NATIONAL GUARDIAN' - WALLACE'S 'PRAVDA'
HERMAN, LOUIS JAY
National Guardian' — Wallace's 'Pravda' WHILE mosioy tioublse cennop ¦iwsiwits into oblivion, wm&k in peettcnlear awe barely m»JH§ communist and fellow-traveling pipl Within the past year or so...
...he* mushroomed...
...But recently voices of protest have been raised, books written, reports published, investigations started...
...But when the Soviet government arbitrarily forbids the teaching of any genetic theories except those it approves of, the (luariimn sees no cause for alarm...
...One can either be for progress or for reaction...
...SUPPOSE THAT, ONE DAY, the American delegation were to come with a proposal to abolish, once and for all, all kinds of forced labor and all kinds of concentration camps, everywhere...
...but in Communist Hungary—so reasons this presumably American news. weekly called the National (iumnUmn _that right haromos "treason...
...Communism as such rarely figures in the Guardian's pages...
...Does not this fact alone make the proposition worthwhile...
...Those who oppose the convention would, of course, be given every opportunity to explain why they are for forced labor...
...We shall be only too happy to hear their humanitarian and progressive-minded- explanations . • • • ONE OBJECTION would probably be that the proposed convention threatens "national sovereignty...
...And so on...
...Victor Kravchenko, author of I Chose Freedom, who left his post with a Soviet purchasing mission to seek refuge in America, is pilloried as a "Russian traitor...
...Indications are that the Guardian's editors suspect their sands haven't much farther to run...
...How long is the average working day...
...On February 7, the paper proclaimed that the "progressive press is in peril," for it had liabilities worth '15,060 and was "threatened with suspension...
...They would also be bound to denounce and outlaw treaties concerning extradition of criminals and deserters to such countries...
...Whittaker Chambers, admittedly a former Communist, is identified as an "ex-progressive...
...How did these publications come I how are they managing to meet expat Communism is at its lowest ebb poilil financially...
...and denounces as a "choleric American" the Nobel Prisewinning geneticist, H. J. Muller, who dsres question Stalin's authority on biology...
...When Parisian Communists riot, "the working people...
...Another from New York State...
...IN AN EARLY ISSUE the Guardian permitted publication—apparently in a burst of libertarianism—of a letter from a reader which said he would refuse to buy further copies "until you criticize the Soviet Union for its failure to provide civil liberties and other essentials of freedom, just as you criticize much milder infringement of civil liberties in the U.S...
...Curiously enough, the American press reported early in July that the Republicans had just announced they had executed Tan Malakka as a Communist leader...
...What Interest groups >lish...
...All of this can be stated in clear and juridically binding terms, and in language simple enough for everyone to understand...
...The New Leader hopes to publiab articles which will attempt to answer begin, this week, with an analysis of th Jay Herman...
...Indeed, a staff writer asserts that this "deserves serious discussion...
...Thus Emil Carlebach from Frankfurt: " 'Democratic anti-communism' is as impossible as a democratic Goebbels...
...making known what the Soviet and other go...
...Next will come the charge of "warmongering...
...same line...
...As a result, according to its own estimate (Bee February 14 issue), it has only "close to 25,000" readers...
...Nevertheless, die Guardian was undismayed, and in addition to acting as the unofficial mouthpiece of the Progressive party, emerged as* an unofficial organ of the Soviet government...
...A reading of the paper would seem to indicate that he is a person who thinks like a communist on"*'most issues but, when in disagreement with the communist line, refrains from saying so...
...ELSEWHERE in the Guardian, a report from London announces: "Drive to war dims Britain's socialist dreams," but of a Prague Communist demonstration the Guardian is able to say: "While armored cars crammed with factory militia and Security Corps men roared through the square, President Gottwald . . . signed a decree . . . developing and changing the whole econ-omy toward socialism...
...On the same page, in an article headed, "Bulgaria today: a bustling industrial nation emerges out of a semi-colonial past," the Guardian's Sofia correspondent reports: "Sofia is a earticelarly flowerconscious city...
