MISCELLANY
Lee, Eric & Franck, Sebastian & Mears, Helen
MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about the failure of the West to gain the "minds and hearts" of Asia. The major reason for this failure, however, is ignored: the extreme divergence of U. S. practice...
...Stevenson...
...Whereas a British Labor government set India free, the French government has never intended to give up Indochina...
...If this makes Hook an almost lone philosophical defender of democratic socialist and humanist values, it makes me Leo Tolstoy...
...THE TITLE DOUBTLESS APPEARS to be contradictory: democracy would seem to imply a multi- or at least biparty system, for how else will the electorate be able to express its preferences...
...Has the U. S. actually "written a new principle of humanity...
...to actively further and propagate socialist values...
...Radical thought must develop true alternatives to meet this dilemma...
...As in the case of General Jara...
...II...
...Needless to say, the result has been damaging to American prestige...
...The magazine Twentieth Century: "This is the first fruit of the longawaited attempts by a section of the American Left to take up an intellectual position distinct from either Communism or New Deal Liberalism...
...On the contrary, the outcome seems perfectly designed to confirm the Communist charge that the U. S. determination not to return the prisoners was due to the U. S. Army's desire to gain these thousands of soldiers to implement the Asian-Fight-Asian policy...
...Irving Howe expresses the disillusionment of progressives with Mr...
...and it also refuses to sign the American-proposed joint defense pact...
...He may, as Irving Howe suggested in the first issue of DISSENT, be willing to vote for Mr...
...He may lend active support to certain government policies, but at no time does he expect basic improvement without a change in social power and political atmosphere...
...The party expropriated U.S...
...Under Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 297 the conditions which in fact exist in Korea and Formosa, "freedom" for these POWs means to transfer from one army to another, Mr...
...Dulles' rhetoric notwith standing...
...DISSENT has stirred up a good deal of dust with this first issue and some of the victims have already hit back in print...
...what interests me rather more is Mr...
...And I hope that future issues will achieve this: a larger measure of assurance, calm appraisal, and objective statement of truth...
...We have stood fast for the right, andit has prevailed...
...If you can undercut Communism by letting Communists decorate public buildings, you're doing good...
...With no farreaching change in sight, the radical cannot share the optimism his liberal critics so often display...
...If the net result is a gradual departure from the sterile battle between Stalino-Liberals and Liberals tout court, the editors of this new venture will have deserved well of the Republic...
...By now, in Korea, the word Freedom must be a term of mockery, like the word "Liberated," which even Americans have turned into a wisecrack...
...Americans have tended to accept the idea that these POWs surrendered because they were fanatic anti-Communists...
...This is a lively publication, though it seems unlikely to reach beyond a rather narrow circle of politically minded intellectuals...
...That fact is Mexico...
...The London Times Literary Supplement writes: "The first number of this new Quarterly of Socialist Opinion shows a laudable desire to live up to its title, which is clearly designed to express opposition to the current orthodoxies of the Left as well as to those of the Right...
...The fate of the POWs provides a practical demonstration...
...What would become of these men if they did not join either the ROK or the Chinese Nationalist Army...
...No matter what the leaflets said, "the terms of the Armistice agreement," according to Mr...
...Whenever the Stalinists get too noisy, the PRI lets the PAN thunder "Mexico is a Catholic country !" ; when the Church threatens to get out of hand, the PP is always around to restate Mexico's devotion to "Socialist" principles...
...Tone Too Shrill I liked the first issue of DISSENT very much—the need for your magazine at this time can not be exaggerated—and I would like you to enter my subscription for it...
...On the other hand, continuation of the war promises no better results...
...But if any of our readers...
...Dulles, promised them "civilian status...
...I am using that word in its correct sense, not in its mid-century American sense, which is merely that of a smear word, almost equivalent to "subversive...
...Well, the anti-Communist POWs are "free...
