Where the News Ends

...AN EDITORIAL ALP Says Dies Committee Should Die THE proposed Dm* Committee investigation *f **, C.I.O...

...Although fact finding is one of the necessities ef government, Diea uses a false facade of Congressional inquiry to wage war against democracy...

...And a lone Nazi raider had flown over a part of England with a noiseless technique and dropped a bomb, by accident or design, on a crowded moving picture theatre, with the natural results...

...Political Action Committee was assail...

...We held that even in peace time the Dies tactics are dangerous to democratic institutions...

...but somehow I never have come to regard Bulgarians aa very real or sinister enemies...

...Then someone in Spain had thought out a homicidal experiment of mixing in bombs with s shipment of oranges to England...

...The pessimists were inclined to place their estimates as high as fifteen, or even twenty million...

...How many human beings were sugaring the living desth of Soviet concentration camps...

...NK could go on multiplying such hard but incontro^ vertible truths indefinitely...

...but the students were inclined to etand up for the present age...

...Where the News Ends By WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN It Is the Iron Age MOT verr lent* ago I spent an evening in New York ' City with a group of Russians, man and women who had been upropted from their own land by one violent revolution, blasted out of Germany by another and out of France by the impaet of the Second World War, Now, like many other European intellectuals, they had found a refuge in the United States...

...Of course on* cannot make a complicated industrial society function without some element of power, authority and responsibility...

...consistent record of handling home grown Fasciats with kid-glove delicacy and restraint...

...Consistent in his allout campaign to throttle labor's democratic right to express itaelf at the polls, Martin Dies has an squall...

...versiv* activities Instead it degenerated into a waaav hunting agency destroying reputations built up ia yean of public service...

...Hoover's relief work in France a'nd Belgium in the last war, nothing has been permitted for the relief of malnutrition, verging on starvation, of children in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway...

...The optimists thought it might be as low as seven million...

...Power of this kind has increased, is increasing and should be diminished, to paraphrase a resolution once adopted by the British House of Commons in relation to the growing influence of the Crown...

...over his fellow-citizen...

...But our side is also not free from blame...

...gioas to abolish th* Commit ta* at the earliest rusiali moment aa a "public sorvic* and a major coo tribute* to national unity and moral...

...Three such headlines, which appeared in close proximity one day recently, have atuck in my memory...

...Martin Dies again challenges the fundamental liberties of Americans in his unauthorized attack of th* i in Political Action Committee...

...His present drive against Isbor's rights reaffirms the grounds on which we challenged th* extension of his committee by Congrese last year We charged then that Dies spread disruption •* the*home front, endangering national morale...

...That an appalling human tragedy had taken place in Kiev there could be no doubt whatever...

...Indeed one might auapect as much by trying to read a daily newspaper or listen to a radio news report imaginatively, with a feeling for the charred bodies and smashed limb* and general human wreckage that lie behind the laconic accounts of bombings and blastings of this, that and the other place...

...I waa so deeply Impressed by the discussion of the numbers of victims of Soviet concentration ramp* and Nazi pogroms thst I tried out the question en a group of atudenta with whom I was holding a aessinar: would they have preferred to live in thia age or in the nineteenth century?* Perhaps it was th* optimism of youth or perhaps it was , realisation that they had no choice in the matter and might as well make the best of the era in which they had been born...

...But I submit that the following statements are not open to question, and do mark out this period as one of singular violence and barbarism, of exceptional bleakness for the human mind and spirit...

...The Dies Committee, never having served a useful purpose, should be abolished by Congress at the earliest possible moment as a public service and a major contribution to national unity and morale...

...But I think a sufficient case has been made out for the proposition that we are indeed living in an Iron Age...

...2) The number of Jews Who have been slaughtered by the Nazia in single cities, such as Warsaw and Kiev, is far in excess of th* total number who lost their lives in all the pogroms of Tsarist Russia...

...But generally speaking we shall be on the right track If we oppose everything that tends to increase the power of the state over the individual, of the big nation over the small, of the leade...

...1) The Soviet regime has deprived more of its citizens (subjects would be a more accurate descriptive word) of life, liberty snd the pursuit of hsppiness in - two decades than the Tsarist regime (no model of constitutional virtue's) In two centuries and more...

