旧站文章

50年前的今天，《人民日报》发表社论《这是为什么？》，从此开始大规模的反右运动，55万以上的所谓反党反社会主义的右派分子，或是被送劳教、劳改，或被监督劳动，妻离子散，家破人亡，他们在中国大地演绎了一出现实版的“悲惨世界”。

50年前的今天是几十万右派及其家属开始他们苦难的历程的日子，50年后，他们在有生之年发出要求正义的声音，尽管希望渺茫，但仍然祝福他们。

不能容许“反右”文字狱贻害至今

——独立中文笔会关于“反右”五十周年的声明

2007年6月8日

50年前的1957年3月，毛泽东和中共中央号召党外人士帮党整风，重申“百家争鸣、百花齐放”的方针；4月27日，中共中央发出《关于整风运动的指示》，提出“放手鼓励批评，坚决实行’知无不言，言无不尽，言者无罪，闻者足戒，有则改之，无则加勉’的原则”。中共各级组织和机关纷纷组织“党外人士座谈会”，鼓励人们畅所欲言。

然而，鸣放刚刚开始两个月，毛泽东就在5月15日写出了《事情正在起变化》，为反右运动定下了调子。6月8日，《人民日报》发表《这是为什么？》的社论，指出：“少数的右派份子正在向共产党和工人阶级的领导权挑战”。“他们企图乘此时机把共产党和工人阶级打翻，把社会主义的伟大事业打翻，拉者历史向后倒退，退到资产阶级专政，……把中国人民重新放在帝国主义及其走狗的反动统治之下。”同日，中共中央向全党发出毛泽东亲自起草的《关于组织力量准备反击右派份子的猖狂进攻的指示》，正式宣布反右运动的开始：“这是一场大战（战场既在党内，又在党外），不打胜这一仗，社会主义是建不成的，并且有出’匈牙利事件’的某些危险。”

于是，一场轰轰烈烈的反右运动在全中国展开，一场中国历史上、也是世界历史上最大的文字狱浩劫遽然降临。数以百万计的知识分子与正直之士被打倒在地，带来了“万马齐喑”的政治局面。

反右运动中抓右派的依据，无一例外是“右派言论”，是再典型不过的“以言治罪”。不仅是公开的言论要治罪（在会议上的发言和公开发表的文章），而且是私下的言论也要治罪（被揭发的私人谈话、私人信件、私人日记和造谣诬陷），已经达到“腹诽罪”的荒谬程度。

反右运动也是一场反法治的迫害运动，可以不经任何司法程序就剥夺上百万人的基本自由。没有检察院起诉、没有律师辩护、也没有法庭判决，而只有群众控诉、会议揭发、背后小报告、领导划圈和组织宣布。

正如《浙江部分反右受害者及其家属敬致全国人大的公开信》所言：“1957年的反右斗争是中国历史上冤者最多、株连最广、历时最长、手段最毒、胜过秦始皇焚书坑儒千百倍的大冤案。”绝大多数右派备受凌辱煎熬达20余年，其家人也都要遭遇程度不同的株连。

1957年的反右运动，作为中国历史上最大的文字狱灾难，前承“反胡风集团”的文字狱，后启全国“舆论一律”的谎言“大跃进”，从而导致非正常死亡达数千万人的“大饥荒”，也是“文革”更大规模的疯狂政治迫害的预演。

尽管1979年中共中央作出为55万右派平反的决定，但是由于当时的最高决策者邓小平是反右运动的前台总指挥，对这场旷古文字狱负有不可推卸的责任，所以邓小平对右派平反做了极为荒谬的辩解：“反右斗争是正确的，错误只在于扩大化。”为此还特意不给章伯钧、罗隆基、储安平、彭文应、陈仁炳等“大右派”平反。

邓小平的定性使为右派平反的举措半途而废，导致了一系列严重的后果。时至今日，反右运动的罪错仍然得不到根本纠正。一方面，中共政权没有向受害者公开道歉，也没有给与受害者以合理的国家赔偿；另一方面，反右运动的真相无法还原，官方档案不见天日，民间的记忆和反思被压制。正因为反右这场旷古文字狱的制度根源没有得到根除，中国“改革开放”近三十年来仍然是文字狱遍及全国。

然而，今日中国的民间不再愚昧和怯弱，当年的右派们也不愿再沉默下去，近年来民间不断发出重新评估反右运动诉求，时值反右运动五十周年之际，民间的呼声已经汇成不容小视的潮流——