...America, with no financial interests at stake, has insisted on providing the native army with arms only to see these arms fall into the hands of the Communists...
...That would have disastrous con sequences...
...But Stalinist domination of labor unions is something else again...
...The three dealing with European-American relations are, perhaps, more topical, and, certainly, more controversial...
...It seems not to occur to us to compare the actual fate of these released prisoners with our inspirational description...
...America remains powerless to aid Asian national movements in withstanding Russian-influenced totalitarianism...
...Insight into the nature of government prevents radicals from succumbing to the illusion that policy proposals to Washington, as presently constituted, could lead to any significant change...
...This answer might well have been more explicit, but it is nonetheless clear that the reviewer failed to understand it...
...Were an American "Labor Party" to come to power, the question would assume a different character...
...Which is why it is quite all right for Siqueiros to paint several murals in University City but not all right for Lombardo Toledano to dominate Mexican labor unions...
...The fact, however, that two-thirds of the released Koreans did not want to join the ROK army clearly cancels the idea that these men consider joining the armies of Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-shek to be identical with "freedom...
...If the radical is at odds with these forces and with their characteristic mode of thought, how is he to propose policy for them...
...Under prevailing conditions it is illusory to imagine that any government will initiate a bold new course...
...French concessions to Indochina have been too little and too late...
...What Mr...
...As of February 16 General Maxwell D. Taylor, Eighth Army Commander had refused this request...
...MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about the failure of the West to gain the "minds and hearts" of Asia...
...WHAT IS TO BECOME of these newly "free" men, these "living symbols" of Western humanism...
...Most of the editors and contributors appear to be associated with the left wing of American Socialism, and the edge of their criticism is turned against Liberal colleagues of the Rooseveltian era now suspected of having made their peace with the established order of things...
...Kolko...
...Niel Glixon who has written reviews for Kenyon Review and Fellowship...
...they may be interested, however, in reading the notices it has received in two distinguished English journals...
...If the elections were honest, any coalition of anti-PRI parties would win...
...Convinced of the necessity of "democratic repression," the PRI is still able to distinguish between the authoritarian sympathizer who is only a nuisance and the authoritarian conspirator who is indeed a menace...
...After all, what may be "democratic" in one country sponsors authoritarianism in another, e.g., feminine suffrage...
...Consider the Korean prisoner-of-war episode...
...What I find most depressing and irritating in Mr...
...Let us take the war in Indochina as an example...
...The question, "What would you do if you were President...
...As for Hook's activities in recent years as one of those intellectuals who has increasingly made a rapprochement with American capitalist society, I refer Mr...
...The radical may oppose some government policies more than others and may even hope to arouse the public sufficiently to obtain the lesser evil...
...Murray Hausknecht, a young sociologist who has published in Antioch Review...
...Does democracy mean the right to all but basic—even undemocratic— changes, i.e., the ones that really matter...
...Did these leaflets make perfectly clear to these soldiers just what we meant by the freedom we urged them to accept...
...There is a fact which invalidates the theory...
...It wouldbe much more effective to put forwardyour viewpoint calmly and intelligently...
...This policy, as the British writer, G. L. Arnold, asserted in a recent article in Commentary, attracts "conservative generals, Peronist demagogues, and elderly bed-ridden intriguers in the distinguished succession of Doctors Mossadegh and Syngman Rhee," while permitting the Communists to spearhead national revolutionary movements...
...It winks at Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia, deplores Arbenz' indecision in Guatemala...
...R. G. M. 304 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 AMONG OURSELVES Most of our readers have no doubt seen the reviews and comments on DISSENT in the American press...
...Adlai Stevenson's public utterances since the failure of his Presidential campaign, and especially during his world tour...
...The PAN headquarters are as large as the PRI Executive Committee's building...
...The American radical looks towards the creation of an American society capable of dissolving the Communist myth as exploited by Russian imperialism...