...Optimists hoped thst a good many of the Jewish residents of Kiev might have escaped to the village* or to other porta of the country...

...What are' we to do about it...

...Witness th* fact that, in contrast to the facilities afforded for Mr...

...Declaring that th* Die* Committee never served t useful purpose, th* Labor Party spokesman urged Csa...

...Th* other debates were about how many Jews had been killed during the Nasi occupation of Kiev...

...And ss soon as that cause is widely enough recognised the peoples of the world msy set about finding remedies and cures...

...by George S. Counts, American Labor Party Stat* Cat*, man, and Alex R***, Btate Secretary, a* an attempt t* "frighten lahor into political inactivity...

...and a holocaust of Bulgarian civilian lives, with a normal proportion of women and children, doesn't send any thrill of rejoicing up and down my spine...

...The precedent of political cooperation between labor and liberals developed in New York, is a sign post which labor in the other 4? atates can follow in meeting the Dies challenge...

...No one doubted that the figure waa to be reckoned in millions, but how many millions...

...Pessimists thought the figure might be as high aa eighty thousand...

...In this crueial election yesr...

...The Dies Committee was crested to investigate ssk...

...Power is hell, 'whether it be the power to precipitate a country into war, to "liquidate" whole classes or races," to demolish cities from the sir, to turn whole populations into robots by modern methods of propaganda and thought control...

...gH method* have been a disgrace to Congress whoa* eat*, gated powers he abuse...

...We charged thst the spreading of sensational and unsubstautiated charges in war time under the cloak ef s quasi-judicial authority, aids the enemy...

...The primary cause of the crisis into which twentieth century civilisation has slipped or fallen is crystal clear...

...Sine* th* inception of his Contain* in 1938, Martin Di*e haa ahown full contempt far tat constitutionally guaranteed rights of Americans...

...But I am afraid the facts of the situation are overwhelmingly on the other side...

...The eight year record of constructive political action established by the American Labor Party is a living rebuttal to Congressman Dies...

...The conversation turned to world affairs and before long two animated debates were in progress...

...One need scarcely labor the point that the Nazi record in this respect is much worse than that of Imperial Germany...

...TWERE was the bombing of Sofia, with six or eight thousand people estimated killed...

...Perhaps this was , a glorious victory...

...Imagine the shock you would hsve received if you could at that Urn* have foreseen the routine headlines of an American newspaper in 1944...

...3) At no time in history has so la/ge a proportion of the human race been under arms, with the' prospect of getting back to a disarmed world so gloomy and so dubious...

...Th* latest faray *t th* Diss Committee is a deliberate attempt to fright* labor into political inactivity," they stated...

...Or try the experiment, if you are old enough, of projecting yourself back to some peaceful, civilized year before the First World War, to 1012, say, or 1913...

...Young people who have grown up in America are sheltered from the impact of some of these facts...

...The very fact that discussion could range around •USAlNiinto sjfmed^Jo meXn^reasiye evidence that we are living in sn age of singular violence and barbarism...

...Power is such a dangerous thing, and can become such a hellish thing that it should be the first concern of every free citizen of every democratic society to see that it be diffused and co-operatively shared and controlled from below by every possible means and that every abuse of power, however slight, be exposed and denounced and nipped in the bud...

...The political and economic and moral restraint* that were imposed on the exercise ef arbitrary power in the nineteenth century hsve fallen awsy, *r hsve been demolished to a very alarming degree...

...4) No war of recent times has been fought with such callous disregard of the lives and health of noncombatants, enemy and neutral alike...

...Dies renews hi* challenge to labor's democratic right to participate is eyents which shape the nation's future...

...It sometimes seem* that the very nature of modern science and technology fight* on the aide ef this arbitrary power...

...Now, while no one likes to think of himself as sn oldster who instinctively prefers the past to the present, as a "laudator temporis act i," I would be most happy if I could conscientiously award the students the best of their argument with me...

...They maintained that there had been social progresa, that the world was moving forward...

...The cause ia th* undue concentration of power - in the hand* of ¦ few strong powers, and in th* hands of certain organized gr*nps or individuals within those nations...