Stronger Than Truth Itself

Since Koestler's Darkness at Noon, the Western world has been able to understand, however dimly, the motives that make loyal Communists confess crimes they did not commit. Since the trials of Cardinal Mindszenty and Robert A. Voge-ler, the Western world has also come to realize that relentless and refined pressure on body & mind can make the firmest anti-Communist admit to outlandish offenses. What still remains puzzling is why Communist trials, so carefully stage-managed as spectacles, can be so blatantly inept as to strain the credulity of a high-school boy. Did the Communists really expect the Czechoslovaks to believe the absurd conspiracies confessed so abjectly at the recent Slansky trial?

Pondering these matters, Raymond Aron, a former philosophy professor who has become one of France's leading highbrow political commentators, wrote in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro: "It was not necessary to have a trial in order to rouse the passions of antiSemitism, and as an instrument of government, a trial is singularly inefficient. Either the masses believe in the truth of the confessions--and in that case, what must they think of a party ruled by spies for so long?--or else they do not believe in it, but then the purpose attributed to the trials by Western commentators is not achieved."

These "ceremonies of self-accusation," Aron believes, can only be understood as "religious rites, rather than instruments of a rational method . . . The goal is to manifest the absolute nature of the supreme power by forcing millions of men to act and talk as if they took absurdities to be the truth ... All religions tend to impose upon the faithful the image of a world which is more true than the world of the senses. In Stalinism, that world is simply the interpretation which the party gives to events, an interpretation which is never definitely fixed. By confessing crimes which they have not committed, disgraced officials help create this super-reality, of which the party is supreme master. The method will be applied to all enslaved countries so that it shall be understood finally that no one opposes the party.

"The faith which the trials are intended to spread has for its object neither the testimony of the victims nor the doctrine of the masters, but the omnipotence of a party which must [be made to] seem stronger than truth itself."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.