THE NEW INQUISITORS
SIR,—It was unfortunate that Mr. Alan Thompson's article on The New Inquisitors should appear in the same issue as Dr. A. Olderts article, Behind the Iron Curtain, for it seemed to take some of the sting out of his rather sweeping generalisations. I do not wish in any way to condone the methods of the Un-American Activities Committee (which now happily is no more), but they did unearth some rather dirty linen—and in the most unexpected places. The revelations of Whittaker Chambers and Louis Boudenz cannot be dismissed lightly. The findings of the Gouzenko case in Canada show that spy rings do not exist only in Graham Greene novels.
Any government of a country has a right to defend itself against what may prove to be an attack on its constitution. Reform must be achieved democratically and not by a social revolution. The dismissal of the Washington professor i -was because of their political allegiance. The Communist's professed aims have surely been stated frequently enough by Marx, Lenin and Stalin to need any reiteration here. Thus when academic freedom or academic licence allows a professor to usurp his position and undermine loyalty to the State, the 'State has a right to take appropriate action.
From Mr. Alexander Werth's recent book, Musical Uproar in Moscow, and a splendid series of articles in the Manchester Guardian on the Lysenko Case, the conformity to party line of Russian composers, critics and writers, one realises. how very narrow the Communist conception of academic freedom is, and one shudders to think of the fate of such " reactionaries " as Mr. T. S. Eliot and Mr. Vaughan Williams and such decadent, bourgeois individualists as Sir Max Beerbohm and Mr. Walter de la Mare, should the Communists gain control here or in the U.S.A.. Indeed, the statements of Zhdanov and Vavilov with their rejection of Western influences recall the centenary speech at the University of Gfittingen which Mr. Thompson so effectively quotes.
As a postscript I might add that in Edinburgh University Mr. Thompson's plea for "academic freedom" falls on ever stonier ground. He must find it difficult to reconcile his article with his speech at a recent Communist-Labour Party debate in which he condoned the trial and imprisonment of Cardinal Mindzenty and the Bulgarian pastors.—Yours,
etc., BRUCE M. COOPER. 42 SPOIDSWOOde Road; Edinburgh, 9-
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