"LIBERAL" FIFTH COLUMN
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Germany, and Mussolini for cleaning Italian cities and making the
trains run on time. From the vantagepoint of Mars or of history 500
years from now, some scholarly dilettante might draw up a list balanc–
ing favorable and unfavorable . aspects of Hitler. But for those who
had to confront it politically in their lifetime, a pro and con attitude
would have been absolutely without political content: Hitler's regime
was essentially vicious and had to be opposed politically. This point
is capital, and I dwell on it because the "liberals" somehow think they
can salve their conscience by various sad remarks from time to time–
which prove their "impartiality," no less!-acknowledging that poli–
tical liberty is not all it should
be
in Russia. Are they too stupid or
too knavish not to understand that an attitude neatly balanced of
pros and cons toward a criminal dictatorship is absolutely without
political meaning? Or, rather, that it has only one political meaning:
sanction of that dictatorship? The ineffable Ingersoll, again, tells us:
"We must he neither for nor against Russia, but we must try to
understand her." Analogously, we should have been neither for nor
against Hitler, but simply have tried to understand him.
If
some "liberals" are slightly taken aback at being called a
Fifth Column, they should learn from Victor Kravchenko that the
Russian employees in the Soviet Embassy at Washington were al–
lowed to read, of American publications, only
The Daily Worker,
PM, The Nation,
and
The New Republic.
During the appeasement
of Hitler, these "liberal" publications pointed loudly to every praise
the Hearst-McCormick press received in Berlin as proof that these
publications were virtual Fifth Columns. Is it likely Stalin is any
less shrewd than Hitler in knowing who his friends are?
How far, after all, can we go in excusing people as being un–
conscious of their motives? When Ralph Ingersoll likened
(PM,
May
6) our military and diplomatic position to Nazi Germany's vis-a-vis
Russia, perhaps he was not aware that he was very definitely implying
that the United States, and not Russia, is most like Hitler. Perhaps
not; but to gauge the effect of such an editorial we must take into
account the distinct frame of reference established by the newspaper
for its day to day reader-the fact, among many, that Ingersoll's
statements appeared
in
a newspaper whose cartoons have already
evolved a snarling bullying type of U. S. Army officer as an American
counterpart to the familiar caricature of the ramrod monocled Prus–
sian. And Ingersoll himself gave
his
cartoons a speaking voice when
he declared (at Madison Square Garden, May 16) that the Amer-
