12 JUNE 1947, Page 18

BOOKS OF THE DAY

Freedom as a Panacea

The Great Challenge. By Louis Fischer. (Cape. 18s.)

Tint writing of commentaries on current affairs has always been a dangerous trade ; a little- less dangerous today than in the past, because of the decline in critical standards and the adoption of amnesia as a substitute for reflective judgement, but dangerous all the same. You can now find in the second-hand book boxes a number of prophetic works whose authors, in some cases if not all, would prefer to have had them pulped. Mr. Louis Fischer does not wholly escape the risks of the business. What is, at the moment, the most topical of his themes, the Indian situation, is the one which shows his prophetic powers at their lowest, shows him most the victim of jargon and of limited equipment. And some of the same weakness is observable in other sections of the book. The account of England in war-time has an oddly belated air, and though Mr. Fischer (as he tells us) surprised his English friends by his readi- ness to ask questions of the man in the street, he shows in his narrative too great a faith in what he learned from more or less eminent persons and a fondness for revealing clichés like " manor house." (Is the word ever used outside books on mediaeval history and bad translations from the Russian?) But despite these faults and a certain carelessness in detail, in names and dates, and a fondness for the American habit of imposing initials on people who get on quite well without them, like Mr. Herbert Morrison for instance, despite too, too much personal reminiscence of war-time journeys, Mr. Fischer's book is worth reading. First of all, it is a very American book. Mr. Fischer is an internationalist ; he hats been a Zionist ; he has served in the British Army. But his approach is sturdily American There is the characteristic American belief in words, in slogans. Too close an examination of the words might take the bloom off, and so it is not attempted. Yet it must be insisted that Mr. Fischer is merely vague and optimistic in his use of words ; he is not sophistical. His key word is "freedom," a word that is vague enough, but which is not capable of the infinitely varied transformations that it has undergone ih the hands of modern forward-lookers. (Modern, in this sense, Means men and women who went overboard in 1917 or 1918 and are still swimming to the distant scene which they saw in the kindly light of the ten days that, shook the world.) Mr. Fischer, who was a very effective apologist for the Russian Revolution, has too much Sense, too much integrity and too much knowledge to see in modern Russia a state where "freedom," in any sense the word has had in; the past, exists to anything like an adequate degree, and, little as- _ there is of it, he sees no reason to believe that there will be more in any visible future. No, freedom for Mr. Fischer is the kind that mother used to make, the freedom of Jefferson and Mill, of , Justice Holmes and (I imagine) of the Lenin of, say, State and

Revolution. It is not what passes for freedom in Stalin's Russia, and, in his vivacious reproaches to Professor Laski, Mr. Fischer seems to me to be in the right.

It is because he sees in Russia a great, servile, nationalist, corrupt and potentially aggressive State that Mr. Fischer is gloomy. He is still gloomier when he thinks how the policy of the United States and Great Britain has helped to spread Soviet rule by the con- cessions made at Yalta and Teheran, as well as by the hesitancies and sterility of British and American policy. He thinks that truth and courage will set us free. Perhaps they will, but the price of freedom will be very high. It is obvious, for instance, that the price of Indian freedom may be the loss of Indian unity. dr. Fischer seems to have swallowed the Congress Party line right down to the sinker in his estimation of the importance of Mr. Jinnah and the Moslem League. His confidence that there is no real enmity between rural Moslems and Hindus reads oddly in the light of current news from the Punjab. It reads still more oddly when we contrast this optimism with the realism of Mr. Fischer's account of Palestine. There he accepts the deplorable reality of Arab nationalism, and listens with sceptical pessimism to the bfficial Zionist view that the clash between the peoples (or religions or cultures) is a minor matter. There he notes that for some Jews Palestine is a pis eller; for them the United States, not Zion, is the city of refuge—shut against them by Americans (Jews and Gentiles alike) who no doubt regard, the crusading activities of Mr. Hecht with tolerant approval. But in " India " all is comparatively simple. There is to be universal education in a new common language. (What language?) After all, Indian divisions are not racial. " Ethnographically India is much more homogeneous than the Soviet Union or than Switzerland"! Really, Mr. Fischer! But obviously South India is out of his

ken, or he would not have let the Maharajah of Bikaner say that " Mysore is an unimportant state." And behind this gullibility lies the refusal to ask what is " India". The India Mr. Fischer has in mind, the united India he saw, is a British creation; Indian unity and British rule have died together. That may show that each was unnatural and sterile, but Mr. Fischer who can see the credulity- begging character of British rule, its essential artificiality, does not allow enough for the fact that Indian unity may be of the same kind. But behind the failure to examine the meaning of terms like India lies a deeper refusal. Why did India (or the Russian Revolution) lend itself to exploitation by the British (or by Stalin)?

When all the wickedness of the villains is allowed for, there is something in the victims that deserves cooler analysis than it gets here. " I hate the oppressors less than I do their victims," said Proudhon crossly. That was going too far, but we should consider more closely not only how far Stalin is a legitimate heir of Peter , the Great but of Lenin, how far the NKVD is the legitimate heir of the OGPU,.. the Cheka, the Okhrana, of the whole Trotskyite doctrine of terror, and how far character-assassination and end- justifying-the-means polemics are un-Marxian or unlike the theory and practice of the great founder of the doctrine.

D. W. BROGAN.