Реферат: Jospeh Freeman

vision in the Fifties!

Now you can see one reason why it is hard to get good studies of the Thirties.

That decade was falsified gigantically by Stalin; it was falsified gigantically by

Hitler. And in this country it his been gigantically falsified by the Terror, the Great

Persecution, the Witch Hunt; by the war on the intellectuals, on the vision of the

Thirties.

And, as in every terror, the victims are themselves affected by this falsification.

People who are penalized for their ideas in the Thirties are not inclined to remember

that decade clearly and vividly. Nature takes care of that.

We know what memory is like when it is painful. We all tend to forget — or, as the

Freudians say, to repress — painful memories. And so, many people have written falsely

about the Thirties in books, newspapers and magazines and have spoken falsely about it on

the witness stand, all in good faith.

It was too painful to remember the truth. The Terror made it painful. And

there is that little thing called survival. It is made a crime to have shared the

vision of the Thirties, then you are asked to write about it. O yes, you did share

that vision! But it is dangerous to admit it now. So you write: WHO – ME?

The story now is that we knew all along that communism was a fraud. Communists

were all stupid, inefficient, cruel, crazy for power, corrupt, foreign agents.

We never really believed that insane, bloodthirsty ideology. We got into the Movement

as a kind of joke, by accident. We stayed there for years God knows why — secretly making

fun of the Movement and everybody in it, sabotaging everything and everyone whenever and

wherever we could.

We were always at heart patriotic in the most ultra-conservative sense of the word. We

were patriotic every day of the year, every hour on the hour, true-blue Pegler patriots

who deserved a pat on the back from the American Legion and a kiss from every Daughter of

the American Revolution between twenty and thirty.

What did we do in the Movement all those years — including the years of that frightful

Russian bloodpurge which now so haunts and horrifies us? We really don’t know. But we were