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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

CLASSIFIED ADVERTISING

A charge of 50 cents for each insertion of five lines or less with 10 ‘cents for each ‘additional line is made for notices appearing in this column. No notices will be accepted later than Monday noon of the week of publication.

“WHAT'S DOING?

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PUBLIC MEETING, Hollywood Bowl, New Westminster, Sunday, February 4, at 8 p.m. Speaker, RAY GARDNER, B.C. Peace Council, 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.

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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 —

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

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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