...I consider the trio to be the most interesting and worthwhile contributions to the subject in an American periodical since the brilliant article The Atlantic Curtain in the Summer 1953 issue of The American Scholar...
...But a Western people who are fighting in Asia, and who justify the war on ideological grounds between democracy and totalitarianism, ought perhaps Dccasionally to wonder what impression of democracy is given to the Asiatic people by our actual practice toward Asiatics in Asia...
...On the other side of the coin, however, is Hook's almost lone philosophical defense of democratic socialist and humanist values...
...In Washington Secretary Dulles declared: The prisoners of war in Korea who donot desire to be repatriated are now being released and will revert to civilian status punctually in accordance with the terms of the Armistice Agreement...
...He records having once asked a DISSENT editor: "Suppose you were running the government, what would you have done...
...Responsible opponents of government policy are expected to offer alternative ways of running the machine...
...This hardly seems to me an adequate position on civil liberties for a liberal, let alone a socialist...
...A new principle of humanity has been written into the hard rules of war...
...Not one province is governed by a National Action officer, no one belonging to the Federation of People's Parties was even suggested for the present cabinet without first having renounced membership in the FPP...
...American propagandists, who talk incessantly of "Freedom," "human dignity," and "the rights of God and Man," are destroying the meaning of words which have, in the past, expressed genuine values...
...Every citizen votes as he pleases, although since the PRI counts the ballots, the result is obvious...
...With this image in mind, the question, "What would you do if you ran the government...
...To paraphrase Jimmy Walker's statement that no girl was ever ruined by a book, has anyone ever turned Soviet agent after having looked at a painting...
...Wright Mills dissects without mercy attempts to create a 'conservative ideology' to match American policy...
...IRVING HowE • We have received a great many letters from all over the country since publication of the first issue of DISSENT...
...Hook has never been particularly distinguished by Christian kindness in his references to opponents, and if I have been guilty of questionable taste in attacking him gratuitously, which is probably true, and which I can regret as a stylistic flaw, I still cannot believe that either Hook's morale, his reputation, or his self-esteem will suffer unduly from my `slander.' Hook will continue to lead the fight against McCarthyism with the crusading spirit and trenchant radicalism of an editor of The New Tork Times, and the fight against Communism with the authoritarian venom of a Hearst executive...
...Newsweek on May 3 reported that the Chinese National Army on Formosa had inducted 13,000 ex-POWs into its ranks...
...1 were based on such familiar facts as his recent statement doubting the wisdom of the repeal of the notorious Smith Act, though he adds that it should be amended...
...What the PRI will not permit is the one thing of importance: power...
...C. Wright Mills, in his recent DisSENT article, "The Conservative Mood," pointed out that the popular image of government in America today is that of an automatic machine...
...By turning our traditional values into propaganda slogans we are debasing the 298 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 words which have expressed these values, and are debasing the values along with the words...
...will revert to civilian status punctually in accordance with the terms of the Armistice Agreement," seems curiously uninformed...
...There remains Sidney Hook's declaration in favor of socialism, quoted by Mr...
...The radical does not preach political abstention...
...The stronger these forces, the more American policy is determined by military considerations alone...
...Mr...
...Irving Howe, and a none-too-gentle dissection of American pseudo-Conservative ideology by Professor C. Wright Mills...
...though, as with everything else printed in this magazine, he speaks for himself...
...Or did the men who deserted do so believing that they were to be free to live as civilians, with jobs, homes, and civil liberties...
...Another issue of DISSENT, and Hook again seems to be butt of inexplicable sideswipes, subtle inferences, and essentially meaningless innuendoes...
...But for the Chinese POWs, the end of the story is explicit...
...It is the PRI which calls out troops to protect the right of the opposition to free assembly—so long as it stays just that: talk...
...A few brief references, however, suggest the end of the story...
...And isn't such expression the very essence of civil liberties and, therewith, democracy...
