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New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 295, 16 February 1945, Page 7

Sir,-Your Observer article, I think, overstates its case with any allegation that Communists "despise and fear the masses." It seems to me impossible to deny that they ‘are, by and large, actuated by.a ‘sincere pity and sympathy towards "the masses" (repulsive word) and a desire to better their ‘standards of living. They do not, however, believe in the political ability of the average individual to do anything for himself; they do believe’ in a total, unified, and minority-run political structure; and they have a slavish and superstitious worship of the omnipotence of propaganda. They set well-being above freedom, "like the base slave who with a belly filled and vacant mind," false as the antithesis is. These obvious comments bring me to the fundamental and generally ignored quarrel between Communism and Western Democracy. It is that from Pericles to Lincoln the essence of the democratic and liberal cr has been that the individual is the fundamental unit of society and that all politics are directed towards protecting his rights and fulfilling his needs. The rights of private judgment, tolerance and all

forms of intellectual fréedom cannot exist apart from this belief. Now the Communist, -whose human sympathies are the foundation of his creed, would be much happier if he could share this; but unhappily Marx saddled all his disciples with a portentous structure compounded of all the elephantine imbecilities of early nineteenth-century science and German philosophy: dialecticism, collectivism and materialism. The individual’s actions and thoughts, according to this belief, are entirely produced by the impersonal forces of the workings of society; he has no existence apart from them and, as they change, he must change, too. "The individual," says Leonard Barnes, one of the most brilliant modern Marxists, "is only a ripple-on the surface of society." This view, inevitably, is incompatible with any sort of liberalism or belief in individual values and rights. For this reason the Observer writer was justified in saying that Communists had "a dark fear of liberty, equality, and fraternity"; but the fear is so dark that it is often quite unconscious. Hence the perfectly sincere indignation of Mr. Meek. But- the issue is-a real one. Between these two creeds there can be no compromise; and as one is held by the Western powers and the other by the Soviet Union, while China hesitates between the two, a wider appreciation of the dilemma would appear important for the future.

J. G. A.

POCOCK

(Christchurch).