Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
Where the News Ends By WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN Social Security — Limited or General? CECURITY against aggressive attack for all nations, large and small, is a cardinal principle of any peace...
...She pays whatever price is demanded by the tradesman who sells what she wants at the place where she lives...
...Should these methods be successful they might produce a self government...
...Especially because they also know about some other significant figures—the scandalous war profits of-big business...
...The report quickly reaches nstional headquarters snd the union journals...
...The Labor Department experts say the average cost of living has gone up less than one-quarter, and the housewives find that the price of spinach, lamb chops or hamburger has doubled or nearly doubled...
...The issue "collaboration versus isolation" is a superficially oversimplified statement of the issues we must face after the war...
...Thomas and Mr...
...What ia back of the conflict...
...And when Hitler attacked Russia in 1941 the Soviet Government was in possession of all the territory it now officially claims...
...But the workers -know that fundamentally they are right...
...We can feel comfortably assared that no war will ever come about because Lithuania has sttscked the Soviet Union, or because Norway has sent a threatening ultimatum to Great Britain, sr because Colombia haa launched an assault against the United States...
...On the other hsnd, the Soviet Union lived in peace and security urilkout this territory so long as the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Tresty were reasonably well enforced...
...Many millions of Russians have been slain and vast tracts of Russian soil devests ted as a result of repeated German aggression...
...The members are mad...
...Then they go to the grocery, the meat market, the department store...
...In reading certain publications and certain newspaper columns that pride themselves on being champions of right against wrong, of freedom aganst tyranny, of law and order againat international gangsterism I find a monotonous emphasis on the note of "security" for the Soviet Union...
...The disappearance of the independent Poland for the preservation of which the war supposedly began would certainly fall in this category...
...In neither case was the possession of a "strategic frontier" a guaranty against devastating invasion by a militsrily superior power...
...The trouble ia oar dependence upon statistical averages...
...No housewife pays an average price...
...Thil figure, 15 per cent, has no living relation with the actual experience of working people...
...For economists and hiatoriana they have a certain importance...
...I have never seen a suggestion in these quarters that the need of Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia for security against the Soviet Union is a great deal more real and pressing than the Soviet need for security sgsinst these smaller neighbors...
...And they are mad...
...F Stalin claims a moral right to demand the elimina-lion from the Polish Government of Ministers whom he regards as "anti-Soviet," how much stronger would be the moral right of the Poles to demsnd the elimination of "anti-Polish" Commissars from the Soviet Government, beginning with Stalin and Molotov, as primarily responsible for the infamous partition of Poland between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in 1989...
...It is profoundly discouraging to Americans who hoped for the establishment of a decent world order after the present war to find Prime Minister Churchill announcing what looks like a Munich policy, 1944 model, with capitulation to Stalin all along tne line, in me Baltic States, in Poland, in Yugoslsvia...
...But what ia both pussling and depressing to me is thst these aforesaid publications and columns never seem to recognize thst security, if it is to be anything but unlimited tyranny and domination of the strong over the weak, must be reciprocal...
...It hi important that we should get these issues straight and see them in perspective...
...Hero we have two groups of first-class men airing a sharp difference of judgment...
...Meany are speaking for them...
...These propositions sre so self-evident that one might ask why 1 am taking time and space to state them...
...And that brings us back to the inhumanity of the Little Steel formula...
...But genuine*friendship can be based only on equality, on mutual respect, qualities that have been conspicuous by their absence in Stalin's hsndling of the Polish question...
...That magic word "security" seems to cast a halo about Stalin's crudest acts of imperialist annexation...
...Thomas aad Mr...
...Millions of workers know that buying what they need, where they live, they have lost buying power during the past two years...
...Meany give the key to the situation...
...In their retort Mr...
...There is no doubt that the two labor men reflect the attitude of the nation's cooks, managers, providers of food...
...It must be security for the weak against the strong as well as for the strong against the weak...
...CECURITY against aggressive attack for all nations, large and small, is a cardinal principle of any peace settlement that will be worthy of the name...
...It is the strong, not the wesk thst require restraint if a civilised warless world is gradually to emerge from the havoc snd chaos of the present time...
...Thomas and Mr...
...CHURCHILL raised other points of grave con-cern to those who believe that justice and respect for selfdetermination of peoples are essential elements in sn enduring pesce...
...The moral surely is that genuine security against aggression depends not upon unprincipled landgrabbing on the motheaten pretext of acquiring "strategic frontiers" (the very phrase has lost much of its meaning in an age of air power), but upon world organization capable of preventing any power from becoming such a threat to the peace of its neighbors as Hitlerite Germany or militarist Japan...
...He maintained that the Atlantic Charter does not apply to Germany, although there is nothing in the phrasing of that document that limits the universality of its application...