...If the people have their way, it may well be that they will "democratically" * When, a few months ago, the FPP did refuse to confine itself to talk, when it staged riots in downtown Mexico City, the PRI reacted with characteristic "democracy": the FPP was banned...
...no jobs...
...Under such circumstances, however, world affairs would appear in a new light...
...How different the outlook would be if the United States government were known as the friend of India, Burma and Indonesia rather than as the protector of Chiang Kai shek and Syngman Rhee...
...and, finally, his recent explicit statement, which reflects the core of much of his life work, that ". . . if democratic traditions and institutions are preserved in the current world-wide totalitarian crusade against them, they will acquire a more socialist content...
...The PRI siphons off resentment by permitting everyone to storm and bluster...
...But you are not alone...
...Praising these now free men for having resisted the Communist blandishments, General Hull said that they are "living symbols providing hope for freedom to millions who still suffer under Communist oppression...
...In conclusion, may I express my warmest best wishes for success in your valuable efforts towards intellectual clarity and genuine freedom of opinion...
...Will those who do not choose to join the army be exempted from the draft...
...The PRI does not recognize Franco, offers refuge to anti-Franquist exiles—and many are Communists, why kid ourselves?—but nevertheless refuses extradition of General Maw (the Chinese Nationalist imprisoned for fraud, and wouldn't Peking love to get him back ! ) The PRI deserves its name...
...THE BURNING PROBLEMS OF the world today appear as dilemmas offering no solutions...
...Kolko's letter, is that from the considerable number of provocative articles in the first two issues of DisSENT, he chooses to be most provoked by two references to Hook, one merely factual by Paul Mattick, one facetious by myself...
...On February 16, The New York Times reported that 3,700 ex-captives were inducted into the ROK army, leaving 3,900 still in concentration camps...
...America, although it can afford a more generous attitude toward national aspirations in Asia than, say, the French, is yet unable to ally itself Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 301 with the forces representing these aspirations...
...How different the situation would be if there were an American radical move ment able to support and give guidance to such movements...
...James S. Wadsworth, deputy U. S. Representative to the UN, said that "the free world has proved that it will not break faith with those who stand for freedom against slavery," and added that the release of the prisoners was "a beacon of new hope to millions now living under Communist tyranny...
...Since 1920, the Republic has been ruled by one party, the Party of the Mexican Revolution (lately, the official name has been changed to the Party of the Institutional Revolution...
...The first three articles are all of general validity...
...My references to Sidney Hook in DisSENT No...
...The PRI said nothing when he signed his umpteenth peace pledge, but when he accepted the Stalin Medal, that was too much...
...Among the new contributors to the current issue: Isaac Deutscher, the wellknown author of biographies of Stalin and Trotsky...
...their speakers command large audiences...
...A source that can not be identified said the Government was so shocked it was making all the released anti-Communist prisoners subject to draft...
...I won't even mention the Stalinists because any analogy would be almost as unfair as those you make between Hook and other favorite scapegoats...
...In view of the present intellectual climate in this country, especially among the selfdenominated "anti-totalitarian liberals" of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom type, I consider your action in printing this series an act of intellectual courage which deserves the utmost commendation...
...Oftentimes doubt has been expressed as to whether this release would actually happen...
...There was nothing to do but stuff the ballot boxes, install PRI deputies and senators where PAN candidates had clearly won...
...Such declarations are made, so to speak, on Sundays...
...The primacy of purely military considerations often plays into the hands of political forces allied with Russian imperialism...
...A cross-section from these many letters is published below...
...After all, you might as well realize that DisSENT really has no monopoly on virtue...
...The intricacies, not to say the mysteries, of Mexican politics obviously do not lend themselves to easy comprehension...
...He cannot impose his ideas of government before they are held by the people at large...
...Until they were "released to freedom" our press and news-weeklies incessantly described their plight...
...The radical, however, knows that government is a complex function resulting from the interplay of social forces, and that it is very largely determined by those powerful forces which occupy key positions in society...
