24 JANUARY 1964, Page 8

Tell Me Another .

The liquid liberals are at it again. Here is Mr. Wayland Young in the Guardian last week, telling us all about the dangers of anti-Com- munism. Many anti-Communist intellectuals, he complains, have been influenced `by a passionate involvement in Marxism or a passionate rejec- tion of it, or' typically, both. The danger is that such people, try as they will to be balanced, cannot but be tempted to erect anti-Communism into a criterion of political judgment.' But of course the truth is that many of us are quite pleased 10 be thought of as anti-Communist. And, in fact, I suspect that the late Hugh Gait- skell's hatred of modern totalitarianism—and Gaitskell was certainly not an ex-Communist- was one of the chief reasons why he was so dis- liked by the anti-anti-Communist 'liberals' in the Labour Party..

What, of course, the anti-anti-Communists can never realise is' that people regard them, not in the least as. an adjunct of the great con- spiracy, as they like to think, but as simply credulous. The reaction of many 'liberals' to such events as the Moscow trials, to the various espionage causes celebres from Hiss to Blake, to the germ warfare hoax (There must be some- thing in it'), or even to the attempts to give Lee Oswald a Birchite ancestry all show how deep- rooted is this credulity. It's the attitude that reacts to the pictures of Khrushchev's nutlear missiles in the Cuban jungle with the cry, 'Fake,' and when the dictator admits that the hardware

is there, responds with the statement that the US has got bases in Turkey, anyway.