2005年9月10日，重庆的116名右派及其亲属发出《中共中央全国人大国务院的公开信》；

2005年9月18日，全国182名右派及其亲属发出《要求平反右派大冤案 补偿物质和精神损失——致中共中央、全国人大、国务院》；

2007年2月28日，上海21名右派及其亲属发出《给中共中央、全国人大、国务院的申诉信——要求国家对右派分子正式道歉并给予经济补偿》；

2007年3月3日，全国61名右派发出《为纪念反右运动五十周年致中共中央、人大常委会、国务院的公开信》；

2007年3月8日，浙江41名右派及其家属发出《给全国人大的公开信》；

2007年3月9 日，新疆37名右派发出《致中共中央、人大常委会、国务院的公开信》；

2007年4月21日，3名右派和1名右派后代联名上书国家主席胡锦涛，要求必须彻底否定“反右派斗争”的错误政治运动；

2007年5月19日，北大10名右派发出《致北大校长的公开信》；

签名联署以上公开信的右派及其亲属和支持者至今已近四万人（见签名网：http://127.0.0.1：8567/dmirror/http/www.qian-ming.net/gb/default.aspx？dir=scp&cid=53）。

与此同时，关于反右运动的回忆、研究和反思的文章大量出现在互联网上。把“反右”检索引擎，在“百度”上是482，000条，在“谷歌”上是249，000条。

值此反右运动五十周年之际，独立中文笔会作为以捍卫言论自由为宗旨的民间写作者组织，鉴于“反右运动”是践踏言论自由的旷古文字狱，鉴于大陆民间关于反右运动的诉求的合法合理合情，鉴于积极参与民间纪念反右五十年的人士正受到迫害，为此声明如下：

一，支持右派及其亲属的诉求：1、要求中国政府开放言禁，允许人们用多种方式反思、总结反右运动的历史教训，找出和挖掉产生错误政治运动的根子，用制度来保障中国的民主进程；2、要求中国政府纠正“反右是正确的，必要的，缺点是扩大化”的错误结论，郑重宣布反右运动是完全违反中国宪法的错误的政治运动，向反右运动的受害者公开道歉；3、要求中国政府给与反右运动中的受害者给与必要的经济赔偿，特别是对于那些遭受开除公职、强制劳改、家破人亡等摧残而至今仍处于困境的知识分子和干部，至少使他们能够得到安度晚年的合法权利。

二，敦促中国政府停止对民间进行公开研究、介绍、讨论、纪念“反右”活动人士的跟踪、骚扰和迫害。本会在此特别关注笔会会员李昌玉先生的个案（参见附录）。李昌玉先生是50年前反右文字狱的受害者，至今仍然遭受着因言治罪的迫害，此案正是文字狱贻害至今的一个缩影和典型。

本会在此强烈抗议济南市有关当局对李昌玉先生的政治迫害，并呼吁：1，立即解除对李昌玉先生的监控与打压，恢复李昌玉先生的人身自由和旅行自由；2，停止用“非法出版”来构陷李昌玉先生，还李昌玉先生以写作自由；3，立即归还李昌玉先生的护照、电脑、手稿、作品等所有扣押的物品；4，追究政治迫害者的责任，不能容许“反右”文字狱贻害至今。

最后，我们呼吁中国政府落实“国家尊重和保障人权”的宪法原则，履行宪法中保障国民的言论自由的条款，依法处理包括反右在内的历史遗留问题，作为启动今日中国的政治改革的第一步。

附录：李昌玉先生个案简介

李昌玉先生是“老右派”，曾遭受长达数年的迫害。自2005年以来，他积极参与民间反思反右运动的活动，与其他右派一起率先发起网上右派签名活动：要求平反，要求补工资，要求向害人道歉。今年以来，他不但参与右派签名活动，而且撰写了大量有关反右的文章。

然而，从今年四月起，李昌玉先生所在学校党委书记奉命多次找他谈话，威胁他说：上面已经圈定全国三个闹事右派分子：北京的铁流、杭州的叶孝刚和山东的李昌玉。书记令他停止参与纪念反右五十周年的活动，否则后果不堪设想。这位党委书记还从济南去到秦皇岛向李昌玉先生的儿子施压，动员其回济南做父亲的思想工作。与此同时，有关部门开始严密监控李昌玉先生的电话和网络，李昌玉先生外出也有人跟踪。

今年四月，李昌玉先生收到美国的邀请函，请他六月赴美参加反右学术研讨会。他所在学校的领导再次上门阻止他前往美国。5月8日，李昌玉先生坐车在前往济南火车站的途中被几辆警车拦截，被带到所在地公安分局。一小时前，济南市新闻出版局的人员从他家小院水泵房抄走了他的文集《历史大视野》1940本，也抄走了他家的电脑。没收了他的护照。这本自费在香港出版的文集被当局作为非法出版物收缴，并立案移交济南公安局经侦大队处理。拦截他的就是经侦大队的多名警官。他们以“”传唤“名义扣留了李昌玉，并对他进行了七个小时的”询问“。传讯后，李昌玉先生虽然被释放回家，但他的人身自由、旅行自由和写作自由仍然受到严格限制。

