Word: labine
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...SECRET OF DEMOCRACY (258 pp.)-Suzanne Labin-Vanguard...
...Suzanne Labin writes with a hatpin. This young (thirtyish) French political scientist impales totalitarian myths and neutralist delusions, prods lukewarm intellectuals who rarely rise to the defense of democracy, or if they do, praise it with faint damns. Author Labin has small use for so-called thinkers who don the smoked glasses of a spurious objectivity and report that they can see no difference between Western freedom and Eastern tyranny except "shades of grey." She believes that it is worth restating the great central truth, or "secret," of democracy, i.e., that it is the first, last, best and only hope...
Does debate weaken democracy? On the contrary, argues Author Labin, the rigor of the dogmatic one-opinion police state leads only to rigor mortis: "To believe that music must bring forth Leninistic harmonies, that physics must be de-Semiticized . . . non-Aryans sterilized, the kulaks exterminated: to believe all this, even unanimously-above all unanimously-must lead a people to catastrophe . . . Hamlet is frequently cited as an example of the tragedy caused by thought not followed by action, but, as Bertrand Russell judiciously observes, the totalitarians ought rather to meditate upon the fate of Othello, on the disasters provoked by action...
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