THE NATIONAL STYLE
525
and the children of light. It exempts him from having to specify
empirical proofs. General Edwin Walker told a Congressional com–
mittee that a "control apparatus" was "selling out the Constitution,
national sovereignty and national independence," but when asked
to specify the members of the control apparatus he replied that he
could not name the individuals, but that the apparatus could be
identified "by its effects- what it did in Cuba-what it did in the
Congo-what it did in Korea." The irony of
this
reply
is
that it is
cut from the same cloth as vulgar Bolshevik explanation: accident and
contingency are ruled out of history, subjective intentions are the
prattlings of "bourgeois morality," history is plot and objective con–
sequence. Just as in a concentration
cam~or
any extreme situation
-a victim adopts unconsciously the mode, manner, and even swagger
of the aggressor, so men like General Walker seem to have become
mesmerized by the enemies they have studied so assiduously and
with such horrified fascination.
To round out their picture of horror, the radical Right has
given us an exact forecast of things to come. Just as the "enthusiastic"
preachers of Baptist fundamentalism would predict with Biblical
certainty the date of the end of the world, so the fundamentalists
of the radical Right make their own predictions of the end of liberty
in the United States. Fred Schwarz, for example, has named 1973
as the date set by the Communists for the take-over of America. In
his lectures, Schwarz builds up the picture of the ultimate fate in
store for his audience once the Communists win. "When they come
for you, as they have for many others, and on a dark night, in a
dark cellar, they take a wide-bore revolver with a soft-nose bullet,
and they place it at the nape of your neck ..."
A more elaborate fantasy is provided in the
John Franklin
Letters,
a Birchite novel that was circulated in 1959 and then with–
drawn.
2
The novel pictures an America Sovietized by the Com–
munists in 1970. The beginning of the end comes in 1963, when the
World Health Organization sends in a Yugoslav inspector, under
powers granted by the President of the United States, to search any
house he chooses. The Yugoslav discovers in the house of a good
2. I am following here the account of Murray Kempton, in the
New York Post,
October 26, 1961.
