WASHINGTON REPORT: Questioning Foreign Aid

...If the point of aid is to hold back the dread threat of Communism, it is not difficult to demonstrate that a little testicular electrification works wonders on individual Communists, even more on border-line cases leaning to the left...

...It was within that frame of renascent anti-Communism that the despised "bleeding hearts" were able to get foreign aid built into the foreign policy of this country...

...The other big thing that brought foreign aid into being, however, was the Soviet permanent occupation of Eastern Europe and especially the brutal and tricky seizure of Czechoslovakia...

...Foreign aid passes as one of the foundation stones of liberal political thought in this country...

...Liberals generally, including me, were shocked and outraged when we learned that AID was second only to cultural attach6 as a favorite cover for CIA operatives in Southeast Asia, but when you think about it, it isn't all that outrageous...

...The rest were all German colonies or occupied territories when the Russians took them from the Germans in battle, the traditional European me[hod of changing land ownership...

...If we are cutting back on aid to American cities in trouble, on aid to American poor people in trouble, in theory on just about everything except military spending, why on earth, the natural question arises, should we still shovel out all that dough to foreigners who manifestly don't appreciate it and predictably pour it down one rathole or another anyway...

...That's not necessarily true, as even a cursory recollection of the origins of foreign aid as an idea and a reality can show...

...The mere fact that you could use that kind of language circa 1947 and still be received in respectable society tells us something about the temper of those times...

...FRANK GETLEIN Commonweal: 453...

...That's what foreign aid ought to be about...

...Czechoslovakia, it is always worth re'calling, was the only independent country occupied by the Russians...

...That is the principal item in the "lessons of Vietnam" we steadfastly refuse to learn..Anti-Communism as policy is negative and reactive...

...It got kicked around for the ~vrong reasons, namely the hypnotic and paralyzing fear of Howard Jarvis and Proposition 13 that hangs in the air of this city like its smog...

...He probably isn't going to vote at all...

...The second is the obvious one that no nation is an island even when it's a real island and certainly when it's a continent...

...As things have worked out, of course, Czechoslovakia was not only the first Soviet conquest of an independent country but also the last, but American perception generally, and specifically the perception of the Senate Department, has yet to catch up with that simple historical record...

...Partly its origins lie in sheer bureaucratic inertia, the cause of many of the things Americans apparently don't like about their government...

...If it were not cluttered up with anti-Communism, it would probably work a lot better than it has...

...Czechoslovakia focused and crystalized what had been the merely murkily emerging anti-Communist revival...

...The first was the Marshall Plan, which worked like a charm because it was perfectly adapted to its purposes: the resurrection of a long-established industrial society 21 July 1978:452 in Europe from the ruins that society had brought upon itself...

...As we all know from phenomena as different as Christmas Seals-whatever did happen to mberculosis?--and Sonny and Char, once you get something that elaborate and expensive into operation, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to dismantle it...

...It's like giving a drunk half a dollar so he won't vote the Socialist Labor ticket...

...Beyond that fundamental inertial guidance system that dominates in these things, foreign aid did indeed come into its postwar existence as the CIA did, as an instrument of the American anti-Communism that was to give us Joe McCarthy, Viemam, Richard Ni$0n:~d Watergate before it was finished with us, which, of course, it isn't yet by a long shot...

...Anyhow, with anti-Communism as the rationale for foreign aid, we can hardly complain when so much of it turns out to be military hardware and secret police software...

...As data processors never tire of reciting, you only get out what you put in...

...There have been moments in the public utterances of President Carter when it looked as if he had grasped that, but more recently, of course, he has discovered that the easy way to improve your popularity is to say you'll punch Joe Stalin right in the kisser if he ever sets foot on Pennsylvania Avenue...

...It is never a question of the end justifying the means, always one of the means becoming the end...

...At the time and for some years after, this looked like one of the all-time great political feats of legerdemain: getting the country to do something it ought to do out of the goodness of its heart for quite different, eminently "practical" reasons, namely saving the world from evangelical Communism...

...If foreign aid could have that instant miraculous effect in Europe, why wouldn't it work everywhere...

...Anti-Communism has brought us disaster after disaster at home and abroad...

...If the Russians took Czechoslovakia, who could tell what would be next...

...there is a certain logic in the specific instance because in the larger scheme, AID was indeed conceived and set up as a kind of housebroken CIA in the struggle with the godless atheists for the hearts and minds of anyone who had either...

...That's what we asked for...

...There was, to be Sure, an undistributed middle in there somewhere, because in theory it wasn't evangelical Communism we were worried about but militarily aggrandizing Communism, but nobody ever sacrificed a political victory for fear of an undistributed middle...

...That is by no means an idle question...

...This walnut-shell and pea job looked a lot better than it was...

...it officially...

...To a very large extent that's what has happened to foreign aid...

...Foreign aid is eminently worth doing for itself alone...

...The resurrection was so good that our two principal enemies in the war and beneficiaries in the peace, Germany and Japan, have become our principal rivals in trade and manufacture...

...Two things happened to change what was derided as another hare-brained giveaway scheme ~ into something close to the heart of American foreign policy ever since...

...But foreign aid has been around much too long--better than 30 years in one form or another--for it, its purposes and its products not to be questioned occasionally...

...We should at last drop...

...It deserved asking long before Proposition 13--which, needless to say, even were it adopted nationally, would have zero effect on foreign aid...

...If foreign aid means sending torture experts to police states in South America to teach the natives how to wire the testicles of wrong thinkers, we really have no reason to be mad...

...From that day to this, anti-Communism has been what this country has instead of a foreign policy and neither the tragedy of Vietnam nor the knockabout farce of Watergate has had the slightest effect upon that policy, though both were the obvious and predictable products of anti- . ~, Commumsm' as both foreign and domestic policy...

...Besides, we had just convinced ourselves that we stood at the start of something called The American Century and it seemed only decent to pass some of the Americanization around to less fortunate folk beyond the seas...

...It isn't something, it's against something and that's no way to be anything...

...In eighteen different ways it is good for this country to live in a world in which most peoples are able to support themselves with a sufficient agriculture and/or a sufficient industry to buy the necessary produce elsewhere, such as right here...

...This is also, of course, one of the basic reasons behind the transformation of the temporary, emergency-only wartime OSS into the permanent, not to say eternal, CIA, to which foreign aid is by no means unrelated...

...What foreign aid needs, then, is first of all a clarification of purpose...

...World War II brought the Lend-Lease program into existence and set up the bureaucratic apparatus necessary to move a lot of military mattriel over great distances in a hurry...

...The first point is simply that we ought to feed starving people because we have the capacity of growing an awful lot more food than we can eat ourselves, even with obesity a national problem for the first time in human history...

...Old timers will recall that one of the root accusations against Henry Wallace was that he wanted to put "a quart of milk at every Arab's doorstep...

...Traditional or not, the Soviet ascendancy in Eastern Europe lent the color of truth to the reviving American paranoia about :Communism...

...If you give it a moment's thought, you can see at once that anti-Communism is a helI of a reason to have a foreign aid program...