelaces for sale, and always were...
...When everyone's hungry, it's nothing...
...I supposed that he might be a member of the Communist Party, to have had technical training, but I didn't find that out...
...Red tape—sure...
...That's all...
...He'll fight for it...
...It's a textile mill now...
...Not until then...
...Around there it's the same idea, only samer...
...He's dissatisfied because he hasn't as much of what he'd like to eat as he wants...
...At his bridge game or his golf game...
...That government is best, he says, as he hands over his taxes, which governs least...
...How unobtrusive it is, except on the 15th of April, in the land of the rich...
...He was living alone there, and I asked him why...
...And if he has a job...
...It isn't a free society, not by half...
...If we say that freedom means to do what we want to do, within reason, and not to do what we don't want to do, within reason, then we have to decide whether political dictatorship is the only impediment to freedom...
...No, indeed...
...You stay where you are, or where your husband is buried...
...An old Italian in a still older cave...
...Discovered—after five or six thousand years of human discovery...
...The next day was Sunday and he was still wearing overalls, so I supposed that he was an atheist...
...American Jews who used to say that just and unjust are relative, and that what's wrong in one place is right in another, and that morals are only customs, and that there are no absolutes, and that man is the measure of all things— these American Jews discovered a quarter-century ago that some things are evil even if local custom, or even German law, proclaims them good...
...by MILTON MAYER This is the last of a series of three articles by Milton Mayer, whose recent and extended travels took him and his family not only through the tourist "beat" of Poland and the Soviet Union, but through East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary as guests of the Protestant churches of those countries...
...If I don't and you don't and we don't, you can be sure that the man in Svit doesn't...
...It's five times as good as it would be in a comparable American company town and ten times as good as it would be in England...
...You're working for somebody else and doing it his way...
...it's a neighborhood or a village...
...It's gotten to be just like the city, I guess...
...Now you work all the time...
...But we believe—you and I—in unchanging absolutes and eternal verities...
...Because all my friends are here...
...I know how it is...
...the Christians were wearing Sunday clothes, and they were a clear majority of the townspeople...
...I brought her presents from her only brother, in western Europe...
...It is only when some are overfed that hunger is hard...
...He's all I have...
...Svit was a pre-Communist company town, though, built and owned by Bata, if I remember right, the outfit that exported good dirt-cheap shoes made by good dirt-cheap labor...
...But it was a rip-roaring movie...
...Aristotle was old hat when he said that starving men can not be interested in virtue, and Napoleon was old tricorne when he said that an army travelled on its stomach...
...Around here we say that the most stable personalities are those that change their residence the least...
...But it's the big idea on which our social order is erected, and without it you have Marxism with only one absolute: Bread bakes the man and all his institutions and ideas...
...Freedom is freedom to eat, and only those who are eating high on the hog think that it is freedom of speech and press and assembly and worship...
...So do you...
...on what do you and I build our politics, science, art, religion...
...You carry your own bags and shine your own shoes...
...It's mine...
...A crummy old surrey comes up behind her and passes her...
...That's Slovakia's recollection of a thousand years of feudalism, capitalism, and, between 1919 and 1938, democracy...
...Marxism wants to industrialize...
...The Communists are industrializing Slovakia at a pressurized rate—and the pressure is far from gentle—because the Slovakian land will support only a third of its people...
...I wish he'd write me more often...
...What's the difference between you"—to the American farmer—"and me...
...In his home or his office...
...This man doesn't like Marxism, and Marxism doesn't like him...
...It is too big for his comfort and convenience, but no matter how little it was it would still be too big...
...Sure, you have no more responsibility, and that's good when it's bad times...
...He fought...
...at least until he has shoes enough and good enough, and maybe then, too...
...Justice, the same for all men everywhere, says, "Thou shalt not steal...
...Why don't you go there...
...And so would yours and mine if we'd been there and if we were he...
...No more...
...When the Crucifix isn't allowed above her bed in Lidice any more, the old lady will get up and go...
...A huge priest occupies the whole of the back seat, in vestments of tattered splendor...
...If you told him it was the landlord's or the bank's and not his at all, he spat (a sure sign that he was thinking hard) and said, "I've been on this land for two hundred years...
...But what would I be doing, with my load of wood on my back, to make them suspicious of me...
...You're a long, long way from home when you get to Svit, unless, of course, you live in Poprad...
...She was well dressed, and when I asked her what she needed, she said, "Nothing...
...In this cave...
Vol. 24 • September 1960 • No. 4
