republics with liberal constitutional safeguards similar or usually equivalent to those found in our own constitution, yet with the shining exceptions of Chile and Uruguay, their political records seem to us to be an endless list of coup d'état, bloody revolution, unelected provisional presidents, political admirals and generals, states of siege, states of public emergency, exiles and refugees, outlawing of opposition parties, liquidation of opposition leaders, suppression of free speech, free assembly, and free press.
Here is a place to walk softly, to be not hasty in passing judgment; we may not understand all that we see. I found in traveling around the world that a great many people believed the most arrant nonsense about the United States. In particular, a great many people, apparently well educated and sophisticated, were convinced that the people of the United States were in the grip of terror and that free speech and free press no longer existed here. They believed that the United States was fomenting a third world war and would presently start it, with Armageddon consequences for everyone else, and that the government of the United States smashed without mercy anyone who dared to oppose even by oral protest this headlong rush toward disaster.
These people could "prove" their opinions by quoting any number of Americans and American newspapers and magazines. That they were able to quote such American sources proved just the opposite, namely that we do continue to enjoy free speech even to express arrant nonsense and unpopular opinion, escaped them completely.
The extremely wide scope of free speech and free press in the United States, much wider than that enjoyed anywhere else in the world including all of the British Commonwealth, is not understood elsewhere.
(More free speech and press than in the British Commonwealth? Surely not! Ah, but we do have: our radio is not government owned, we do not place severe restrictions on the importation of printed matter from outside our borders, our libel laws and our limitations on reporting of court procedures are as nothing compared with theirs, our news reporting is the most aggressive in the world.)
The real restrictions against what we can say or print are very nearly limited to only the most blatant of pornography and to classified military secrets. But citizens of other countries neither understand nor believe this; it is too foreign to their own experience. I said to a man in South Africa: "You insist that anyone in the United States who expresses an opinion favorable to Russia or to communism is immediately thrown in jail. How do you reconcile that with the fact that the communist Daily Worker is still published in New York?" He simply called me a liar.
I thought of sending him a copy on my return, but I refrained; such a publication in his country was likely to cause him trouble if he was caught with it.
In most cases all around the world these discussions that revealed the extent of misconception about the United States and its institutions started at the same point: why didn't the United States government or the United States people or somebody suppress Senator McCarthy and put a stop to the "reign of terror" in our country?
The interest in Senator McCarthy was enormous; the total lack of understanding of what was really going on was even more enormous. Now I am neither a constituent nor an admirer of the Senator, but I found myself repeatedly in the odd position of trying to explain what he was doing, why it was legal in a free country for him to do it, and how it was impossible for a congressional investigation to cause a "reign of terror" in 160,000,000 people.
My task was made more difficult by the fact that many Americans with other attributes of a horse than horse sense were asserting loudly that McCarthy had indeed created a "reign of terror." Are you terrified? I am not, yet I have in my background much political activity well to the left of Senator
Here is a place to walk softly, to be not hasty in passing judgment; we may not understand all that we see. I found in traveling around the world that a great many people believed the most arrant nonsense about the United States. In particular, a great many people, apparently well educated and sophisticated, were convinced that the people of the United States were in the grip of terror and that free speech and free press no longer existed here. They believed that the United States was fomenting a third world war and would presently start it, with Armageddon consequences for everyone else, and that the government of the United States smashed without mercy anyone who dared to oppose even by oral protest this headlong rush toward disaster.
These people could "prove" their opinions by quoting any number of Americans and American newspapers and magazines. That they were able to quote such American sources proved just the opposite, namely that we do continue to enjoy free speech even to express arrant nonsense and unpopular opinion, escaped them completely.
The extremely wide scope of free speech and free press in the United States, much wider than that enjoyed anywhere else in the world including all of the British Commonwealth, is not understood elsewhere.
(More free speech and press than in the British Commonwealth? Surely not! Ah, but we do have: our radio is not government owned, we do not place severe restrictions on the importation of printed matter from outside our borders, our libel laws and our limitations on reporting of court procedures are as nothing compared with theirs, our news reporting is the most aggressive in the world.)
The real restrictions against what we can say or print are very nearly limited to only the most blatant of pornography and to classified military secrets. But citizens of other countries neither understand nor believe this; it is too foreign to their own experience. I said to a man in South Africa: "You insist that anyone in the United States who expresses an opinion favorable to Russia or to communism is immediately thrown in jail. How do you reconcile that with the fact that the communist Daily Worker is still published in New York?" He simply called me a liar.
I thought of sending him a copy on my return, but I refrained; such a publication in his country was likely to cause him trouble if he was caught with it.
In most cases all around the world these discussions that revealed the extent of misconception about the United States and its institutions started at the same point: why didn't the United States government or the United States people or somebody suppress Senator McCarthy and put a stop to the "reign of terror" in our country?
The interest in Senator McCarthy was enormous; the total lack of understanding of what was really going on was even more enormous. Now I am neither a constituent nor an admirer of the Senator, but I found myself repeatedly in the odd position of trying to explain what he was doing, why it was legal in a free country for him to do it, and how it was impossible for a congressional investigation to cause a "reign of terror" in 160,000,000 people.
My task was made more difficult by the fact that many Americans with other attributes of a horse than horse sense were asserting loudly that McCarthy had indeed created a "reign of terror." Are you terrified? I am not, yet I have in my background much political activity well to the left of Senator
Similar Books
