ASIA: DEBACLE AND DRIFT
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
Where the News Ends Asia: Debacle and Drift By William Henry Chamberlin SATISFACTION OVER THE LIFTING of the Berlin blockade, the visible decline of Communist strength in', Western Europe...
...Lockridge and Heggen best-flellihg novelists, and the latter- also a spectacularly Successful playwright...
...In bis bourgeois sehootl Te robot beUefs m a.strange eat of rales...
...As the psychiatrists might put it: "What kind of compulsion neurosis afflicted them...
...Much of this responsibility can be traced to the Yalta conference, the withholding of military aid during the critical years of the civil war—1946 and 1947—and the efforts to force a coalition government including the Communists...
...It did not mobilise popular support: the fighting performance of Its troops was anything but Unpreesive...
...Already we hear of Japanese businessmen listening respectfully to lectures by the Japanese Communist leader, Sanzo Nozaka, on how to trade with China...
...This is the Influence of Moscow's victory in China on the rent of Asia* A Sovietixed China Is certain to exert a disastrous influence on rtthv COurse #f •vents' tn"5apen and * Korea, the Philippines and Indo-Chlna...
...Did they, perhaps, express something of the suicidal impulse amok in the world today...
...We should make two points clear, and without delay: First, that not a penny of American resources will be used for the suicidal purpose of building up Red China...
...they were fine intellect men of culture...
...They earned high incomes...
...Oh, Comrades, look out Per that teen-age terror, Ike western Boy Scout...
...Hongkong, which the British fortunately did not hand over to China after the war, is an air and naval defense bastion and there are provincial troops in the southernmost provinces of China, in Kwangtung, Kwangsi and Yunnan, which, if properly supplied, can constitute a cordon against Communist consolidation of all China...
...Let the tragedy of the Winantsr Forrestals, Heggens', et al, stand before us as a, terrible warning of the price of failure...
...Perhaps it is true that men cannot And a solution to peace because in peace thty cannot find the false surcease which war provides...
...to provoke hatred, to destroy human beings root and branch...
...Second, that any Chinese group that displays a capacity for resistance and selfhelp can count on our support...
...News stories say that a decade in Washington wore down Forrestal...
...Provided there is no ill-omened experiment in appeasement, no fatuous effort to buy off the Chinese Communists from Moscow by extending American diplomatic recognition and credits, -Mao Tse-tung and the other Chinese Communist leaders could safely be left to simmer in the stew of their inevitable economic difficulties—if not for one serious and important consideration...
...Where the News Ends Asia: Debacle and Drift By William Henry Chamberlin SATISFACTION OVER THE LIFTING of the Berlin blockade, the visible decline of Communist strength in', Western Europe and symptoms of political unrest and economic distress behind the iron curtain must be tempered by concern for the consequences of the debacle that is taking place in China...
...Communist agents in Malays* most of them Chinese, have been carrying on # hit-and-run murder campaign Which is not likely to flag for lack of outside help when and if a Soviet China becomes a reality...
...No matter what "side" one is on, everywhere there is discernible this tendency of man to defeat himself, to lay himself open to so much frustration that, in the end, the best solution becomes self-obliteration...
...With almost eighty million people cooped up in an area smaller than the state of California and poor in natural ro» sources, Japan must have access to the foodstuffs and raw materials of continental Asia or face a prospect dangerously suggestive of genocide...
...And the trend toward war, which is Still predominant, is therefore a disguised wish to commit suicide...
...This was why Japan, with about one-sixth of China's population, was able to overrun and hold large areas of China until the whole Japanese dream of empire collapsed under America's blows in 1945...
...Psychiatry no doubt has a separate explanation for each individual case...
...It has already looted everything that was not nailed down, and a good deal that was, in Manchuria...
...It would be a matter of decades, perhaps of generations, before China's communist rulers could give China the industrial underpinning needed for a strong military, naval or air power...
...Judging from the experience of the East European countries, the Soviet Union is better qualified to plunder its vassal states than "to assist their reconstruction...
...And Heggen whipped himself into a state because he could not produce the novel he hoped would succeed Mr...
...Malaya and Indonesia...
