Реферат: Jospeh Freeman

those sons-of-bitches today and we hope that our former friends and comrades do lose

their jobs and go to jail and we shall be delighted to help them get there.

———-

This is obviously false. A man is married to a woman for years; he lives with her, has

children with her, makes sacrifices for her and accepts the sacrifices she makes for him.

They say they are in love and everybody believes them and everything points to it.

Then they quarrel and get divorced and the man says: "Look at her. What an ugly

horror! What a lush! What a wicked, immoral dame! You know something? She was always like

that. From the day I met her, I knew she was a combination of Messalina, Fanny Hill, Becky

Sharp, the witch in Hansel and Gretel and the Gorgon Medussa !"

There are wounded lovers and there are wounded idealists who falsify the past that way.

But what they tell us cannot be true and for a simple reason.

In order to be DISenchanted you must first be ENchanted. In order to lose your belief,

you must first believe. In order to feel the hatred of shocked and soured love, you

must first love.

But who can blame the people who have falsified the past under the fire of the Great

Persecution? It is easy to ask others to be heroes or martyrs; it is not easy to be a

hero or a martyr, though we naturally respect those who are.

Once it became a crime punishable by economic and social ostracism and by prison to

have had any connection with radicalism in the Thirties, it was only natural that people

should protect themselves, their wives and their children by spinning fairy tales about

that past. The radicals of the Thirties were sincere in their convictions as long as they

held those convictions. If the story is falsified now, it is because terror is not the

best climate for memory or for truth.

In a way the Thirties may be defined as that period when many people followed an ideal

which first exploded in betrayal and for which they then had to pay by persecution.

And the Fifties may be defined as that period when you had to pay and pay and pay for

the vision of the Thirties.

And it was not only official agencies that penalized you for that vision. You were also