"LIBERAL" FIF,TH COLUMN
293
shouting what a fine fellow he is, and how slanderous, criminal, and
endangering to international relations were such criticisms of him as
this.
v
The "liberals" will not lack for other evasions meanwhile. Their
fecundity for rationalizations has already shown itself bottomless. No
doubt they will accuse the views of this editorial as expressing an at–
titude of hatred towards Russia or Stalin (they do not bother to dis–
tinguish) -and probably a "pathological" hatred too, if you please.
(Lately they have taken to using a debased and comic version of
Freud for what they im.agine is an avantgarde weapon of vilification.)
But it is they who really hate the Russians, since they do everything
within their power to further Stalin's oppression of this people. And
is it so pathological to hate a criminal dictator? Was it pathological
to hate Hitler? Then it w.as also pathological for Locke to hate the
Stuarts, Voltaire to hate the Bourbons, Beethoven to hate Napoleon,
Marx to hate Louis Napoleon, Lenin to hate the Tsar. The "liberals"
will also have other worn and tattered scarecrows to shake-any op–
portunism that comes to hand, .anything indeed to avoid the issue of
democracy against totalitarianism. Unlike the "liberals," we have no
secret and ambivalent longings to "escape from freedom," which we
mask under one rationalization or another; and having no totalitarian
commitments anywhere in the world, we insist that no compromise be
made with totalitarianism.
Until they take at least this minimum position, the "liberals'' are
obviously usurping a name which they have despoiled of every
vestige of its original meaning. The word "liberal" now retains no–
thing but a denotative value, and that is why we have persisted
in
keeping
it
in quotation marks throughout. Whether or not the "lib–
erals" here spoken of will ever earn the removal of quotation marks
from their "liberalism," they have already made themselves a long
past to live down.
