Dieven verdedigen tegen moordenaars

Met de beschouwing van De Kadt over het anti-Amerikanisme stem ik ten volle in. Een wereld van dieven dient wel degelijk tegen een wereld van moordenaars te worden verdedigd - ziedaar de essentie van mijn mening.

In het binnenkort te verschijnen boek Authors Take Sides On Vietnam, een symposion van meningen geredigeerd door Cecil Woolf en John Bagguley, luidt mijn antwoord op de beide vragen 'Are you for, or against the intervention of the United States in Vietnam?' en 'How, in your opinion, should the Vietnamese conflict be resolved?' als volgt:
'I am for the intervention of the United States in Vietnam. If in 1939 ramshackle capitalism - with its colonialism, its unemployment and its almost complete lack of social justice - was worth defending against the medieval brutality of nazism, how many more then is modern, post-colonialist capitalism - with its developing social justice, its growing tolerance, and its increasing freedom for the arts and letters  - worth defending against communism with is legalized social injustice, its medieval censorship, its primitive contempt of individual life, its xenophobia, and its superstitious suppression and persecution of writers. The conflict in Vietnam can only be resolved as the conflict in Europe twentyfive yerars ago: by military force on the scene, and not by pacifist demonstrations thousands of miles away, organized by people who mistake communism for a progressive movement.

Hollands Maandblad, januari 1967

Uit: Gerard Reve - Schoon Schip 1945 - 1984, pag. 149, uitgeverij Manteau.