...A good deal of fun has been poked at this suggestion, But it would be a serious mistake to overlook the significance of this passage...
...What's wrong with thia picture...
...A government that remodels itself at the behest of a foreign power ia no longer free...
...His figures sre, doubtless, correct...
...If this is the spirit in which the peace settlement is to be made, a spirit of unprincipled power politics, of carving up countries transferring people from one sovereignty to another like rattle, then it will become very doubtful whether America could or should pledge itself to maintain any such settlement...
...The issues are vital to every worker trudging home with his pay envelope, every woman with her market-basket, every family gathered about the table...
...Twice in her lifetime Russia Iws been violently assaulted by Germany...
...In reading the publications I have in mind one might get the impression thst Polsnd invaded Russia, occupied a large part of its territory, instituted a reign of terror, carried off a million or so Russians for forced labor...
...They feel that they are being defrauded and deceived...
...No one grudges the brave Russian people the fullest 1 measure of security within the boundaries which the Soviet Government accepted in voluntarily concluded treatries and confirmed in non-sggrevion and neutrality pacts which it pressed in such profusion on its Western neighbors during the thirties...
...Yet some of our ex-champions of international morality soothingly represent this demand, the kind of demand that could only be addressed to a vassal state, as a normal innocent expreasion of deaire for a "friendly neighbor" and denounce the Polish Government, with its considerable representation of Peasant and Socialist Ministers, as "reactionary" because of its refusal to accept It...
...The reason lies in the amazingly onesided and distorted conception of the word security which one finds in much American writing on the subject and which is reflected hr Prime Minister Chtrrebhi's reference to the Soviet-Polish dispute in his recent speech...
...AN EDITORIAL— The Fight About Figures HPHE debate between the trade unions and the Labor * Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics is basic...
...And they suggest the submission of the conflict to a poll of irate housekeepers...
...The experts of the Labor Department promptly came back with a detailed and explicit denial of this claim and ¦ defense of their own original eatimate...
...JhBR...
...It should also cause serious discussion and an increasingly articulate demand to know more of the Arabian Nights secrets of Teheran on this side of the Atlantic...
...First the Bureau of Labor Statistics published its report culminating in the statement that since January 1, 1941, the cost of living Index has advanced 23.4 per cent...
...He intimated that one of the secret decisions of Teheran had been to "compensate" Poland with territory that is purely German ethnologically, as an offset for Stalin's annexation of about forty per cent of Poland's former territory in the East...
...And any security that is worthy of the nsme must be universal in character...
...It, too, is based on a little average figure that was computed far back...
...Thomas and Mr...
...The husband hears about it...
...Meany may come out second best in their fight about figures...
...But they sre operates...
...It is well that for once the country's attention should be centered on something that really Matters...
...As former Ambassador Bullitt has well said, Americans will not underwrite crime...
...Actually, of course, as readers of The New Leader know, it was the other way around...
...These men presented statistical material which seemed to them to ahow that the cost of living has, since our entry into war, advanced 43.5 per eent...
...It is good to know that Churchill's speech was subjected to'severe criticism in parliament, of the full details of which we have been imperfectly informed...
...It is most unlikely that Stalin's methods of bullying and blackmail will achieve their professed objective of creating a "friendly" government in Poland...
...He goes to his union meeting and the local officials hear of it...
...Indeed the first type of security is obviously of greater importance, if a world free from the shadow of aggression is to come into being...
...Meany are honest...
...I cannot feel that the Russian demand for reassurances about her western frontiers goes beyond the limits of what is reasonable or just...
...Much more real and important is the issue: Collaboration on what terms and for what purposes...
...Now in the case of the First World War, in the outbreak of which Tsarist Russia had some share of responsibility, along with Imperial Germany, the Russian frontier was farther to the west than the line which Stalin demands at the present time...
...The official averages are a composite of prices of aft products which enter into m> living over the length and breadth of thia wide aad divergent land...
...For purchasers of the basic necessities of life they are not so good...
...The Department of Labor statisticians are competent, and Mr...
...The reply on behalf of organised labor wee delivered by R. J. Thomas and George Meany, the labor members of the President's Cost-of-Living Committee...
...Stalin's demand that the Polish Government reconstitute itself to his liking is utterly incompatible with the "free" Poland which the Soviet dictator, tongue in cheek, professes to desire...
...A. Ford Hinrichs is competent and conseientioas...
...Churchill tried to justify Soviet annexationist demands with arguments thst simply do not make historical sense...
...They read the figure, 23.4 per cent...
...They say: "No group of government bureaucrsts have ever before had the authority to insult millions of American housewives...
Vol. 27 • March 1944 • No. 10
