Word: scapegoat
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This mass delusion does not, as some self-pitying eggheads would like to think, stem from a chronic public distaste for intellectuality. It is the outlet for frustrations born of war and preparation for war. It is the kind of scapegoat-flogging that almost inevitably results from seemingly endless international tension. In American education, the public has found reflections of Communism it can attack more safely and successfully than those in the distant and powerful Soviet state. It matters not that the very vulnerability of "red professors" is an indication of the irrelevance to the total scheme of Soviet conspiracy...
...need of a scapegoat to blame for his inflation troubles, Juan Perón last week scrapped his recent policy of sweet forbearance to the U.S. (adopted after President Eisenhower's inauguration) and took a running dive back on to his old, angry anti-U.S. line. In his annual message to the reconvening Congress, Peron accused U.S. press services of an "infamous campaign of lies" to spread the idea that Argentina is undergoing a crisis. (A bomb, the eighth in Buenos Aires that day, burst one block from the Congress building while he was speaking.) That afternoon...
...momentous case in point is Federal Judge Luther Youngdahl's dismissal of four of the perjury counts against Owen Lattimore. If the American public has ever desired a scapegoat for the victory of Communism in China, it has been Lattimore. Ever since Senator McCarthy called him the "top Soviet agent in America," he has taken a continual barrage of mud. By last November his name had been so completely blackened that even defenders of the Truman Administration's Asian policy shied from debating the charges that he was an agent of Soviet conspiracy...
This is the standard scapegoat 'ritual. But Youngdahl, former Minnesota governor, has held it up, for the moment at least. In a decision as courageous as it is thoughtful, he has given the public a needed lesson in Constitutional law. Reminding that McCarran's questioning had no legal purpose but to gather information for legislation, he pointed out that perjury indictments must be relevant to that purpose to be valid. Interrogation about a man's opinions cannot be grounds for trial. Lattimore was asked whether he was a "Communist sympathizer" and whether he knew whether certain of his associates were...
...liberal intellectuals, as opposed to their most conservative opponents, can still recognize a man's achievements apart from his political views; that their hatred of suppression is not just limited to Communists; and that perhaps Mr. Viereck and those who condemn with him are just seeking an easy scapegoat for the brute fact of postwar Russian successes...