...Yet not a week later, the PRI declared that the recently formed Authentic Party of the Revolution (anti-PRI) would enjoy the full protection of the law (= the PRI...
...Amid speeches praising his devotion to the Homeland, he was retired from military command...
...Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 299 vote for authoritarian parties...
...International Issues Best wishes for the future...
...In Formosa, however, these "free civilians" were taken to induction centers for "reindoctrination," after which they were to be "permitted" to join Chiang Kai-shek's army...
...From the first issue it looks as though DISSENT may com° closer to the truth about many things in today's world than any other publication I know...
...Thousands of Korean and Chinese soldiers deserted and came over to the American side as the result of propaganda leaflets dropped on their lines by the U. S. Army...
...Lee says in his amusing little article about the one party system in Mexico puzzles us...
...I further refer Mr...
...Better Than the First I believe that the Editorial Board, in the preparation of the second issue of DISSENT, accomplished the impossible: viz., they succeeded in issuing a number even more valuable than the first issue...
...If these contributions strike an evocative and somewhat nostalgic note, there is plenty to balance them, notably a critical estimate of Adlai Stevenson by Mr...
...His only "crime," as far as this misguided observer can see it, has been to formulate a broad program for preventing Communists and McCarthyites from assuming prerogatives no responsible and realistic democracy can allow...
...No doubt...
...Yet, if you were Eisenhower, you could not change this aspect of American policy...
...I think that its tone was unfortunately shrill and exhortatory...
...The Koreans and Chinese who set out for "Freedom Village" and were welcomed into the "Free World," to enjoy "the sunlight of Freedom," only to land in another army against their will, may wonder what the difference is between "Freedom" and "enslavement...
...Yet it is my contention that the only safeguard for democracy in Mexico is, in spite of its corruption, the continued power of the PRI...
...The Voice of America has proved no substitute for American policy...
...Theoretically, this is impossible: if the people vote, say, for segregation, dictatorship or war, then segregation, dictatorship or war is democratic...
...This suspicion will be strengthened for anyone who thoughtfully reads our reports of the arrival of the ROKs at their induction center...
...302 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 Poor Sidney Hook...
...seems wholly justified...
...The major reason for this failure, however, is ignored: the extreme divergence of U. S. practice from U. S. ideology...
...I realize how much we need such a magazine and wish you luck in the undertaking...
...This is word-play, and it is too much of a luxury when one remembers, for example, the embarrassing percentage of votes cast for Hitler in 1933...
...An AP dispatch from Seoul provides a clue: Only one-third of the anti-Communist Korean prisoners who were turnedover to the UN command have expressed a desire to join the ROKarmy...
...The Indochinese nationalist movement was pushed into the Communist camp...
...I would like to add one suggestion...
...Truman...
...Hook, no matter what his early reputation, has distinguished himself in the last few years by leading the ideological reaction in liberal thought, and among such achievements has been his equivocal relation to civil liberties on matters like rooting the Communists out of the universities—as though America's security (if one is to take such phrases seriously) were threatened by an occasional fellow-traveler or party member in various scattered universities...
...his ability, contrary to the organizational anarchy which now pleases many DISSENT writers, to work within such groups as the Union for Democratic Socialism and the L.I.D...
...Of these 3,900 some "failed to pass military medical examinations while others are insisting on civilian employment...
...According to a New York Times correspondent (January 22) an "American advisor" of the ROK Army, watching the POW come in "after an 18-hour trip in a tightly packed boxcar" commented that it didn't matter whether they volunteered for the ROK Army or not, since "they'll come back to us in the draft anyway...
...Unfortuntately, this is a priori reason ing...
...The Revolution, after forty years, is an institution...
...His major concern is with the basic framework of government rather than with specific features of government policy...
...As many as possible have been answered, but we regret that we could not possibly answer all...
...American policy is caught in a vicious circle in its quest for security...
