20
SIDNEY HOOK
your streets, and your buildings, and your possessions, and hence
your pride. From now on, you will yield the road to no one, you
will walk in dignity.
Ultimately and short of catastrophe, the position of the West
will depend upon its understanding of revolution. And revolution
involves both liberation from necessity so that men may walk in
dignity and constitution of a body politic that may permit them to
act in freedom.
SIDNEY HOOK
What
is
at stake in the cold war
is
not free enterprise but
human freedom-the freedom of people to choose their own way of
life, the freedom to say "no" to tyranny, the freedom to be different–
the same cluster of freedoms which the West defended against Hitler.
What is at stake is not Christianity or any other religious faith but
the right to believe or disbelieve in accordance with one's conscience.
By the West I mean the democratic countries of the world in which,
of course, there still exist many injustices and violations of the values
of freedom. But so long as the political processes of registering freely
given consent remain intact, with sufficient courage and persistence
these evils may be removed. At any rate, in almost every respect the
state of freedom and public welfare today in the West
is
far healtheir
than when we resisted Hitler.
The difference between the open societies of the West and the
Communist dictatorship may be symbolized in many ways. Contrast
the fact that England bestows its highest award- the Order of Merit
-upon Bertrand Russell, its severest critic, with the degradation of
Boris Pasternak, and the failure of a single Soviet writer to speak
out publicly in his defense. Or contrast the gentle, almost deferential,
treatment in England of Bertrand Russell inciting the public to viola–
tion of law with the treatment which would have been meted out to a
Soviet Russell-or since it is hard to conceive of a Soviet Russell–
with the pitiful, brain-washed creatures who once were men cowering
in the courtroom during the Moscow Trials.
