Реферат: Jospeh Freeman

education who, often to protect themselves, persecuted you. We also have had something we

used to ridicule in Russia; we also have had denunciation, the bearing of false witness,

confession, contrition, recantation. During the Moscow Trials people in this country

wondered about the victims, the Old Bolsheviks. Why did they confess? Perhaps we ought to

ask the same question of the Penitent Radicals in this country. Comrades, why do you confess?

In both cases the fundamental fault is in the persecution not in the victim. I have

never accepted the totalitarian idea, now prevalent throughout the world, that not the

murderer but the murdered man is guilty.

———-

In the Great Persecution of the current decade all of us who spoke up in the Thirties

for the vision have been asked: Where do you stand?

If there was any Candide na?ve enough to think they really wanted to know where he

stands, he was soon set right. They did not want to know where you stood in the Thirties

or where you stand today. What they wanted you to do was to name names so that your

friends, or your former friends, or people you barely knew, could be fired from

their jobs, ruined professionally, economically and socially and, if possible, sent to

jail under the pretext that this great republic of ours was in imminent danger of being

overthrown. And woe to him who refused to name names!

I’ve always been curious to know what would happen if they gave Candide a chance to say

where he stands. Let us do so now. Perhaps, if we listen with patience and sympathy,

Candide will tell us where we stood in the Thirties, what the dream was which inspired and

activated American writers then, and where we stand today. I have the pleasure of

presenting a little Existentialist comedy entitled

WAITING FOR CANDIDE

[Enter CANDIDE. He takes the witness stand -- the far end of a long mahogany

conference table -- and faces the all-male investigating body. Please note that none of

these investigating bodies ever has a woman on it and hurrah for women! This investigating

body is a curious one; it contains the usual type of inquisitorial legislator; it also

contains men of influence and power in education, art, literature and science.]