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‘LITTLE UNITED NATIONS’

Czechs provide center

for foreign

PRAGUE CITIZENS who live
around the. Old Town Square
nave been surprised the last few
days to meet numerous young
people — : black-skinned and
white, yellow and brown, and
talking animatediy in a variety
of foreign. tongues — hurrying
down. a quiet street behind the
ancient Tyn church. They are
boys and girls of almost every
nationality in the world who are
studying at Charles University
and their destination is the
Center for Foreign Students.

Here at this Center, a beauti-
fully-appointed  six-room apart-
ment, young people from such
distant places as China and Ar-
sentina, Nigeria and Haiti, Ven-
ezuela and’ Viet Nam, Canada
and. Persia, meet to listen to
music, read; discuss questions of
common interest or just relax
and enjoy themselves.

The Center was opened this
month by Czechoslovak Minis-
ter of Education, Dr. Zdenek
Nejedly, and the facilities it af-

Vicious film
by John Ford

RIO GRANDE

John Ford, the once great. di-
rector of The Informer, and of
Grapes of Wrath, touches the
depths’ of corruption with this
vicious film against the Apache
Indians. Give it a wide berth.
THE WOMAN OF DOLWYN

Edith Evans delivers a su-
perb performance in this British
film about the intentional flood-
ing of a Welsh village in 1892.
But an otherwise fine story by
Emlyn Williams breaks down
completely to become a near
Hollywood melodrama in the fin-
al sequences.
PANIC IN THE STREETS

A brutal chase after a gang-,
ster infected with. . bubonic pla-
gue done by Elia Kazan in the
familiar ° ‘documentary’ style.
Along the way the film manages
to be highly. offensive in its
treatment of the workingclass
characters, particularly the for-
eign-born people who appear in
the background of the story.
Zero. Mostel, . the *comic,. plays
the part of a gangster—straight.

students

fords to these students so far:
away from home ‘have been
universally praised by all of
them.

There is a lecture room where
talks are given on Czechoslo-
vak life and culture. There is
a buffet for light snacks. In
the lounge is a grand piano, a
radio and a gramaphone with
numerous records —_ classical,
folk songs and ~ dance music.
Chess sets, cards and a ping-
pong table are also to be found,
There is a cinema projector
where the latest films showing.
in Prague’s main cinemas will
be screened for the foreign stu-
dents. In fact, the Center pro-
vides them with almost every
entértainment they could ask
for.

In addition they are all re-
marking on the care taken by
the ministry of education and
the - Union. of ‘Czechoslovak Stu-
dents to provide a really -home-
like atmosphere. The Center has
been furnished with the newest’
and most béautiful products of
the Czechoslovak workers. Easy
chairs, couches and gay cur-
tains all help to make these
young. people from far-away
lands feel that they have a home
in Prague.

Such is the place depicted by
the Veice of America as a cen-
ter for “training Communist ag-
ents’. The young people thus
described by the hysterical voice
of imperialism have greeted this
latest slander with hilarity. Stu-
dents of medicine, engineering,
natural sciences, economics, phi-
losophy and languages, they are
all unanimous in their gratitude
to the Czechoslovak people for
the opportunity they have been
given to study in an atmosphere
of freedom and security, such
as many of them could never
have dreamed of in their own
countries.

In fact, as Dr. Nejediy said
in his speech at the opening
ceremony, the Center for For-
eign Students in Prague is truly
a little United Nations, free
from the imperialist domination
which ‘stifles the voice of the
peoples at Lake Success, where
young people from all over the
world are proving in daily prac-
tice that the nations of the
earth can live and work together
in harmony and peace.

—P. NERENBERG

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10 ‘cents for each ‘additional line
is made for notices appearing in
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of the week of publication.

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reporting on the Warsaw Congress.
Auspices, New Westminster Peace
Committee, ’ ;

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Spirit of the New China

These schoolgirls symbolize the hope and opportunity of the
menthas already initiated reforms designed to sweep away the o1

tined women to a subordinate and menial position in society,

GUIDE TO GOOD READING -

New China. The People’s govern-
itworn feudal traditions which des-

Williams hits at witch hunters
in new book-but inconsistently

IN HIS Witch Hunt, The Re-.
vival of Heresy (Little, Brown)
Carey McWilliams has attempt-
ed the impossible: He has at-
tempted to expose the basic fals-
ity’ of the current anti-Commun-
ist “loyalty” campaign, and he
has attempted, simultaneously, to
argue that America should fore-
go the witch hunt because it is
making that country over in the
Communist likeness. The trouble
with McWilliams‘ uncomfortable
paradox is that it just isn’t true.
And it can only serve to disarm
the people in the struggle
against the whole trend toward
fascism.

