Реферат: Jospeh Freeman

But it’s got to be a two-way street. It must work both ways. We must really and

truly and with all our hearts and in actual fact forgive each other.

[Candide picks up the glass of water at his elbow and absentmindedly puts it down.]

Once we agree on genuine freedom of thought and discussion, gentlemen, I’d like to chip

in my two cents to the current worldwide effort to solve the contemporary human dilemma.

Call my contribution, if you like, the Midget’s Mite, but please listen.

We are in trouble everywhere, in every country, because we have made technology and

politics – the pursuit of wealth and power – the end. But they are not

ends. They are means. The end is what it has always been in one form or another.

The end, the goal is the redemption and liberation of man.

[Candide takes a sip of water, wipes his brow and goes on.]

Gentlemen, when I used to follow a fellow named Karl Marx in the Thirties, I read this

by him. The great religions told us what is wrong morally. But goodness could not be

practiced in a world of political inequality. Then came the "bourgeois democratic

revolution" and showed us what political equality could be like. Nothing could be

done, however, as long as there was economic inequality. Socialism could bring about

essential economic equality and this would at last make it possible for men to practice

the virtues taught by religion and the political equality taught by democracy.

This was a great idea until recently. It was, in a way, the idea which animated the

Thirties. Then the Socialist Fatherland, ruled from the Kremlin by a Caesar named Stalin,

made gigantic technological and industrial advances. But there is no economic,

social, or political equality in Russia. And, far from practicing the moral virtues, they

have committed some of the most frightful crimes in all history.

This is important not only for those American writers who went through the radical

movement in the United States in the Thirties. It is important for the world, since half

the world to-day is under the rule of socialism of one kind or another.

Today something is rotten not only in the state of Denmark but in every state on the

face of the earth without exception.

What is wrong? And what is to be done?