...carrying with it its own terms and the context of the status quo, is not politically meaningful to the radical...
...But what finally happened...
...and Mr...
...Democracy is, in effect, something the PRI imposes on those whose preferences are specifically undemocratic...
...Now it has happened, and we can all rejoice that human dignity and the rights of the individual are being respected...
...At the moment, however, the actual attitude one has to American society, the degree and vigor of one's criticism, is far more important than the abstract declaration of being, or not being, a socialist...
...and democracy would lose...
...Has it really provided "new hope to millions now living under Communist tyranny...
...As administered to date, our "new principle" is not likely to be a "beacon of new hope to millions now living under Communist tyranny...
...Kolko appeared in several articles, and the authors of these have been asked to write brief replies.— Ed.] Mr...
...The suspicion will be further strengthened by an AP dispatch of February 20, 1954 which reported that the South Korean Major General Choi Duk Shin had arrived in Saigon to try to convince France to accept Seoul's offer of an ROK division for the Indo-China war...
...They have no homes...
...The answer remains a mystery...
...A phone call made on May 19 to the Times, the Herald Tribune, Newsweek and Time received the reply that none of these agencies had carried any follow-up story on the released Korean POWs...
...Eisenhower, who, in turn— despite the fears of many liberals—would be judged a little worse than Mr...
...If there is any middle way in Latin American politics, the PRI is it...
...All this the PRI permits . them...
...Per contra, what kind of a democracy is it that allows only those parties which do agree on suppositions...
...Kolko to Hook's articles in the New Tork Times Magazine Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 303 on the Fifth Amendment, in which he took a position that strikes me as poorly calculated to stem the growing threat to civil liberties...
...For two and a half years of war, negotiations for a truce were delayed ostensibly because the Western powers insisted on the humanitarian principle of "voluntary repatriation" which our press interpreted as meaning that prisoners of war, when released by their captors, should be "free" ; that they need not return to "death and slavery" ; that they should become civilians with a "free choice" for their future...
...The radical aims at the creation of true democracy...
...For some time now the United States has attempted to give the world a picture of the good society by playing up its wealth...
...There are other parties, to be sure, but they are without influence...
...Perhaps this policy is short-sighted ; I don't think so...
...On a handsome pension, of course...
...Robert Manners, an anthropologist who has done work on Puerto Rican society...
...An article on the Berlin disorders of June 17 suggests that, while primarily nationalist in inspiration, they also represented a spontaneous working-class movement...
...Giving up the fight, however, would not only bring the horror of a totalitarian regime to Indochina but would throw the entire region open to the RussianChinese power drive...
...The fate of the 3,900 remains a mystery...
...The latter would be held a little bet ter than Mr...
...As General Van Fleet once told a Congressional Committee, the ROK troops (even those who were "integrated" with our own) were paid the equivalent of ten cents a month, so they obviously have no savings...
...The PRI long opposed it, finally gave in, watched the women vote for the Catholic Right (PAN...
...W. H. Chamberlin in the April 21, 1954 Wall Street Journal also takes up the cudgels against Hook's "complacent attitude," but for different reasons than yours, of course...
...Most of them have been prisoners for years, and have been in the army for an even longer period...
...holdings in 1938 (e.g., Standard Oil), but did it without the violence which accompanied Peron's taking over the British-owned transportation system (in 1945...
...The difficulty is that groups opposing one party rule in Mexico are, to varying degrees, anti-libertarian, while the PRIrigging elections, backing the Army, dominating the rubber-stamp Senate and Chamber of Deputies—is basically demo cratic...
...The PRI answer is, roughly, that democracy is not an unmitigated Good...
...IS IT COMPATIBLE WITH CIVIL LIBERTIES to tolerate groups whose programs expressly disagree with the fundamental suppositions of a democracy...
...Harvey Swados, a story writer and novelist whose work has appeared in New World Writing and Partisan Review...