...Again, the ousting of a Communist from an American university whips a Guardian writer into a righteous fervor against the "same kind of authoritarianism which in Galileo's day forbade the teaching of the new astronomy in all the colleges and universities of Europe...
...Thus Cedric Belfrage, the editor, reports after the Waldorf "peace conference" in New York that a "bridge of confidence and of cooperation" was built between "Communists and other progressives...
...But we know of no statements by the American Communists that the government should be overthrown by force...
...Aside from the communist minority, they combine political illiteracy with abundant enthusiasm and sublime faith...
...you would imagine...
...But even if the Communists did call for overthrowing the government, the American tradition carried down through Jefferson and Lincoln is that they have a right to do so...
...In their souls they will begin to hope for freedom...
...All signatories would be obliged to report to this commission the following: 1. All laws, executive orders, regulations, instructions or directives pertaining to forced labor or corrective camps in existence as of a given date, and the dates and texts of the laws abolishing them...
...and "Russia" is a beaming Stalin feeling the muscles of a sturdy Russian workman...
...Unhappily, two weeks later Wallace's party collided violently with reality, and its hoped-for 5,000,000 votes melted to just a million...
...By May 2—without any explanation of where the money had come from— another announcement cut the price of the Guardian from ten to five cents, because "we .. . want to reach millions before our sands run out...
...But national sovereignty does not preclude voluntary agreement to international treaties...
...They would make any attempt to hold a person in forced labor a criminal offense...
...Free labor unions will arrange meetings and demonstrations, and picket delegates from those nations which refuse to abolish forced labor...
...3. The number, location and organisation of all remaining jails, prisons and like places of detainment...
...Do they all follow the tax do they appeal to...
...McManus' phony concern for "the people" led him, once, to long for the "return of the penny paper...
...No evil could be more abominable than slave labor, and no cause more just than the struggle *to remove this blot from the face of the earth...
...All but Bessie, Marcantonio and Kahn are now editors of the New Masses' successor, Masses and Mainstream...
...In China and Greece "peace |is| being made by . . . the people...
...2. The number, location and organization of such camps, with the number of detainees in each, as of the same dale...
...Its delegates would enjoy diplomatic immunity, and be admitted to all areas formerly containing concentration camps and to prisons still in existence...
...The trial of the American Communists, however, arouses this kind of editorial response: "Their ideas, it is said, include that of overthrowing the government...
...How many people arc detained in them, and for what crimes...
...The Senator's point is pertinent, but his suggestions are of a technical rather than political nature...
...The General Assembly can edopt only recommendations by which nobody is bound...
...The preamble to the convention would be simple...
...After the International Congress of Women adjourned in Budapest, Ella Winter exulted: "It was obvious that many countries, particularly colonial ones, believe the Soviets spell peace and an end to exploitation for all...
...GUARDIAN READERS seem to range between fervent party-liners and BibieBelters convinced that Henry Wallace alone practices the golden rule...
...Complaining of the "sluggish and uncreative imagination" which hampers our foreign policy, Senator Flanders inquired: "Must we forever have our policy determined by a foreign power...
...Thus, when a ring of "American agents" is exposed behind the iron curtain, Editor Belfrage denounces the "web" of underground subversive activity spun and maintained by the U.S...
...THERE IS SUCH AN ISSUE...
...at home as well as occupied territories...
...Curiously, in the process of "making known" the activities of various governments, the Guardian has consistently managed to turn up on the Soviet side of every question...
...Finally, representing the Guardian in Moscow is the Daily Worker's correspondent...
...Even men wear flowers in Sofia, sometimes in their buttonholes . . . and sometiaaee between their teeth...
...Before World War II there were international agreements against white slavery and the opium and slave trade...
...Communism, it seems, "is not an issue...
...It must be made clear, too, that the convention is unequivocally directed at forced labor of any kind, anywhere: in Siberia as well as on the Sahara...
...It would say that maintenance of forced labor or concentration camps is a crime against humanity, on a par with those for which Goering and other Nazis have been properly executed...
...A front-page cartoon preview of 1949 in the January 3 issue, for example, presented a revealing Guardian-style world ideological tour...
...The slavers will, of course, try to prove that forced labor is essential, useful, wholesome and pleasant...