In 2006, as lovers of poetry became aware that the 100th anniversary of W. H. Auden’s birth was coming up, some of them began to fret that the event wouldn’t receive the attention it deserved. No major celebrations seemed to be forthcoming, in pronounced contrast to the festivals for John Betjeman’s centenary that were going on throughout England in the second half of 2006. The BBC gave Betjeman a whole month of festivities, and wasn’t Auden a much greater poet, worthy of far more honor?

Yes, but & Betjeman was an enormously popular and beloved poet in England. (Almost the only person who didn’t love him was his tutor at Oxford, a young don named C. S. Lewisnot yet a Christian, by the waywho told his diary “I wish I could get rid of the idle prig,” and later wrote his pupil a letter which began, “Dear Betjemann [sic], You called the tune of irony from the first time you met me, and I have never heard you speak of a serious subject without a snigger.” Betjeman responded, in a book he published when he was twenty-seven, by offering effusive thanks to Lewis, “whose jolly personality and encouragement to the author in his youth have remained an unfading memory for the author’s declining years.”) And it was not just Betjeman’s poetry but also his deep love of EnglishnessEnglish architecture, English history, the traditional forms of English society, and the Church of Englandthat endeared him to his countrymen. As Richard Jenkyns has recently written, “Betjeman was not always sure that Christ was the Son of God, but he was absolutely sure that the Church of England was the true church”an epistemological condition that for many an Englishman indicates well-ordered priorities.

Auden, by contrast, left England for America in January of 1939 and never returned for anything more than an extended visit. Though only thirty-one at the time, he was one of the most famous writers in Englandhe was twenty-six when the phrase “the Auden generation” entered the languageand his failure to return to his native land when war broke out later that year was denounced by angry MPs in the House of Commons. And if his wartime detachment cost him the respect of British conservatives, his conversion to Christianity two years later alienated, dramatically and permanently, the political Left, for whom he had been a hero.

Auden almost immediately assumed a significant public presence in the United States: in the war years and after he wrote for a remarkable range of periodicals, including The New York Times, The New Republic, Commonweal, and The Nation. But American intellectuals were nearly as befuddled by Auden’s religion as his British ex-admirers. Randall Jarrell, the country’s most brilliant and influential critic of poetry and a fine poet himself, treated the Christian Auden with something approaching contempt, and convinced more than a few others to do the same. Auden was never forgotten, and occasionally his brilliance was recognizedeven at times by Jarrell, who was so awestruck by a poem called “Under Sirius” that he could only respond, “Well, back to my greeting cards”but his reputation underwent a long, slow decline which lasted through the rest of his life.

Where does that reputation stand now? It’s hard to say. Probably the most common view is that Auden was a major poet in his twenties but, after his move to America and subsequent religious conversion, drifted off the path. Many poets and critics read Auden’s story as one of a prodigious talent mostly frittered away. The greatness of those early poems is rarely disputed; the question is whether that one decade of greatness is sufficient to ake a major career.

One might think that Christians, at least, would champion his work, but they have rarely done so, in part because of his lifelong homosexuality (and for other reasons which I have explored in this essay). But here at the centenary I think the most important thing to note is this: in the early 1940s Auden began writing poems that scarcely anyone knew how to readthat scarcely anyone even today knows how to read.

After that agitation in 2006, readers and poets and critics roused themselves and did proper honor to Auden on his birthday, February 21st, 2007. There were festivities here and in England: the BBC even did its part, with a series of programs, including radio essays by poets on Auden and, best of all, a Good Friday reading of Auden’s great poetic sequence Horae Canonicae, introduced by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. But reading through the many reflections and tributes that turned up in the English-language press, I couldn’t help noticing how many writers seemed to be groping, uncertain what to say about a man who clearly was for them an enigmatic figure.

Take, for example, the extended conversation about Auden at Slate.com. Meghan O’Rourke led off the discussion by reflecting on the famously corrugated appearance of Auden’s face in his final years:

According to a biographer, Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden seemed worn down at the time of his death, and the poet’s friends have said that the years of drinking, heavy smoking, and barbiturate use had taken their toll. But it is tempting to imagine that it wasn’t the drugs and liquor that prematurely aged him, but his literary aesthetic itself: the mantle of moral and political responsibility he believed came with the job of being a poet. If he was a formidably craggy slab of a man by the time he turned 60, it wasn’t just the Chesterfields, it was the crushing responsibility.
But this gets Auden precisely wrong: when he became a Christian, when he began to cultivate a more civic and ethical mode of poetry, he unburdened himself, divesting himself of responsibilities that others wanted him to meet but that he knew himself to be incapable of sustaining. What had been “crushing” to him was his status as the spokesman for his generation; what freed him was finding, in America, a refuge from his admirers.

