Where the News Ends

CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY

Where the News Ends By William HENRY CHAMBERLIN Miscellany and Mailbox BECAUSE I have recently received several letters ¦* of more than personal interest, I shall turn over a good deal of this...

...Anna Louise Strong, with her unlimited capacity for rhapsodies in Red, once told a touching tale of how the Lithuanian peasants loved the Red Army...
...He wss assigned to the Job of intimating that Americans were cowards at the time when General McArthur declared Manila an open city to avoid useless slsughter of the population—a consideration that would be quite strange and alien to the Communist mentslity...
...on that evening and in the night of June 14-15 about 30% of the Lithuanian officers in the 29th corps were arrested and deported...
...Hartmann - is nothing more than a fanatical sentU mentalist, his "movement" bears the possibility ef danger...
...All that the foremost experts can possibly do is to suggest certsin reasonable discounts for various types of testimony...
...They were vigorously supporting the President and his war policies during the two years while the communists opposed our entry into the war and used every sort of underhanded trick and blatant publicity stunt to hinder American preparations for war...
...To quote further from General Rastikis: "The climax came on the evening of June 14...
...Tha professor is surrounded by a few—a vefy f— siaieu pacifists who think that, since war is bad, it U their duty to try to bring about an immediate peace, at any price...
...Tke Daily Worker seises the opportunity to do a characteristic smear job...
...This sort of shameless lying about the record of Social Democrats reveals ss insulting contempt of public intelligence...
...Another aspect of the softening up campaign is to depict conditions under Soviet rule in the Baltic Republics as idyllic...
...The uprising started on June 23 (one day after the beginning of German-Soviet hostilities) and rapidly spread over a vast territory...
...independence could have told him: that even a very alight deviation from the totalitarian official "line" is sn offense not to he forgiven Mr...
...But American scientists swallow them whole...
...The extent to which the Government of the USSR has continued to use dictatorship, mass arrests, suppression and terror in its rule over the country is to me a gauge of its economic failure to provide the people with food, clothes, shelter, security...
...My correspondent cites an article by the former commander-in-chief of the Lithuanian Army, General S. Rastikis, hitherto unpublished in, this country, which describes in great detail how the Lithuanian officers in the "Red Army" maintained by the Soviet regime were removed snd sent to Russis, obstensibly for higher training, being replaced by Russians...
...This was followed by a mass people's uprising, which my correspondent sun1mari7.es as follows: "It was a popular revolt against the inhuman and stupid Soviet rule...
...The story is too long to go into here...
...Now by a rare coincidence this column and "The Daily Worker" were in agreement on the proposition that Mr...
...Persistent misinformation comes over the radio from commentators who ought to know better, or inform themselves better, that the Curzon Line of 1919 was generally accepted as Poland's legitimate eastern frontier, which it was not, that it was Polsnd's ethnographic border, which it was not, that the pre-1939 Polish-Soviet frontier was obtained as a result of the Soviet-Polish war of 1920, which is historically not true...
...Now I quote her testimony: "In 1934 we believed what D...
...A Laivian named Gregory Meiks-nis recently published s book which faithfully followed the line that the Soviet regimes in the Baltic could do no wrong and enjoyed the virtually unanimous support of the people...
...Willkie's amour-propre, kmt waa unmistakably beneficial to his international political edacalion...
...Willkie has now presumably learned what many individuals who have tried the experiment of retaining the friendship of totalitarian regimes while retsining s minimum ef critics...
...So heavy was the weightage that such s stern ideological critic as "The Daily Worker" placed its imprimatur on the piece, with one or two minor reservations...
...There are powerful reactionary forces always ready to come out againat our unconditional surrender policy...
...This was a great manhunting day in all Lithuania...
...Their utmost efforts have resulted in the coming together of a few doses persons at a meeting in New York...
...In a front page story a feature writer stsrts by trying to make an amalgam of Norman Thomas...
...The first aad mat of those epithets describe Dr...
...COME time ago this column discussed the confusion thst must beset the mind of the average American, with no first-hand knowledge of Russis, when he hears so many contradictory assertions about that country...
...The New Leader is glad to present to its readera s repudiation of Dr, Hsrtmsnn by the Socialist Party...
...Like all turncoats, he feels a psychological compulsion to shout loader than anyone else to prove his complete conversion to the cause...
...She had married a Russian who went abroad at the time of the Revolution but had subsequently been granted Soviet citizenship...
...Hartmann's peace movement and never has been and is on record as being officially opposed to a "negotiated peace" or "peace now...
...Of course we soon found when we got into the USSR that we had made a terrible mistake and that the only life my husband could have there was in prison...
...This hold was strength-eimt'd rather than weakened and its methods became even more ruthless as they prepared for war...
...One of the first things I learned was how little Russians, even simple workers and peasants, believed in Soviet 'facts' and published data...
