you must first believe. In order to feel the hatred of shocked and soured love, you
must first love.
But who can blame the people who have falsified the past under the fire of the Great
Persecution? It is easy to ask others to be heroes or martyrs; it is not easy to be a
hero or a martyr, though we naturally respect those who are.
Once it became a crime punishable by economic and social ostracism and by prison to
have had any connection with radicalism in the Thirties, it was only natural that people
should protect themselves, their wives and their children by spinning fairy tales about
that past. The radicals of the Thirties were sincere in their convictions as long as they
held those convictions. If the story is falsified now, it is because terror is not the
best climate for memory or for truth.
In a way the Thirties may be defined as that period when many people followed an ideal
which first exploded in betrayal and for which they then had to pay by persecution.
And the Fifties may be defined as that period when you had to pay and pay and pay for
the vision of the Thirties.
And it was not only official agencies that penalized you for that vision. You were also
penalized by men and women in positions of influence and power in literature, art and
education who, often to protect themselves, persecuted you. We also have had something we
used to ridicule in Russia; we also have had denunciation, the bearing of false witness,
confession, contrition, recantation. During the Moscow Trials people in this country
wondered about the victims, the Old Bolsheviks. Why did they confess? Perhaps we ought to
ask the same question of the Penitent Radicals in this country. Comrades, why do you confess?
In both cases the fundamental fault is in the persecution not in the victim. I have
never accepted the totalitarian idea, now prevalent throughout the world, that not the
murderer but the murdered man is guilty.
———-
In the Great Persecution of the current decade all of us who spoke up in the Thirties
for the vision have been asked: Where do you stand?
If there was any Candide na?ve enough to think they really wanted to know where he
stands, he was soon set right. They did not want to know where you stood in the Thirties
or where you stand today. What they wanted you to do was to name names so that your
friends, or your former friends, or people you barely knew, could be fired from
their jobs, ruined professionally, economically and socially and, if possible, sent to
jail under the pretext that this great republic of ours was in imminent danger of being
overthrown. And woe to him who refused to name names!
I’ve always been curious to know what would happen if they gave Candide a chance to say
where he stands. Let us do so now. Perhaps, if we listen with patience and sympathy,
Candide will tell us where we stood in the Thirties, what the dream was which inspired and
activated American writers then, and where we stand today. I have the pleasure of
presenting a little Existentialist comedy entitled
WAITING FOR CANDIDE
[Enter CANDIDE. He takes the witness stand -- the far end of a long mahogany
conference table -- and faces the all-male investigating body. Please note that none of
these investigating bodies ever has a woman on it and hurrah for women! This investigating
body is a curious one; it contains the usual type of inquisitorial legislator; it also
contains men of influence and power in education, art, literature and science.]
CANDIDE: Gentlemen, I don’t know what capitalism is today or what
socialism is. We live in a new complex world. I’d like to study this world, to understand
it, to come to conclusions about it and about the future of man. But not on the basis of
nineteenth century theories. No, on the basis of what we can learn today about the
world today.
One thing, however, is clear. The immemorial evils are with us still!
The world is still full of poverty, tyranny, ignorance, hatred, violence and bloodshed.
There are still in every country in the world — and I make no exceptions whatsoever!
– the overprivileged few and the underprivileged many.
There is inequality of the most ghastly kind today and nowhere more so than in those
countries which call themselves "socialist" and in those which have thrown off
"the yoke of imperialism" and whose leaders strut around in fancy uniforms and
rush around in fancy Cadillacs and live it up in their fancy palaces amidst the starving
millions in the rice paddies around them and who do so with the same arrogance and
callousness as the colonial administrators they chased out a few years ago at gunpoint.
And over all this hangs the threat of the most terrible, the most destructive, the most
catastrophic war in all history, the first global thermonuclear war, a war that may
annihilate mankind, as we are reminded every day.
We are all concerned about this. But each of us is concerned in a different way and
that is good. Difference of opinion not only makes for horse racing, as Mark
Twain said; it also makes for a genuine exchange of facts and opinion and thus for a
better chance to correct error and arrive at truth.
Where I stand today, gentlemen, begins with this freedom to study, to analyze, to think
and — be they right or wrong — to utter my thoughts freely, without fear of punishment,
or of reproach for anything except sloppy thinking.
