Реферат: Jospeh Freeman

it with perspective. But the Thirties are a special period. They are a period of trauma

and when people think about the Thirties they encounter an emotional block.

They encounter an emotional block because the Thirties, being the Age of Assassins, was

the Age of Terror.

There is no real literature in Germany about the Thirties. Who is going to set down

today the horrors of the Hitler regime, the terror, the mass murder?

There is no real literature in Russia about the Thirties. Who would dare to tell the

truth about Stalin’s reign of terror, the paranoid murder of millions, the butchery of

rivals and friends, the enslavement of a people by force and fraud?

But it is not only Germany and Russia that went through a terror which has left us a

trauma that needs to be overcome in order that we my be free again in mind and heart to

think courageously and truly about our life in the twentieth century and our destiny in

it.

The great terror took place in Germany and Russia in the Thirties. In the case of

Germany it lasted till the Third Reich went up in flames in the spring of 1945. In Russia

it lasted till Stalin’s death early in 1953, though in some ways it is not over yet.

In the United States the terror came in the Fifties.

True, nobody in this country got shot. Nobody was gassed in a concentration camp.

Nobody was pushed into a bake oven. But do not underestimate the effectiveness or the

consequences of the terror here in the current decade.

Man lives not by bread alone and he dies not by guns alone. The terror in this country,

the so-called "witch-hunt" whose grim symbol was the late, O far too late

Senator McCarthy, ruined many lives, many innocent lives, and many of them remain ruined

to this day.

I do not want to lacerate your feelings with the details of the American Terror. There

is a reaction setting in against it. For our purpose it is important to keep in mind that the

Terror of the Fifties, whatever its connection with Korea and the Cold War, was in

effect an attack on the Thirties.

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