THE RUSSIAN VISIT SIR,—Mr. Ronalds describes as hypocritical the views
of those who deplore the coming Russian visit. Our visitors will not be the
freely elected representatives of the Russian people—such representatives do not exist— but the leaders of the Communist Party. They run a police State, settle differences by judicial murder, and base economic advance in part on the life-long slave labour of some millions of folk whose only offence is to have thought for themselves. They have utterly rejected the values on which our civilisation is founded, including truth, and they stand politically for most of the things we have struggled to get rid of in Britain. Their official aim, never yet disavowed in word or deed, is to extend their own slave system to the whole world including us. Since the worship of naked power in the shape of Communist supremacy is their only religion and their only ethic, nothing they say or do can be taken at face value. It is these men whom we are to welcome and entertain as friends. In so doing we shall betray our own best traditions, cut off another glimmer of hope from the silenced millions east of Berlin, and present the world with a mature specimen of the renowned British hypocrisy—if it is nothing worse. More dangerously, a great mass of people in Britain may be deceived by this exhibition into thinking that Communism is not so bad after all : when that happens, we shall be pretty well mounted on the tiger. Pace Mr. Ronalds, I would be the last to criticise Americans for continuing to recog- nise thuggery as thuggery even when the thugs adopt a crooked smile and start handing out bouquets to their intended victims. My sym- pathy goes to those British notables whose duty it will be to play the parts of hosts and friends in this ghastly masquerade.—Yours faithfully,
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