PARTISAN
REVIEW
violated in jail and camp by the rotten and inadequate food, the
starvation, the repulsive facilities, the filth, the overcrowding in living
and sleeping quarters (planks, arranged in tiers, on which so many
sleep pressed together in rows that it is impossible for the sleepers
to
turn over, one at a time, when their sides are cramped; several times a
night one of. the jailed gives the command and all the rows turn simul–
taneously), the killing pace at which work is exacted and the murderous,
impossible quotas, the bribing and thieving and informing, the constant
subjection to n1thless and arbitrary treatment by the guards for the
least (or suspected or falsely n1mored) infraction or to bullying by the
criminal element, whose brutality is condoned or encouraged by the
camp authorities. Few men who have been brought up according to
civilized standards can withstand such tre::..tment without breaking down,
without surrendering the integrity and self-respect which is the legitimate
pride of us all. And what is true of the jailed is true of the jailers. A
totalitarian society is one in which the mass of men is forced to recapitu–
late the early terrors, as in a waking nightmare, a nightmare from
which one cannot awake because it is the reality. A prison camp is a
kindergarten in a slaughterhouse, in which the penned must go round and
round in a forced march to childhood, regressing to what they never
were (the vacated possibilities between the first elements and the later
formations of character realized, and the realized possiblities, which
gave the mature person his amplitude, wiped out) that there may
remain no interval of time or reflection between the word of authority
and the obedience. And there is no redress, as to a righteous politics, a
justice in the minds and wills of others, which was available even in the
Tsars' days. This
is
Soviet politics; it is also the level and the limit to
which all politics today can move.
So much we know. But we must be careful in reading this appeal
to the West, not to make too much of our westernness; it is not synony–
mous with democracy-Germany is also West-and in itself it is proof
against nothing. The character of an American and the values-"We
hold these tn.1ths to be self-evident"-to which it conforms can be
altered by the same methods. In fact, the immediate quality of American
life has often impressed observers, our own and from foreign countries,
with its violence and bn.1tality, far more violent than the Germany
which, by this impression, should have been a safe bet against succumb–
ing to terror before our own country. It won't hurt to rehearse this;
we have grown so used to the thicker layers of our atmosphere, we
sometimes forget what we breathe. The South; but what about race
riots in the North, and the bn.1tality of American cops, urban and
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