oss

‘LANDS OF

ANXIETY*

Novelist finds disillusionment,
frustration widespread in West

MOSCOW
WHEN you travel west from
Moscow, always following
the setting sun, you finally
reach the Lands of Anxiety.
It is there that people look
with apprehension toward the
next morning of their lives.
Will they still have work?
Will the patterns they knew
and have lived in still func-
tion?
Or will all the fretting and
worrying have been for noth-

ing, anyhow, because the “Big
Bang” has come, consuming
all life in its mushroom-shaped
cloud?

It is not a nice world to
have to live in, and if I were
a young man in one of the
Lands of Anxiety, I, too, might
resent it deeply and be very
angry.

I might turn against the
generations that fought two
world wars without appar-
ently learning a damned thing

OPEN FORUM

Heikkila deportation

CONCERNED, Vancouver,
B.C.: U.S. immigration auth-
orities are still bent on de-
porting William Heikkila, but
when and if they do deport
him and others like him they
will be deporting from their
shores the very principles
upon which they claim their
nation to be founded.

They will be deporting,
first of all, freedom. They will
be saying in effect: “You
may have freedom of thought
and speech only as long as
you think and speak what we
tell you to think and speak.”

Secondly, they will be de-
porting Christian principles.
What of the golden rule?
They take a middle-aged man
with married children, know-
ing full well that those child-
ren’s mates are bound to
have family ties that would
prevent them from following
the deported man into a for-
eign country.

This leaves the man’s wife
with a ghastly choice. If she
does not follow her husband
into exile she will never see
him again. If she does follow
him she must say goodbye
forever to her children, her
parents, and her brothers and
sisters.

How would the deporting
authorities like it if they were
to be exiled forever from
home and family? How would
they like being deprived of all
they held dear because they
dared think for themselves?

It is heartening, though,
that there was opposition in
the U.S. to this deed. Let us
hope that the good people
there will start working a
little harder for goodness and
decency, so that their country
will not go by default into the
hands of the unscrupulous and
cruel, the Nazi element who

. everyone

go about like roaring lions
seeking whom they may des-
troy.

People want security

_ READER, Vancouver, B.C.:
The basic things that people
want from society are secur-
ity, comfort and honor. In
our society, honor is given in
proportion to the amount of
security and comforts one has
been able to acquire for him-
self.

That is why, when it is sug-
gested that a socialist society
would be better, because it
insures security and comforts!
for all, some protest that if
had these things
then how could you “get
ahead.”

How can one be honored for
possessing things that are
common to all? It is true that
people are now honored be-
cause of what they have been
able to take from society, and
it is hard for them to visual-
ies a world wherein people
will receive honor only for
what they give society.

But people are changing.
Many of them are beginning
to regard exploiters as thieves,
and are shaking off their in-
fantile desire to shine at the
expense of others. They are
seeing instead a society where
all will enjoy the good things
of life.

This kind of idealism starts
in the minds and hearts of
people, but it is the most prac-
tical thing on earth. It shows
that man can and will pro-
gress.

And just when the _ but-
terfly shakes off its cumber-
some body and takes wings to
the sky, no power on earth
can change it back to a cater-
pillar — just so, when man
moves further away from his
cave, neither guns nor bombs
nor coercion can make him
crawl back into it.

from them, so that today the
threat of a war of extinction
hangs over my head.

I might become cynical, be-
lieve in nothing, and try to
get as much thrill as possible
out of my days—rock ’n’ roll-
ing, speeding, knifing, hurting,
hating, in a noisy but inarticu-
late revolt against something
that is big and evil and stupid
and petty all at the same time.

And if I ‘were a* young
writer I might join the so-
called “Angry Young Men”
literary movement, which ar-
ticulates that revolt and spends
its anger in the witticisms of
frustration, and believes “that
there are no good causes left
to fight for.”

Temicht

eg t %

But I don’t live in the West.
And the whole thing would be
of only academic interest if

* these negative moods were just

a fad that confined itself to a
certain age bracket in what
I call the Lands of Anxiety.

However, they slop over into
countries where cynicism is
uncalled for, where perspec-
tives unheard of and un-
dreamed of some 20 years ago
are today open to youth.

In fact, it seems that a most
subtle kind of propaganda is
busy spreading such moods
where they exist and making
them slop over and affect
youth elsewhere. At a time
when clearheaded determina-
tion is needed to preserve
peace and enthusiasm, to help
bring about socialism, disillu-
sionment becomes a weapon
—a weapon of the enemy.

xt t so

No capitalist in his right
senses believes any longer that
he can sell the beauties of
monopoly capitalism to deci-
sive masses of people.

Seen globally, capitalism
and its economic philosophy
have ceased to be attractive
as a spiritual force, and the
hired publicity boys must
cover the sorry nakedness of
their proposition with talk of
“people’s capitalism” or “Wel-
fare State”’—wilted fig-leaves,
to say the least.

But to the capitalists it
doesn’t matter much if capi-
talism appears shoddy as long
as the other alternative, so-
cialism, can be made to look
like something you don’t want
to fight for, either.

John Osborne, one of Brit-
ain’s “Angry Young Men”, has
a character in a play he wrote
bemoan the fact that in 1957
there is no Loyalist Spain to
go to and fight for. There is

This picture of children watching British troops onl
with a guided missile dramatically illustrates the
of the West’s “Lands of Anxiety.” -

nothing. No “good cause” any-
where.

That type of young man is
not new. In 1937, he would
have found that Loyalist Spain
and the fight against fascism
wasn’t so good a cause, either
—not pure enough, you know.

And he wouldn’t have joined
the International Brigade; he
would have stayed at home
and made smart cracks, quite
as he does today.

Ah, these petty bourgeois
Parsifals who are so quick to
anger because there’s blood
and dirt in the class struggle,
because Communists  aren’t
just one long picture gallery
of positive heroes—whom does
their anger help?

The cynicism of these
youths, their attempt to escape
into smart-aleckism—who does
this profit? ... The capitalists,
obviously whose rule is main-
tained by people’s inertia.

Worse: we know where an-
ger without direction, or mis-
directed anger, can lead.

The young men of Germany
in the early. thirties of this
century were angry, too. Many
of them turned to fascism, The
victims of their anger ended
in the gas ovens, and they
themselves at Stalingrad.

And why, of all generations
of youth, should this one in-
herit a ready-made paradise?

What entitles the young men
and women of some countries
to an empty anger over prob-

May 9, 1958 —

su
tems that must as of
anxieties that ns pi!
come, struggles th 5

weathered?

other day, here 1” fa
met young peoP’©
ent mind.

They were 10
but enthusiastic,
sioned, but ease! ga

They were enginé ag
search workers, nA ti
extending the RE the
science and puildine the
new world which * pat
cause mankind @¥ ,
world of socialis™ jn

They didn't SHV’ to
boots over the he f
“Big Bang,” thov®” ine |
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tion. They had COM ae bY
since wars are a yen
ple, people can ae 40%

They knew ange | otf
their anger W85 es thee
anced outlook, 20g #
was directed tore es
pose: it was clas gi

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Soviet Union turns 10 y

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ae were 2 tiny oi
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