ENEMY OF FREEDOM

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 914, 15 February 1957, Page 5

ENEMY OF FREEDOM

Sir,-Did not Reuben Ship’s The Investigator show Mr. Downey (Listener, January 25) exactly where investigations of the type conducted by Senator McCarthy lead? Did not Ship illustrate forcefully enough that investigations of that kind lead not only to culling the Reds from our precious community but also to suppressing liberal opinion, and that when this happens we might as well have saved ourselves the trouble and allowed the Communists to overthrow by force our lawful government? But, of course, Mr. Downey does not think very highly of liberal opinion for he uses the words "run-to-seed" to qualify it. I do not know what run-to-seed liberalism is exactly, but I will take the liberty of presuming that it is the kind of liberalism to which Mr. Downey does not subscribe. He would almost certainly insist that he was a man of liberal beliefs although he allies himself with the policy of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a necessarily narrow-minded body under the chairmanship of McCarthy. He would say that he was a man of liberal beliefs but that he had made the sacrifice of modifying them temporarily because this is necessary in combating Communism. But per-

haps it is more accurate to assume that Mr, Downey condemns all liberalism. For a few phrases further on he mentions that present-day society has substituted Almighty Man for . Almighty God. History shows that people who have enlisted God as an ally and as a justification for carrying out their megalomaniac misdeeds have been notably unliberal, What, exactly, has God to do with the differences of opinion between ourselves and Communists? Can we believe that our way of life has been founded and is run as God would wish and that the Communists do not have this Divine blessing? Surely this is crediting God with views as parochial and narrow as our own, and this is nothing if not flattering, worshipping ourselves, the very thing Mr. Downey finds fault with. We always arrive at the inevitable paradox. Inquisitorial methods used to combat Communism result in the most undesirable characteristics of Communism appearing in our own free com-munity-the stifling of freely formed and expressed opinion, the prostitution of the mediums of enlightenment such as the press and radio and the glorification of our own State at the expense of some other State, In other words, by combating Communism by these methods the purpose of Communism is achieved. Mr, Downey says that run-to-seed liberalism could not be a more hopeless way of defeating Communism. What, then, is the wavy? :

J. MICHAEL

D'ATH

(Hamilton).