VICTIMS OF THE COLD WAR
• ;:sf unnecessary human misery in which these are only four random items ? There is very little to choose, so far as these Infortunate victims are concerned, between cold war and war Without qualification. It has indeed been argued in the past, With justification, that so long as the lives of millions are dominated by the fear of individual interference and cruelty the state of man in peace is hardly better, if at all, than his state in war. The dreaded knock at the door, the summons to the party meeting, the notice of investigation '—we have Been enough of these things in our time to know that bombs and bullets are scarcely less terrible while being infinitely quicker in action.
Even the consolations of the present state of affairs are secondary. There is something solid in the fact that scores of Police will go into action to require the release from arbitrary imprisonment of one man under the ancient law of habeas corpus. It is worth something that if Dr. Cort with all his grievances, true and false, wants to go to Czecho-Slovakia, nobody here will stop him. But it would be worth far more If Governments had not worked themselves into a state of fear and hatred from which there is no escape for the individuals 'who are caught up in the hideous machine.
Sharp awareness of the human misery which surrounds us all the time through mere rigidity of doctrine is not an unprac- tical or a loosely sentimental matter. Without a removal of that rigidity, which spreads slowly outwards from the diseased Communist core, larger international agreements and the ' relaxation of tension ' have a strictly limited and subsidiary meaning. It is humane care for the fundamental rights of , individuals that counts most of all. That care, which is sporadically kindled when isolated men and women are made to suffer in public—as in the past few days—must be main- tained all the time. In the long run it is only with the aid of such simple and clear ideas that we shall break out of our present prison-house.
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