...Burdened as we are with chores, polemics, problems and bills, we refuse to be drawn into a quarrel...
...300 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 I. A SOMEWHAT UNFRIENDLY REVIEWER has denounced DISSENT'S radical politics as "irresponsible...
...The PRI permits daily attacks by the leading newspapers of the Republic—so long as it doesn't go beyond that: journalism...
...But other fields are not neglected, and due attention is given to British Labor's record in government, and to the spiritual heritage of George Orwell, patron saint of the homeless Left...
...True there are varying particulars one may take issue with, as I do also, but not in the form of unpleasant and underhanded comparisons...
...I would like to suggest that you con tinue to give as much space to a dis cussion of international issues (Euro pean, Asian, Latin American and Afri can) as you do national for, after all, the two are so often inter-related...
...So it is, with all the twists and turns characteristic of more than thirty years in office—from the anti-clericalism following Obregon's murder by the cristero de Leon Toral to Cardenas' agrarian reform, from Alemin's industrialization program to Ruiz Cortines' much touted clean-up campaign—the PRI follows a familiar course, slapping down the Right (but not too hard) and coddling the "Left" (but not too much...
...These remarks may help to explain why it is impossible for a radical to give a simple answer to a question whose very assumptions he is forced to reject...
...Similarly, while the People's Party (a CP front) and the CP itself are hopelessly discredited, the PRI continues to play them off against the Right...
...They are given no money...
...Dulles, in asserting that "the prisoners of war in Korea...
...Nor can he believe that our military security system is an ultimate safeguard...
...Kolko to my article in the Partisan Review, January-February 1954, called "This Age of Conformity...
...GABY KoLICo [The references to Sidney Hook which have disturbed Mr...
...they print as many pamphlets...
...We can take great satisfaction from that fact...
...It is not easy to demonstrate humanitarian concern for the individual, or to promote democratic ideas while fighting in an Asian country, and "utilizing" Asiatics as soldiers and drafted low-wage labor...
...He cannot imagine himself in a position which he opposes...
...Tribute is also paid to the memory of Rosa Luxemburg...
...What did actually happen to these thousands of Koreans and Chinese...
...And if the Communist becomes too objectionable, "democratic repression" is always available...
...The radical seeks a way out but cannot find it in the present situation...
...This small number comes as a surprise to the ROK which estimated as high as 90 per cent wouldjoin the Army...
...Hook's activities during the week...
...Where certain interests and attitudes remain sacrosanct, choice of action is inevitably limited...
...Groups with financial interests in Indochina have retained their influence in French government circles...
...Our editor replied that he could not be responsible for proposing governmental policy today...
...Frank Marquart, educational director of Local 212, UAW-CIO, and a frequent contributor to Politics...
...The war in Indochina has weakened France and strengthened Russian imperialism in Western Europe and its Communist allies in France...
...In the name of the UN, General John E. Hull issued a proclamation to that effect one minute after midnight on January 22, 1954...
...He can only imagine running a government in a domestic environment which has in some fundamental way been transformed...
...I suggest that unless DISSENT wishes to follow in the sour, unpleasant path of sectarianism, it had better draw up bills of particulars against the straw dummies it evidently enjoys kicking around, or else spend its time in more fruitful and constructive inquiry...
...Once they were turned over to Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-shek, however, they were forgotten...
...The difficulty of providing acceptable "civilian employment," however, is suggested by the report that the ROK Army has asked the U. S. Eighth Army to permit the ROK "to forcibly induct" 1,000 of the former prisoners into the Korean Service Corps—the Korean service which supplies laborers for the U. S. Army in Korea...
...Similarly, the press reports that the Chinese POWs were pronounced "free civilians" while on the American LST ships that were carrying them to Formosa...
...We Need Such a Magazine I have subscribed for DISSENT and later will donate a little to keep it going...
Vol. 1 • July 1954 • No. 3