McWilliams is a
and astute writer. He goes into
considerable detail on the various
manifestations of the witch hunt
in the U.S... 4 the Hans Frel-
stadt case, the Hollywood Ten,
the California University loyal-
ty oath, and others,

‘He is forthright in asserting
the right of Communists to teach
and to work. He ridicules the
concept of “loyalty” standards,
pointedly notes that the vague-
ness of such standards is intend-
ed precisely to make it difficult,
if not impossible, for accused
“heretics’ to establish their loy-
alty. :

His entire approach toward the
current witch hunt in terms of
“heresy” has its illuminating
uses in comparing the present
.to the’ Inquisitions of the past.
But McWilliams perpetrates a
“distortion by straining this in-
terpretation.

x * >

A “HERETIC,” he would have
us believe, is a member of a
persecuted minority group or
faction, and such hereticg are
harassed in Russia as in Am-
erica, But in order to make this
tieup possible, he has to denart
from his otherwise impeccable
regard for facts and documenta-
tion. As when he writes, | “Tf
Lysenko exiles geneticists who
disagree with him .. .” or gigi
‘Kamenevy, Stalin’s art critic , as
expels modern artists from So-
_Viet guilds and unions, . . .”

But the “exiled” Soviet _Bene-
‘ticists who disagreed with Ly-
senko exist only in Hearstian
fantasies. .

McWilliams would have us be-

thoughtful

lieve that communism and the
Soviet Union are heretic-hunt-
ers. Yet it is precisely socialism
which .permits the full freedom
of discussion which elevates
criticism and self-criticism of
ideas and actions into a govern-
ing factor in society. :

In the celebrated “Marr con-
troversy” over the teaching of
linguistics, it was the head of
the Soviet government, Stalin,
who rebuked the proponents of
the prevailing school in this
field for suppression of and re-
prisals against its opponents.
Thus, under socialism, dissidence
is protected. Under capitalism,
it is the heads of the American
government who lead the witch-
hunters. (And, in Canada, it
is the government whose loyal-
ty to the principle of indepen-
dence is questioned which now
seeks the power to strip the
right of citizenship from those
who have “shown by their con-
duct they are not loyal to Can-
ada.”) ¢

McWilliams shuns any com-
parison between American cap-
italism’s witch hunt trials and
the trials of men like Rajk,
Mindszenty and Bukharin in the
Soviet Union and People’s De-
mocracies,

But such comparison would
demonstrate the class basis
which he has obscured. It would
show, on the one hand, that in
America a capitalist ruling class
persecutes, not a minority, but
spokesmen for the majority of
the people, and for that major-
ity’s desire for peace and social
progress, .

In the Soviet Union and Peo-
ple’s Democracies, on the other
‘hand, a tiny group of paid
agents of imperialism was at-
tempting to flout by counter-
revolution the majority’s declar-
ed will. 5: j

Clearly, it would be absurd to
say that Franco was a “heretic”
when he attempted to overthrow
the Spanish Republic, or that the
republic should not have acted
to destroy him.

McWilliams doesn’t argue,
needless to say, in, favor of Fran-
co or of the aforementioned re-
cipients of working class jus-
tice. But he does obscure the

difference between the capitalist
PACIFIC TRIBUNE —

}

ii

war on the American people and
the socialist and democratic ma-
jority’s protection of its triumph
in Eastern Europe.

* * *

HAD McWILLIAMS correctly
viewed the current witch hunt
in its specific content as a class
phenomenon during the period of
American imperialist efforts at
-world dominion, he would not
then complain that the “more
we yield to the anti-Communist :
hysteria, the more we minimize
the’ differences between democ-
racy and communism.”

For he fails utterly to see, or
to concede, that’ the bourgeois
democratic principles to which
he adheres can no longer find
expression under the rule of im-
perialists bent on war and fas-
cism,

Yet surely McWilliams must
see the absurdity of asserting
that the more undemocratic de-
mocracy becomes the more like
communism in face of the fact
that the Communists are among
the most persistent fighters for
even the minimal bourgeois de-
mocracy which they represent
as totally inadequate for the
American people.

Tt is unfortunte that McWil-
liams, who is forthright in de-
fense of American Communist
rights and in his exposure of
the witch hunt, should have par-
roted the vulgar and stereotyp-
ed accusations against the So-
viet Union and the alleged Com-
munist “police - state,”

This variant of red-baiting
does not help to fight the witch
hunt. For it is ‘sheer naivete
to believe that a people can be
mobilized to fight thought con-—
trol when, at the same time,
they are asked to concede -a
substantial element of truth in
the dogma of the heresy hunt-
ers, :

McWilliams doesn’t have to
believe in socialism to fight the
, witch hunt. But he would: have
‘done a greater service to that
cause had he either restricted
himself to the American scene
or, after giving the matter the
Same detached examination he
has given the witch hunt, ex-
Ploded the shabby myth of So-
viet terror and police state rule.
—ROBERT FRIEDMAN | >

FEBRUARY 2, 1951 — PAGE 10