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Communism that intellectual honesty is sacrificed. Yet I strongly
suspect that in twenty years time, we shall 'look back with pained
repugnance at the hypocrisy with which progressive-minded people in
the sixties turned a blind eye to the racism prevalent in black Africa,
while condemning South African
apartheid.
Nor will it be easy, when
the sixties are seen in the perspective of history, to deny the existence
on both sides of the Atlantic of a double standard in our attitude to
racial minorities at home. Because I am already written off as a dyed–
in-the-wool Zionist, I can perhaps afford to mention the anti-anti–
Semitic veto which has successfully suppressed any candid and objec–
tive writing about the Jewish problem, and the anti-anti-Negro veto
which makes honorable newspaper men suppress irrefutable evidence
that Negro rioters can commit crimes of violence, and tempts literary
critics grossly to overpraise Negro writers for books which they would
have treated very differently if composed by people of their own color.
Liberalism in America and democratic socialism in Britain have
for thirty years been providing the dynamic which disproved Marxism,
and made a Communist revolution unnecessary. But the Labour Move–
ment over here, since it has become respectable and successful, has
evolved its own brand of conformism, obscurantism and color blind–
ness; and it seems to me that liberalism in the United States has
developed not dissimilar forms of hypocrisy and Pharisee-ism. It is
surely a sign that something is wrong with the Left when a large
minority of a democratic community are angry enough to feel that
Barry Goldwater expresses their frustrations, and James Burnham
articulates their thoughts. I agree with George Kennan that when this
happens we should take the warning very seriously indeed.