For without this freedom, no true civilization, no true progress is possible. Without
it you will get a world of Sputniks without men, and where there are no men, the people
persih.
So let’s call it a day, gentlemen! Let’s forgive each other. You forgive me all
the intolerance and fanaticism and persecution I practiced on my side of the fence and
I’ll forgive you yours.
But it’s got to be a two-way street. It must work both ways. We must really and
truly and with all our hearts and in actual fact forgive each other.
[Candide picks up the glass of water at his elbow and absentmindedly puts it down.]
Once we agree on genuine freedom of thought and discussion, gentlemen, I’d like to chip
in my two cents to the current worldwide effort to solve the contemporary human dilemma.
Call my contribution, if you like, the Midget’s Mite, but please listen.
We are in trouble everywhere, in every country, because we have made technology and
politics – the pursuit of wealth and power – the end. But they are not
ends. They are means. The end is what it has always been in one form or another.
The end, the goal is the redemption and liberation of man.
[Candide takes a sip of water, wipes his brow and goes on.]
Gentlemen, when I used to follow a fellow named Karl Marx in the Thirties, I read this
by him. The great religions told us what is wrong morally. But goodness could not be
practiced in a world of political inequality. Then came the "bourgeois democratic
revolution" and showed us what political equality could be like. Nothing could be
done, however, as long as there was economic inequality. Socialism could bring about
essential economic equality and this would at last make it possible for men to practice
the virtues taught by religion and the political equality taught by democracy.
This was a great idea until recently. It was, in a way, the idea which animated the
Thirties. Then the Socialist Fatherland, ruled from the Kremlin by a Caesar named Stalin,
made gigantic technological and industrial advances. But there is no economic,
social, or political equality in Russia. And, far from practicing the moral virtues, they
have committed some of the most frightful crimes in all history.
This is important not only for those American writers who went through the radical
movement in the United States in the Thirties. It is important for the world, since half
the world to-day is under the rule of socialism of one kind or another.
Today something is rotten not only in the state of Denmark but in every state on the
face of the earth without exception.
What is wrong? And what is to be done?
The way to find out is not by purge trial or Congressional investigation, through the
GPU or the FBI. The way to find out is by the logical methods of science, by the genuine.
democratic process in politics and by the creative methods of the arts aflame with
imagination and love.
For if we do not love each other, we will never liberate each other. And if we do not
love each other, we cannot help each other or the world. If we continue to hate each
other, we will wipe each other off the face of the earth with the greatest of our
discoveries so far — atomic energy.
Love, you say — ha! ha! That’s for the pulpit and Sunday.
You are wrong, gentlemen. Democracy and socialism would never have been possible even
as an ideal, as a dream, as a vision without the notion of man’s humanity. And this would
never have been possible without the notion of man’s divinity.
Why is it wrong for men to enslave, oppress and kill each other? Primitive man did not
think it was wrong and neither did pagan man. It became wrong when Vedantism, Buddhism,
Judaism and Christianity developed the notion that God created man in His own image or
that God is man or that man is God.
This was the birth of personality. It was also, in a way, the birth of the Blues. For
personality means not only freedom but also responsibility, sin and guilt. But the whole
point of personality is redemption from sin and guilt, the whole point is freedom!
It was then that it became wrong to enslave, oppress and kill our fellow men. Why?
Because from that point of view every one of us in every nook and cranny of the world is
the creation of God, a child of God, and he who kills man kills the divine.
It has said that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God. Who said that? Marx? Lenin?
No, gentlemen. Saint Thomas Aquinas said that. If, said the early church, men are driven
to choose between the unjust laws of the king and the just laws of God, let them rather
kill the king than disobey God.
[Candide coughs, takes another drink of water and goes on]
It was the early church that developed the idea of revolution which the leaders of
democracy in this country and elsewhere, and from them the leaders of socialism took over
as part of their cultural and moral heritage.
But I am not here to call for revolution! Far from it, gentlemen!
We who still believe with all our hearts and all our souls in the vision of man
redeemed and liberated everywhere without exception are today the most conservative people
in the world.
