Word: totalitarian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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While the totalitarian threat emphasizes the worth of American political values, the contributors fear the demand for uncritical affirmation of American society and culture. Essential to creative activity is freedom to criticize without fear, the right to love one aspect of America and to loath another. Such criticism represents a more productive commitment to a society than unquestioning acceptance. For creative achievement, the lingering sense of intellectual alienation is a necessity...
Alluding to the professor's statement that it is "the duty of citizens to cooperate in government," Leopold Kohr, assistant professor of Economics at Rutgers, extended this conclusion and alleged that in a totalitarian state this would enslave the individual. "The characteristic feature of democracy," he said, "is not cooperation but opposition which in the eyes of government always looks like obstruction...
...government." Since the authors do not qualify the statement, I assume this duty to apply to all government and all conditions. If we would have a communist government tomorrow, our new leaders would find such an interpretation of the citizen's duty very handy, and so would any totalitarian government. This is why we should not be surprised to find both nazis and communists proposing international agreements and laws making non-cooperation in government an offense to be prosecuted not only by the home state of the citizen but also by the host state into which he may have escaped...
This is what nazism and communism demand, and what our won a increasingly collectivized society seems to demand in increasing measure too. However, it is not only totalitarian but indecent, if the judgment of society becomes the standard by which an individual is judged also by those with whom he is connected not socially but personally, and by more intimate bonds than those of citizenship. For the fact that someone is a law defying. citizen does not mean that he could therefore not at the same time be the best of fathers, the most perfect of gentlemen, or the most...
...free nations as the only alternative outcomes of this conflict. I believe we can and will avoid an atomic global holocaust and given time, courage and patience, that the tradition of dissent and freedom will prove to be a better guide for a heavily industrialized society than totalitarian communism." ... The next ten years, if they bring neither World War II nor peace will be in a sense a continuation of that long period of trial for the university tradition which started when Hitler came to power in Germany...