Liberty Is a Lady

THE SECRET OF DEMOCRACY (258 pp.)--Suzanne Labin--Vanguard ($5).

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 of 20th century mankind.

Hamlet or Othello? The book is an exercise in anti-gullibility, an examination of the totalitarian sophistries about the free world which democrats have often uncritically swallowed. The prime myth of the totalitarians. Nazi. Fascist or Communist, is that they are modern, "the wave of the future." In reality, they are as age-old as tyranny. According to the Soviet Union, "an ineluctable law governs history" in their favor; yet it requires nothing less than "a constant reign of terror to crush the plots that might alter its unalterable course." The secondary myths are that the totalitarians are young, strong, healthy and decisive, while the democracies are decrepit, dilatory. corrupt and weak. In one sense, the totalitarians are young. The average life expectancy in the U.S.S.R. appears _to be about 30 years, the same as it was in the Middle Ages. Starvation, slave camps and the liquidation squads keep ripe old age rare. For the rest, the young are the dictator's ideal dupes with their "excess of energy," their "lack of attachments, their impulse toward sacrifice, their ignorance." They become the zealots; the majority of SS men who ran Buchenwald in 1938 were between the ages of 17 and 20.

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 not preceded by thought."

10 Million to 2. How do the totalitarian regimes camouflage the rank odor of their crimes? By using the deodorant of the false analogy. Have two Negroes been lynched in the U.S. in the last five years? The Soviet Union says, in effect, "You are not qualified to condemn my 10 million murders, for you have two Negroes on your conscience. Clean up your own backyard first." In their sham elections, rubber-stamp assemblies, and raids on the word democracy, the totalitarian regimes pay the false but grudging tribute that vice gives to virtue. Always unstable, says Author Labin, totalitarian regimes will be swept on into Trotsky's famous "dustbin of history." Adaptable, realistic, vigorous, the democracies can preserve the dignity, freedom and future of man--if they remain vigilant.

Few of the things Author Labin has to say will strike American readers as new, but they are said with rare feminine eloquence. Above all, it is remarkable and refreshing--although not typical--to hear them said in present-day France. The book is a heartening reminder that liberty used to be a lady, and French.

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