...Among these are to be* found, for example, a host of former contributing editors of the defunct New Masses: Alvah Bessie, Vito Marcantonio, Albert E. Kahn, Isidor Schneider, Richard O. Boyer, William Gropper, Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois...
...Pravda will find it necessary to report something on these "imperialist maneuvers" in the UN...
...Still, the UN is not without value, for through it one can speak to the world and arouse its conscience—even mobilize it for action...
...They would agree to prohibit, by law, the maintenance of such institutions...
...He did not disclose what the content of his leaflets would be...
...But let any nation try to defend the thesis that whoever proposes voluntary abolition of slave labor by international convention is guilty of promoting war...
...consigned to the hell of forced labor...
...But, one reads, seating Communist China on the UN Security Council "would immeasurably strengthen the socialist minority...
...in "civilized" as well as in "primitive" countries...
...The Voice of America will help...
...the Assembly must insist upon answers—from those countries which maintain concentration camps—to these questions: How many such camps do you operate...
...nments are doing, not in propagandizing (or or against them...
...Thus, when Jennings Perry shifted from tte late New York Star to the Guaadian, a reader gushed: "A million kisses for finding Jennings Perry on your pages- • . ." " The Guardian reader's chief loveimage is, of course, Henry Wallace...
...Not by third-rate diplomats, but by the foreign ministers, of the several nations, and by delegations, including, as their members, prominent labor leaders...
...More important— cpenaee at a time when American olltieally and...
...By LOUIS JAY HERMAN THE TABLOID-SIZE National Guardian made its initial appearance last October 18, when Henry Wallace's followers still imagined they would poll 5,000,000 votes in the Presidential election...
...No human being, the convention would stipulate, can be compelled to work or be interned in a place of detention excepting only criminals condemned by an independent judiciary after a fair, public trial...
...Peter Meyer is a frequent contributor to Tht N*w Leader...
...Adds the Guardian's crack word-analyst: "Professional confusers of the public in America took the word over as a description of any kind of all-embracing state, whether the government were imposed upon the people or by them...
...To be successful, a political offensive must deal with an issue that can have an immediate impact upon millions of people...
...The investigation will go on, we are told, but the matter has hot becomeas it should be—one of the focal points of world politics...
...Even they .would be protected against starvation, overwork, torture, or any other form of inhuman treatment...
...Millions have died there...
...Russian factory workers and kolkhoz muzhiks, Polish peasants, and Albanian shepherds will know better...
...on the wen loamiianlsl left ¦jpateg to survive* • new erop of tfflef*1...
...The proposed international commission would have the right and duty to check on the veracity of this information, to obtain and publish it, to examine official documents, to hear witnesses, and to investigate complaints...
...But during the revolt of Indonesian colonials against the Dutch, the Guardian uncovers the damning information that the Republican government is allied with "Trotskyists" led by "Tan Malakka, the Trotskyist leader, who' spent the war years in Tokyo...
...Labor o (monthly), to name a few which hire are...
...I pray with all my heart for God's blessings on such a man as Henry Wallace...
...Unable to tap the vast reservoirs of healthy liberalism, the Guardian finds itself purveying party-line propaganda largely to already convinced "progressives...
...The contracting parties would agree to grant asylum rights to bona fide fugitives from concentration camps in countries which still maintain them...
...In another issue, a Paris dispatch says, "Under the Marshall Plan: France is headed right into depression...
...INITS IWnmmhfkXm at events, the Guardian follows the double-bookkeeping system conventionally used by most party-line publications...
...Refugees from communism come in for abuse automatically...
...And his additional proposal to organize a "little United Nations" within the present organization,' but without veto power, would have only a remote bearing upon the lives of common people...
...An undisguised communist dictatorship is called "socialist...
...It would conclude that governments which tolerate slave labor do not belong to the family of nations...
...Ralph Parker...
...These questions should be repeated again and again, night and day, before and after every speech made by representatives of concentration camp • "democracies"—until they are satisfactorily answered, or until it is clear to the world why they are being evaded...
