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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 25. No. 12. 1962

Editorial — The intolerant society

Editorial

The intolerant society

As the two major blocks hurl accusations at each other, few people stop to think and realise that persecution, intolerance and brutality today know no frontiers. There are few nations in the world who have not, at some time, bowed to persecution.

The appearance of a short study* on this subject is timely and important. Over the last three years, cases of brutality have been recorded on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain, Novelists have disappeared in the Soviet Union, Communists have been tortured in France and ministers beaten by police in the American South.

Any people, any nation can be tolerant in times of peace and calm. The test of a country's progress comes in a time of stress or tension. Sharpeville and Hungary have shown that today's society cannot withstand unrest without resort to cruelty and brutality.

Changing people's way of thought is never easy; and those who attempt the task are usually unpopular. The Rev. Ashton Jones has been advocating social equality for three decades. He practises what he preaches — he lives with Negroes and they are his friends.

In March, 1960, he arrived in Dallas, Texas. In a university sit-in he was arrested and being declared a hobo by the county judge, was taken to gaol. But it was no ordinary cell. It was four feet by four feet with no window so that Jones could not stand up.

Ashton Jones was released 14 days later. Arriving in Shreveport, he was beaten senseless by local citizens. Taking him to gaol, the police shaved his head, tied his hands and threw him in with six criminals who repeated the beating. The police held him for 60 days.

Olga Ivinskaya was a constant companion to Boris Pasternak during the last years of his life. Shortly after his death, she was arrested by the Russian police. Olga was sentenced in Moscow to eight years' imprisonment; her daughter received three years, both sentences for importing roubles into the Soviet Union illegally.

So far as can be inferred from material available, the real reason for Olga's arrest was that the authorities wanted her to agree to the destruction of Pasternak's "The Blind Beauty", a play on pre-revolutionary Russia.

Unless society recognises the right to dissent, none of us in the long run is safe. For there is nothing to fear in ideas except that we may not understand them. Governments lose their raison d'etre if they do not protect liberty. There is no purpose in having liberty unless we are allowed to disagree. If an individual chooses fascism or communism, that individual should forever have that right to choose, just as Jones and Ivinskaya should have had the right to choose their ideas.

—R.J.B.

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* Persecution 1961 by Peter Benenson.