ENEMY OF FREEDOM
Sir,-As a newcomer to the New Zealand Listener, it may be unfortunate that the first copy to come into my hands is that of. January 11, in which, in your editorial, "The Enemy of Freedom," and in the eulogy of Reuben Ship’s The Investigator, one cat see how well the real enemies of freedomCommunists and fellow travellers-have done their work of smearing those who tried to expose Communist activities. It is a strange commentary .on our times that we are urged to fear, not these selfconfessed enemies of freedom, but the men who would try to defend freedom against its sworn enemies, Ever since the 1920’s the activities of Communists and their fellow travellers have continued unchecked-except in isolated cases and with the help of the maligned investigators. These activities, which are still being pursued, include, at the underground level, espionage and infiltration. The latter is the most important and the hardest to counter since it involves the highest in the land and the opinion-forming machinery of the press, radio, etc. It was these difficulties that hampered and finally stifled the House Committee on Un-American Activities which had to do its job in a climate which those Communists concealed in the press and elsewhere made sure would be one of suspicion and jitters. Present-day society suffers the cancer of Communism largely because it has substituted Almighty Man for Almighty God, and has lost the power of distinguishing right from wrong. But good and evil do not cease to exist simply because we no longer recognise them. Communism is evil, but it is a unique evil which cannot™’be compared, as your articles seem to suggest, to anything else in history so that it must be fought with weapons which in any other circumstances might be repugnant but which are justified in this singular crisis provided they are not themselves evil. Nothing could be more hopeless than to suppose that Communism can be defeated by run-to-seed liberalism, for that is its optimum environment. If we are not prepared to grasp the danger of this evil and make the sacrifices involved in fighting it, we must accept the conclusion that. our civilisation is not fit to survive.
N. E.
DOWNEY
(Lower Hutt).
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 911, 25 January 1957, Page 5
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372ENEMY OF FREEDOM New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 911, 25 January 1957, Page 5
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