We are asking the leaders of democracy and the leaders of socialism to go back
to first principles. Not to the Thirties, O no! But all the way back. To the roots! For
there true conservatism and true radicalism are one. They are one at the roots of our
humanity from which all things grow and live and have a future.
When we recover these first principles and live by them, we will find the
political instruments for carrying them out. For there is no truer first principle than
the one which says that where there is a will, there is a way.
Naturally, where there is no will, there is no way. If you do not want peace,
you will have war. If you do not want justice, you will have injustice. And if we
live only by, in and for political instruments, whatever they may be, if we have no first
principles, no vision, if the means are the end, then we and the world are lost.
What are the first principles, gentlemen?
It’s a long story and should occupy a new generation of free, audacious thinkers for
the next generation — thinkers who will say with Ivan Karamazoff: I don’t want a
million dollars; I want an answer to my questions!
But here we can take one first principle briefly. You ask, gentlemen, why I entered the
Movement in the Thirties when you were clever enough to stay out of it or why I left it
the year I did when you had the genius to leave it the year before.
I entered it because the Movement in its early stages — like religion and democracy in
their early stages — called for the universal liberation of men in such terms of truth,
beauty and morality that anyone with the slightest generosity of spirit, anyone genuinely
concerned with the fate of man, had to respond, had to join.
This cannot be understood solely in terms of the technical details of political,
economic and military manoeuvres and clashes.
When a doctor is rushing in his car to save a life or to deliver a baby, you cannot
explain his mission by the car, the gear-shift cannot explain the baby.
Nobody would fight in a war if he were told that it was being waged to enrich the
elite. And nobody would join a radical movement if he were told that it would end in
nothing more than the regulation of the price index or the transfiguration of a few
obscure politicians into dictators and generals.
No, men fight and die for casue only when they think it will free them from evil and
give them some good, above all when that casue is the emancipation of mankind, or at least
of millions, a casue in some way connected with the redemption and liberation of man.
The corruption comes later — but not before some good is done. Then the early church
dies, the Jacobins and the Abolitionists disappear and, in our time, the communists may go
out of business. But the original dream, the vision of man’s universal liberation is
always there and will always find new ways to express itself.
What is that vision?
In the Book of Revelations we are told: "’And I saw a new heaven and A new
earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more
sea . . . And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes and there shall be no more
death; neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former
things are passed away . . . And he said unto me: It is done. I am Alpha and Omega,
the beginning and the end. I will ,give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the
water of life freely. And there shall be no night there.’"
It has also been said: All men are equal, not in capacity but in value.
This vision has haunted men for thousands of years. It reappears in the apocalyptic
utterances of the Reformation, the Puritan Revolution, the French Revolution, the
twentieth century socialist revolution — and in the American writing of the Thirties,
always in different terms appropriate to the age but always with the same hope: to wipe
away all tears, to abolish man-made death, to do away with pain by the passing away of the
former things, the old state of affairs, and the arrival of a new beginning, a new heaven
and a new earth.
This has been called the basic dream with the changing name.
And in every case the vision, once carried into practice, achieves great things and
becomes corrupt. And after a while the vision finds a new outlet; for as long as there is
pain and sorrow and crying and man-made death in the world, as long as men suffer at each
other’s hands the horrors and humiliations of slavery, exploitation, inequality,
injustice, imprisonment, capital punishment and war, so long will that vision burn in the
hearts of some and at the right time — such as the Nineteen Thirties and, who knows?
maybe the Nineteen Sixties! — it flames up in the hearts of millions the world over.
Where do I stand, gentlemen?
I stand by that vision.
The vision, the basic dream is in the Declaration of Independence, in the Bill of
Rights, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the Communist Manifesto, in the
Gettysburg Address, in the Emancipation Proclamation, in the Four Freedoms. And, believe
it or not, gentlemen, it is in THE PRELUDF, the masterpiece of that old tory, William
Wordsworth, the tory who began as a radical and wrote the only great poem we have about
revolution.
For it is THE PRELUDE, better than anything ever written, that tells us what a period
of reform and revolution, a period like the Thirties is like. Speaking of his own radical
generation, Wordsworth says:
O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, us who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven.
Yes, came the dawn, comes the revolution and it is bliss to be alive and to be young is
very heaven; for while we are young, the world is changing, it is being transfigured.