Our Own Ignorance

For eight months, as chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuernberg trials, Robert H. Jackson, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, had listened to Nazi bigwigs trace the rise & fall of Hitlerism. The big lesson of Nuernberg, he told a New York lawyers' meeting last week, was that Hitler doomed himself when he exiled scientists, suppressed information and halted intellectual progress. Why not, asked Jackson, in effect, let the Russians, who are making the same mistake, wither in their own stupidity? Said he:

"Smugness can put an iron curtain around us as effectively, as government can. The ignorance that I think is most dangerous to us is our own. The Nuernberg experience therefore leads me to doubt the wisdom of many people who think we have to ... break in through the Soviet iron curtain, that we must somehow penetrate it with information, news and our own ideology. I agree that the iron curtain is regrettable. But I think it is ultimately more disastrous to those it shuts in than to us whom it shuts out . . .

"If [the Russians] want to send their scientists to Siberia because they do not make the cold facts of sciences, such as genetics, support Soviet political theories, I condemn it as inhuman; but I don't think it imperils our security . . . What I think we would need to fear would be an open-minded, tolerant and inquiring Soviet Union, thirsting for truth."

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