TELL ME ANOTHER
SIR,—If you call me a liquid Liberal, I think I shall
call you a tortuous Tory. (Actually, I am a solid Socialist.) Tortuous, because you quote me out of context in a pretty tendentious way. The point of my article was to praise those of the Thirties generation —yours—who had never been Communist, at the expense of those who had been, and had then reacted into an excessive anti-Communism. The next younger generation is lucky not to have been scarred by the Communist-anti-Communist experience. The article ended : "'You can't imagine how deceitful, corrupt, and cruel it was," say the ex-Communists. To which the rest of us can only reply : "We had never supposed otherwise":
You are certainly right to call anyone credulous who reacted as you describe to the Moscow trials, the Hiss and Blake cases, the germ warfare allega- tions, and the Russian rockets in Cuba, I did not, and your implication that I did is fanciful. It was definitely not credulous to say the US had (not 'has' —they are dismantled) rocket bases in Turkey. The US, Soviet and Turkish governments all agreed about their presence. Do you really doubt it?
WAYLAND YOUNG
Previous page