...Winant Vasw a diplomat...
...The Chinese Communists have made no secret of their hostility to this country...
...BUT THERE REMAINS UNANSWERED the question: "What drove these men to overreach themselves...
...Moreover, there are substantial Chinese colonies in most of the countries of southeastern Asia, in Siam, Malaya, the Philippines and the Netherland Indies...
...The problem for our generation is how to curb the hidden death wish and bring to the fore the creative impulse within us...
...be on guard...
...It may also be frankly recognised that the Chinese nationalist government was not a strong, effective or reliable ally in the postwar period...
...The occasion calls for swift, effective co-operation between the United States and all the governments, European and Asiatic, which are threatened by the Communist advance...
...But we wonder whether a common thread does not connect them together...
...Roberts...
...Richard Amteon...
...He's Illed with Mean bath weird and Insidious, Vulgar and vile and meat fearfully hideous...
...To subvert culture, to eaaae sucvetkm...
...Forrestal at the very summit of political power...
...Slam, and Burma...
...Presumably, television made great demands on Davis...
...For China, despite its size and population, is extremely backward and primitive industrially and technically...
...A Communist regime firmly in control of China can exploit these colonies: as fifth columns, working on them both by propaganda and by threats and pressure...
...Ms mind Is all twisted, Me notions are oddHe Where* la brotherhood, pease, and God...
...Winant held the trying post of Ambassador to wartime Britain...
...Nevertheless, if China could in any way be sealed off from the rest of Asia, the consequences of its fall would not be as tragically disastrous as would the overrunning of Western Europe by the forces of Moscow— a contingency that may now be considered happily averted...
...All, in short, were successful...
...Srm worse, he's been brought...
...American subsidies doled out by the occupation forces have disguised this problem...
...Before the war it was far outstripped by Japan in industrial output, trade, shipping, literacy and technical skill...
...aft*'' ,»,« *' »~ O-N Buard...
...THE* PRESENT UNITED STATES POLICY of passive drift is thus no adequate response to the challenge of the debacle that has taken place in China...
...IXPOSUM The Boy Scout movement of the United States and other western countries was exposed today, in an article in Soviet Sports, as an imperialistic device for training automatons of the imperialist armies, hourgeois spies and espionage agents, Strikebreakers, and advocates of religion and world citizenship.—.News item...
...What made them take their lives...
...THE KREMLIN WILL NOT...
...However, there is no reason or excuse for the' government of the strongest country in the" world to look at the spectacle of Communists submerging China with the passive fatalism of a rabit watching a boa-constrictor...
...To apportion the responsibility for this debacle is less important now than to consider what should be done, and done quickly, if its consequences are not to spread all over Asia...
...Lockridge slaved for years to produce one novel...
...Strain of overwork...
...We should not encourage them and discourage our friends in China and other parts of Asia by making any gestures of appeasement...
...A drifting boat seldom survives a tempest...
...The urge to violence...
...in China, gain access to any important source of natural wealth...
...Ma's carrying tent pegs with which te bant you, A whistle to signal, a rope to hang rent He's equipped with s kniie and a kssa iggsd axe And trained to follow yens faintest tracks...
...It is bad enough that this huge and ancient land, inhabited by almost one-fifth of the human race, should be passing under Communist domination...
...Suicidal Impulse JOHN WINANT, ROSS LOCKRIDGE, and within the past week Owen Davis, Jr., . . Thomas Heggen...
...Davis a topranking man in television...
...On the other hand, mane persistence on earth for countless ages seems to indicate that, parallel to the suicidal impulse—which is really a prehistoric vestige —he possesses a strong impulse toward survival, toward self-improvement, toward creativeoess...
...James V. Forrestal . . . the list of suicides grows...
...but cannot permanently solve itChina's size and historic prestige are bound to exert a magnetic influence on adjacent Asiatic lands, some of which, notably Frenca Indo-Chlna and Burma, are already in a stall of acute disorder...
...The very fact that, in contradistinction to the way things once were, in war there can be no victor, is in itself so frustrating a psychological fact that warwhen engaged in—becomes truly an act of auicide...
Vol. 32 • May 1949 • No. 22
