‘Paranoic Fear’ Of Communism In U.S.

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31115, 19 July 1966, Page 17

‘Paranoic Fear’ Of Communism In U.S.

(N.Z.P.A. Reuter—Copyright) GENEVA, July 18. An American Negro clergyman in Geneva has appealed to Europe to help turn the United States away from what he called its “paranoic fear” of communism.

Unless the United States adopted a realistic view of the world’s real, problems, “we are all lost,” the Rev. Dr. Benjamin F. Payton, an associate of the civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, told a public meeting in Geneva last night. The meeting was organised by the World Council of Churches in connexion with an international conference on church and society.

Dr. Payton, a conference participant, is executive director of the Commission on Religion and Race of the U.S. National Council of Churches. “Otherwise Engaged”

In a reference to the Vietnam war, Dr. Payton said the United States could not engage in the struggle to give

the world’s disinherited real economic freedom because it was otherwise engaged. “Too many people in my country are too enamoured with a kind of abstract fight against communism,” he said. “Too few in my country understand that when one wastes oneself and the very bodies and souls of others with bombs and napalm you do not prevent communism that way. Communism arises out of the very soil of despair and poverty.”