SOVIET SLAVE LABOR AND WESTERN HORROR
rural, the whole country over, and detention camps for Japanese and
CO's and anti-Semitism and xenophobia and vigilantism and witch–
hunts and the insane hatred that one can see mounting, holding back,
growing into the sub-acute intelligence of sadism with its dead-right
instinct for producing the crisis and explosion it means to produce?
Our democratic Government holds (thank God or history) these
forces checked, the democratic system relieves some pressures, exerts
a counterpressure against others, and we have a tradition of due pro–
cess of law, of equality and a humane laissez faire, all of which has
thus far been our protection. But it is impossible· to believe, from what
politics has already disclosed about itself, that a constitutional warrant
is sure; it is no more than surface. The strength of any political surface
depends on the deeper forces that attach themselves to it from the under
side, by growing up to meet it and support it. Ultimately, the safety of a
system demands the widespread existence among the people of a character
structure which conforms, in impulse, values, in the basic orientation
and training, to the values that are asserted at the surface. Our surface
is cracked, our character-structure, split. The totalitarian countries, on
the other hand, have shown that such conformity between value and
character is more than a theoretical possibility for tyrannous regimes.
Our citizens, too, were once children, trained to potty, knife and fork,
to good manners and respect for authority. They, too can be demolished.
What stands in the way of demolition is a system of politics which in
turn draws its strength from the character of its people-a circle which
is liable to become vicious. The "West" is no sure thing.
But by all means tell the West. It is as much for our own good as
for theirs, the slaves lingering in their sub-arctic
lager
who made this
request of Gliksman when his freedom was restored, that the truth about
Soviet labor camps must be told. The West defends itself against such
knowledge (an extreme but common form of defense, observable among
fellow-travelers, is to run in the direction of the threat, to be absorbed
by it and thus to pass from its view). The West does not want to hear
such things. This is bad. What is worse is that when. the West is forced
to hear, it reacts only with horror. It is a first horror, a horror of feigned
innocence, whose real recoil is not from the thing revealed but from
the excitement that the revelation produces, the unconscious recognition
that we ourselves are capable of suffering and inflicting the same agony.
This is dangerous, it can lead directly to the creation of the evil. We
must be made to release our first hon·or, to come to the awareness
that yes, of course, we too are capable and susceptible, all of existing
humanity is susceptible. The admission thus wrenched from conscience
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