...A few,.of the words which do heavy duty for the Guardian are: "progressive," "unity," "peace," "socialism," "red-baiting," "workers" and "the people...
...We >f the National Guardian by Louis An editorial note blandly, replied that "the Guardian is interested in...
...The Mindszenty case elicits the editorial comment that "the 'America' of the great monopoly interests fs now openly and unashamedly in the business of promoting, enthroning and even deifying treason in every country where economic power has been taken out of private hands...
...All former concentration camp inmates would receive the right to communicate freely with the members of the commission...
...Henry Wallace and others who described the system foiwded on forced labor as "economic democracy," were allowed to go unchallenged...
...France" is shown as a soldier with a swastika on his helmet, bayonet in hand, and "Made in U.S.A...
...The right te overthrow the capitalist American government is sanctioned by "American tradition...
...and the dales and circumstances of the abolition of these camps and of the release of their inmates...
...And last but not least, Senator Flanders' handbills "can be disseminated...
...all around and over the Soviet's borders...
...as a rule, slick Jobs, printed o» eg and well-written...
...Most of the sheet is written—and unquestionably controlled—by those who spent the years of the Nazi-Soviet pact denouncing Roosevelt as "fascist" and national defense as "warmongering...
...How many have died in the last ten years...
...Sometimes "people" is interchanged with "progressive," meaning communist...
...Exactly what a "progressive" is, the Guardian never explains...
...As for the opponents of Czech Communism, the Guardian gloats: "Facing a thin future, the remaining drones in Prague looked out on the armed workers . . . and many decided to turn over a new leaf...
...But they will fool only American fellow - travelers...
...were attacked" by the "U.S.dominated* government...
...THE MAIN THING IS...
...Totalitarianism"—a nasty word applied to Russia by red-baiters—turns out to be the invention of a Nazi...
...Final judgment of the validity of this arguments can be entrusted to the public opinion of the free world and to those who suffer under the forced labor system...
...Any UN decision can either be vetoed or ignored...
...the attention of the UN, but the slaveholders have been allowed to answer with abuse and evasion, and have not been compelled to reveal how many people they hold in their concentration camps and how many of these manage to survive...
...and in Western Germany an avowed German Communist, Bmil Caiiebach...
...TO MEET THE PROBLEM of palming off a simon-pure communist viewpoint on its readers, the Guardian takes full advantage of the verbiage invented by the Communists to befuddle fellowtravelers during the popular front period...
...pve com* Into being the National fas*, Manet & Mainstream (foxaf on the March and Jewish Life .are com* to oar attention...
...Louis Jay Herman, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, has written lor the South Atlantic Quarterly...
...Millions of innocents, young and old, men' and women, languish in concentration camps under conditions typical of the darkest ages...
...But it is questionable how many more readers will be found who care to pay even a penny for the Guardian's thoughts...
...Then let the UN discuss it...
...The AFL brought the problem to...
...Soviet soldiers in occupied territories can be reached...
...The proposed forced labor convention would not limit national sovereignty any more than, say, the Russo-Iranian treaty, which permits Soviet troops to enter Iranian territory whenever Russia considers itself endangered...
...The free press will undoubtedly report the proceedings...
...TO ENFORCE THIS convention, the UN would appoint an international commission, representative of the contracting parties...
...All participating countries would agree to abolish, by law, within a given period of time, all concentration camps, forced labor gangs, details or brigades...
...Other writers include this group of alumni from Soviet Russia Today: Harry F. Ward, Ed Falkowski, Israel Epstein, Ella Winter, Johannes Steel, Frederick L. Schuman and Louis Adamic...
...in Madrid as well as in Moscow...
...A week later McManus reported that enough "Guardian Associates"—no one thought of calling them Guardian Angels—had rallied to the paper to insure still further publication...
...Lest Guardian readers look askance at the more curious aspects of Eastern European "socialism," such as singlestate elections, a staff writer enunciates this new democratic principle: "The test of a democratic election is not the appearance of two or more names on the ballot...
...Com* mueJsts—that is, members of the socalled Communist party—are admitted to exist, but are regarded simply as a more advanced type of "progressive...
