Record of a Friendship

339

Summerhill School

Leiston, Suffolk

My dear Reich,

[ 1951 ]

October 16, 1951

I wrote the accompanying air mail letter before your second
letter came. Let me state that I take no sides re Philipson and Raknes;
I simply told you what I heard said. And my suggestion that you let P.
write his viewpoint meant simply that you'd answer it and make a lot
clear to humanity that might never come out ...
Because I don't feel passionately the same things that you do, you
always conclude that I am lacking in grasp or so etwas [something of
the sort]. This communism business, which you say hurts you that I
can't see its dangerous vileness. I see it as an extension of existing condi­
tions, the same thing as anti-semitism, negro race hatred, South African
Apartheid, caning in English schools, beating children and animals ...
in a word hate. I hold it is because we have not put our own houses in
order that we have allowed communism to win so much. In 1936 [on a
lecture tour in South Africa] I saw Boer policemen chase natives out of
a public park with whips at closing time; these natives, given the chance,
will become communists, indeed the ones I spoke to then said they were
communists and they had no idea what the word meant or that Marx
had lived. When you write about doing something I ask what one can
do so long as the factors that make for hate are not attacked at the same
time? We both preach love and freedom for babies and reach some
folks, a small number indeed, a growing number but far too small
to arrest the hate in life and politics in time. The Stalins will be top dogs
for many years before Peter and Zoe grow up to try to take over the
world. Partly of course because Barakanism breaks up the united front
of freedom. Now my dilemma is this: If you have to, and it is clear that
you must, shoo off the band-waggoners, they become enemies in a world
that has too many enemies. You may say What the hell! Let em be
enemies! Better open enemies than false friends. True, but is there any
other way? That is the fundamental question, how to keep a united front
against hate. These letters of yours show that in two old friends and to
some extent fellow workers there is not enough unity. It isn't enough for
you to say that I am unaware of the "true nature of the red fascist
regime," seeing that my whole life has been for child freedom and
absence of moulding. It seems to me that you see ONLY the red fascism
and not the other coloured ones that are in Catholicism, Moral Rearma­
ment, Ku Klux Klan, etc. Bertrand Russell in a letter to me recently