Democracy and Dissent

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 464, 14 May 1948, Page 5

Democracy and Dissent

VERY democracy in the world to-day is in trouble with communists, and every communist knows why. It is one of those unequal contests morally in which one side has scruples and the other only aims. Where the communists are a considerable ‘proportion of the population, as they are in Europe, democracy is threatened with extinction. Where they are a handful only, as in America and all British communities, democracy’s

problem is not survival, but survival in a reasonably pure form. It is easy enough to say that those who make trouble deserve a taste of it, but it is one thing to know what communists deserve and another thing to decide what democrats can afford to do to them. The view of the best democrats so far has been that they can’t retain their democratic principles and punish others for doing what democracy itself permits. It is a precious principle but in crises very dangerous. It allows communists to establish themselves in the democracies and work there till they become a menace; but it does not allow ‘democracy then to throw them out neck and crop. They still have the protection of the law and of the democratic tradition. To a communist that is romantic nonsense. When democracy protects him it does so at its own peril, and since he has no intention, if his own day comes, of pro-

tecting it in return, its softness is just another sign to him that it is not fit to survive. He will destroy it if and when he can, and because that is his ineradicable purpose, he has put democracy on the spot. If it throws him out it muddies its own stream. If it leaves him alone, trusting in the good sense/ of the public, and in the superiority of its own way of life, it is maintaining the liberal tradition unbroken, continuing on a road from which no one has successfully driven it in the past, but at the same time committing an act of faith for which history provides no ready parallel.