...On the other hand, Archibald Johnson, who quit his job as a British journalist in Moscow to become a Soviet citizen, is dignified by having his letter to Pravda reprinted in the Guardian under the title, "Why I Chose to Stey in Russia...
...But they will experience difficulty...
...Democratic socialist England is, of course, barred from the Guardian's Moscow-certified "socialist" fraternity...
...Freedom-Monger Asks UN to Adopt World Convention on Forced Labor By PETER MEYER SENATOR RALPH PLANDERt of Vermont recently proposed that handbills and leaflets be dropped ever Soviet teritory in a peace offensive directed at the exploited and deceived inhabitants thereof...
...National Guardian' — Wallace's 'Pravda' WHILE mosioy tioublse cennop ¦iwsiwits into oblivion, wm&k in peettcnlear awe barely m»JH§ communist and fellow-traveling pipl Within the past year or so there |a* Guardian (weekly), the Daily Comfm marly New Ma—em, monthly...
...I hear the answer: the UN has no power...
...Thus, "England" is represented by the glowering figure of Mars brandishing a sword...
...The Assembly would be asked to recommend that all nations conclude a universal, binding international convention, prohibiting all kinds of slave or forced labor, and abolishing—within a certain (short) period of time—all concentration, internment, detainment or "corrective labor" camps...
...and all regulations and instructions concerning the prison regime...
...A front-page editorial promptly proclaimed that this "Progressive Newsweekly," as it is subtitled, would uphold the, "progressive tradition" of Franklin D. Roosevelt as "represented today by Henry A. Wallace, and by him alone among the candidates now contending for election to the presidency...
...The real political dividing line is between "progressives'' and "reactionaries...
...the penal laws and court procedures by which a person may be condemned to loss of freedom...
...Week after week it has lustily whacked at "big business imperialism" and "warmongering" as exemplified by the Marshall Plan and the Atlantic Pact, but has yet to criticize mildly any aspect of Soviet policy...
...And Russia and her satellites, writes the renegade Brush Labor M.P...
...The facts cannot be completely suppressed...
...in coming issues, a series of war some of these questions...
...The last paragraph would say that the international convention will come into force when ratified by a minimum number of signatories, among them the five permanent members of the Security Council...
...on the seat of his trousersi-while "Czechoslovakia" is depicted as two workmen busily building a house labeled "PLAN...
...Is then no way in which we can take the offensive so that we become the determining force in our relations, instead of being anxiously dependent on the moves of the adversary...
...They * excellent paper, well-llluatrated ee into being...
...The reason is, if he criticizes the communists he thereby becomes a "red-baiter" and a destroyer of the "unity of the progressive forces...
...Wq may hear of resolutions describing how inmates of Arctic camps thank Comrade Stalin for the exhilarating life they enjoy...
...Henry Wallace's part in the Guarduui's thorough whitewashing o! communism has consisted mainly of releasing some of his speeches to it for occasional publication...
...Not in some obscure subcommittee of a subcommission, but before the full Assembly and before the whole world...
...The Guardian's pages are constantly adorned with cartoons drawn by the Doily Worker favorite, William Gropper, or reprinted from the communist press of London, Prague, Warsaw, Sofia and Moscow...
...Democratic parliaments will adopt, appropriate resolutions...
...One of the most terrible scourges of our time is forced labor...
...Konni Zilliacus, are the "socialist third of humanity...
...The free world paid little attention to this problem for a long time...
...The following week General Manager John T. McManus, a notorious fellowtraveler of long standing, announced that reader contributions "guarantee us several more weeks of publication...
...It would quote the articles of the' UN Charter and its Declaration of Human Rights...
...Doubtless slave-holding governments will try to protect their nationals from the devastating effects of freedommongering...
...Writes one breathless woman frem New Mexico: "During the campaign he visited our little town and I met him and had a nice talk with him and immediately decided he is a man the people would love, if they were allowed to...
...Throughout the Congress delegates applauded the achievements of the Soviet Union, the Red Army's job of liberation...
...What do the inmates get to eat...
...Terror paralyzes all who live under totalitarianism lest they at any time be...
Vol. 32 • August 1949 • No. 32