...THE fact that the "Pravda" hatchet-man went to work on Mr...
...not taken place...
...Its soldiers, so ran the tale, were so considerate that the tanks would stop to avoid running over chickens...
...It was very interesting for me to observe the changes that occurred in the USSR, because most of those you describe happened while I was there...
...Hartmann, and the Social Democrats—ai though merely putting the words down on paper constitutes proof of a connection...
...I supported myself by^> fiving private English lessons, kept completely sway rom all foreigners and lived and worked entirely with Soviet citizens...
...He is s former lfenshevik who climbed on the Bolshevik bandwagon after the Revolution...
...Socialists oppose any deal with Hitler or Hirohito...
...Laat week the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party passed a resolution without a single dissenting voice atsting the socislist position on s negotisted peace...
...He was arrested in 1936 and ss Isle as 1941 was still alive and in prison...
...loader of the "Peace Now" movement The journalist!, hullabaloo which has been raised about him and hn society ia out of all proportion to their importance...
...Where the News Ends By William HENRY CHAMBERLIN Miscellany and Mailbox BECAUSE I have recently received several letters ¦* of more than personal interest, I shall turn over a good deal of this week's column to tbe contents of my mailbox...
...George Hartma...
...Willkie with a vengeance merely becanse the latter mildly expressed one or two pious hopes that Stalin would not completely throw the Atlantic Charter out of tke window in the treatment of Russia's smaller neighbors msy have been annoying to Mr...
...more than 16,000 Lithuanians of both sexes were arrested and deported...
...Another difficulty in acquiring a true idea of Soviet conditions is the condition of hothouse isolation from the masses of the Russian people in which most of the few foreign residents in the Soviet Union sre obliged to live...
...First, however, a few comments on the kick in the teeth which the hatchet-man of "Pravda," David Zaslavsky, administered to Wendell Willkie...
...Since I was an American citizen and we had absolutely nothing to do with any activity against the Soviet Government, I waa allowed to live in a village near Moscow and to care for our adopted son...
...I retain a faint and unpleasant recollection of Zaslavsky from the days when I lived in Russia...
...Willlcie's article was heavily weighted on the pro-Soviet aide, as was implied in tha vary title: "Don't Stir Distrust of Russia...
...On June 24 the uprising spresd over the whole peasant country," It would seem that the Lithuanian workers and peasants, soldiers and students did not live up to the roles assigned to them by those volunteer press agents of the Red regime in Lithuania, Anna Louise Strong and Gregory Meiksnis...
...The doctors laugh at the 'health statistics,' The farmers at the 'production' ones, etc...
...Samuel H. Friedman, Chairman of the New York City organization of - the party, writes as follows: The Socialist Party is not connected with Dr...
...The ssme groups—here and in England—-which devoted their all to appeasing Hitler before ths wsr are still in the wings waiting to come on at the-first opportunity...
...There were at least three or four prominent centres of revolt: Kaunas, Wilno, Siauliai, Marjampole, without taking account of the revolt of the 'Lithuanian Red Army!' "It is noteworthy that the uprising in Kaunas was conducted mainly by tbe local factory workers, in other centres the insurgents were mostly student youth...
...but Poland could, have obtained a more favorable frontier with the Soviet Union if the war of 1920 had...
...I recently received a letter from sn American woman who lived in Russia from 1936 until 1940 under conditions that give her a much better right to be heard than for a reason that will be obvious as I quote two or three salient paragraphs from a letter which she wrote me in connection with my book: "The Russian Enigma...
...AMY mailbox recently contained a letter from a Lithuanian who came to this country fairly recently, a man of unimpeachable knowledge and integrity, that confounded these pleasing Actions with hard facts as to what happened in his native country...
...p\nt eWBvwS^snj'ss*** An Editorial No "Peace Now" A NYONE who sdvocstes peace now is either aa ia, *" nocent, a crook, or slightly cracked...
...The idea of the thing, however, is potentially dangerous...
...But the point is that these developments did not change the basic nsture or chsracter of the Communist Party or its dictatorship one iota...
...Willkie's srticle, so ungratefully received in Moscow, in some of its phrases and assumptions fits in with a campaign now going on to soften up American public opinion for the acceptance of an East European Munich in the form of an unconditional acceptance of Stalin's annexationist demands...
...So, though Dr...
...All American Social Democrats fought Hitler from the beginning down—even during the long, years when the communists were on his aide...
...John Haynes Holmes, Dr...
...a wellknown correspondent and writer on Russia) wrote about the past being forgiven in the USSR and thought it safe for us to go to my husband's country and help build a "new society" there...
...Like the Soviet Ambassador in Aldanov's "The Fifth Seal" he must live in uneasy recollection of ¦articles that he wrote in the days before he saw the light under such titles as: "Renegades, Come to Your Senses...
...Any sentiment for peace roused by fussy-minded innocents will be seized by the leaders of such groups, who are far from being pacifists, and exploited for their own selfish ends...

Vol. 27 • January 1944 • No. 5


 
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