Naïve though it may sound, for Auden this country really was a place to start over. And he came to believe that in shrugging off the expectations others had for him, he also had to shrug off his own self-understanding, his own formation as a person and a poet. Auden had always been a critic of Romanticism and an aficionado of earlier and less fashionable poetic movements: from the beginning he had drawn on medieval literaturewhich he had come to love after hearing some lectures at Oxford by an Anglo-Saxonist named Tolkienand had celebrated Alexander Pope and Lord Byronthe one Romantic poet Auden admired, in part because everyone else treated him as a minor poet who had been over-celebrated in his lifetime. Auden despised Shelley especially, often singling out for scorn the notion that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” It was a model of poetic power that, he saw, many of the great modernists had accepted as well, for all their vocal anti-Romanticism.

But as he settled into life in America, and into Christian belief, he came to think that he had absorbed more of the Romantic model of the poet as isolated genius than he’d realized. Superficially his verse had not looked Romantic, but deep down, he had accepted distinctively Romantic ideas about the singular power and unique insight of the poet.

The self-criticism that arose from this insight sometimes verged on sel-loathing. Auden was certainly too hard on his earlier self and earlier work: that first decade of work truly was extraordinarily powerful and innovative, in ways that Nicholas Jenkins explores in one of the best essays to commemorate the centenary. But Adam Kirsch is also right to say,

Auden’s breaking of his own style now looks like one of the key moral gestures of 20th-century English literature. Auden was one of the first great writers to recognize that, after World War II, the modernist visionwith its abstractions and myths, its glamorizing of danger and sacrificewas no longer sustainable. Poetry, to be credible in a new world, had to be ethical in a new way: scrupulous about its claims, its concepts, even its language.
Kirsch believes that “If the Auden centenary sees any major change in the poet’s reputation, it is that such a dismissal of the later, American Auden now looks definitely mistaken.” But I’m not sure this is correct. Auden indeed became ethically “scrupulous” about his language, about the power and the role of poetry, but there are many for whom this is a highly unattractive trait: the word Seamus Heaney uses is “censorious,” and while he understands Auden’s concerns, that’s not a complimentary term.

Moreover, the later poems can be hard to read. The earlier poems are often obscure, but after modernism we’re used to obscurity. (A friend once wrote to James Joyce, puzzled about some passages in what would become Finnegans Wake, to which Joyce gave an incomprehensible reply capped with a jaunty sign-off: “If I can throw any more obscurity on the subject, let me know.”) We know how to read obscurity. But Auden’s later poems, though grounded in public language and public conceptsGreek and Roman mythology, European history, Christian doctrineare knotty and complex: they demand a distinctive kind of thinking from us. Auden wrote this way because he demanded difficult thought from himself; he resisted easy answers and comforting assurances. He explored forgotten resources from poetry’s past: the medieval love for allegories of the inner life, the essayistic or letter-like meditations of the great Roman poet Horace. But these are resources that readers must struggle to reclaim, and for many it’s not worth the effort.

Above all, and most unusually, Auden saw his poetry as a means of building community among his widely scattered friends. When, a decade ago, I first investigated the trove of Auden’s letters held by the New York Public Library, I was struck by how often Auden turned over a sheet of stationery and, on the back of a letter to a friend, typed out a draft of a poem. And in most cases the published version of that poem would be dedicated to that friend. How many of our great modern poets do such a thing? It is a touching gesture, but alsoespecially for those of us with an exalted view of poetrya challenging one.

Let us pay tribute to this remarkable man. He was deeply, deeply flawedthough no more so than Iand his model of the Christian life is, generally speaking, not one I should choose to follow. But he paid (and still pays) a great price in reputation for his embrace of Christianity, as he does for his bold and fearless rethinking of what it means to be a poet. One of the wiser decisions of Auden’s later years was his selection of Edward Mendelson to be his literary executor: among many other activities on the poet’s behalf, Mendelson maintains the website of the Auden Society, where you may find biographical information and many links to the texts of poems and recordings of Auden reading them. Please, go there.

Alan Jacobs teaches English at Wheaton College in Illinois, and is writing a book about original sin. His Tumblelog is here.

Brave New World at 75

Caitrin Nicol