OUR PEACE TERMS
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
Where the News Ends Our Peace Terms By William Henry Chamberlin THE PROPAGANDA PICTURE, built up by knaves and subscribed to by fools, of a warmongering America responding td a peaceloving...
...Through the speeches and acts of its leaders Republicanism is displaying a desperation, an irresponsibility, and a mood so reactionary that even non-Republicans must view the spectacle with foreboding...
...HEARINGS, NOT HERRINGS Theatre-Less Capital Gets Good Show in Red Hearings.—Newspaper headline...
...There were seven of these terms, and they are worth a brief enumeration, if only for reference when the next Communist-front "peace" conference gets under way at the Waldorf or elsewhere...
...TWO OBSERVATIONS may be offered on these terms...
...Is not oldfashioned conservatism really dead...
...4. Let an independent international authority, "not subject to control by either ourselves or the Soviet Union," control atomic energy for peaceful purposes...
...Is Reaction Inevitable...
...And no such miracle is likely to take place...
...Senator Bricker early this year, and Gabrielson more recently, have both frankly called for an open, permanent alliance with the Dixiecrats...
...the present state of international tension...
...For if the Soviet Union would call off subversive activities, call off rule-or-ruin tactics in the United Nations, relinquish its grip on the satellites, lift the iron curtain, its rulers would cease to be Communists...
...5. "The Kremlin could refrain from using the Communist apparatus controlled by it throughout the world to attempt to overthrow, by subversive means, established governments with which the Soviet Government .^stands in an outward state of friendship and respect...
...3. Let the Soviet Union cease undermining the United Nations by boycotts and walkouts...
...Is it likely that in this period only an outright reactionary alignment is possible...
...It has spiked the verbal guns of the "anti-anti-Communists," to borrow an apt expression from Arthur Koestler...
...First, would even the most zealous of the advocates of a "new approach" to Moscow suggest that any one of these conditions is unfair or unreasonable...
...For here American peace terms, or at least armistice terms, in the cold war were stated very clearly and in explicit detail...
...Acheson has suggested terms w^iich no one outside of a small irreducible core of all-out Communist sympathizers and a diminishing fringe of fellow-travelers is likely to find unreasonable...
...For this is the emptiest kind of banality...
...While liberals like Senator Lodge strive to implement their party's Lincolnian principles, the Republican Policy Committee maneuvers as cheap a sellout—on FEPC—as Boss Tweed ever pulled off...
...Already, plans have been laid for the endorsement of GOP candidates by the States Righters in 1962...
...7. Lift the Iron Curtain...
...Iliciiwdi ArtlMMHfa...
...However, the announcement of these terms served a useful purpose...
...And tragedy is tenaa, For in tha Sanata caucus The acting la immense...
...1. Make peace with Germany, Japan and Austria on conditions which would leave these countries free...
...It left, however, a slimy political sediment which muddied German minds for generations thereafter...
...The Soviet leaders could at least permit access to the Soviet Union of persons and ideas from other countries so that other views might be presented to the Russian people...
...But can these attempts succeed...
...Second, the fulfilment of these seven points would not require that meeting of chiefs of states which is held up in some quarters as u panacea, notwithstanding the unpleasant associations with the names Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam...
...If it is willing to stop its outrageous boycott of the UN agencies it can stop it...
...In some areas 'tJoinihittees for Republican Action" nave been formed...
...What this means—and Bricker has confessed it in so many words—is that the GOP is, preparing to scuttle whatever remains of its proud past...
...Are progressive Republicans not fighting a lost cause...
...Tha heroes may be hammy...
...If the Kremlin wishes to withdraw its troops and its goon squads from Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Albania, it can do just that...
...6. Let the official representatives of all countries be treated with decency and respect, not subjected to perpetual espionage and to the even more outrageous indignities that are commonplace in the Soviet satellite countries and "in Red China...
...While Senator Taft wants to "maintain our present high standard of living" unfettered by government regulation, he and his followers defeat housing legislation designed to strengthen the central element of American prosperity—the middle class...
...Apd this move, if there is to be the slightest chance of successful negotiation, will have to be something a good deal more specific and concrete than again playing the cracked record about the possible coexistence of communism and non-communism...
...e * IT IS SMALL CREDIT to the intelligence of certain American commentators when a declaration by one of Stalin's lieutenants that the coexistence of communist and non-communist political and economic systems is possible is treated as world-shaking news...
...If it wants to stop the subversive activities of Moscow agents outside the Soviet frontiers, create normal conditions for foreign diplomats, permit foreign journalists to work free from censorship and to travel freely, no one is preventing these welcome steps...
...Any such overture would carry the utterly untrue and unwarranted inplication that we are mainly, or at least equally responsible for...
...Liberal Republicans—men like Morse, Ives, Driscoll and Javits—are fighting valiantly to build a "forward-looking" party...
...While Senator McCarthy hurls wild charges concerning "Communist spies" in the State Department, Rep...
...Applaud them, friends, and aire them Ad liberty or death...
...The most sweeping Soviet Soviet concession that is suggested, withdrawal of military and police forces from the satellite countries, is nothing more than an honest implementation of the Yalta, Agreement...
...Any such conference would be a foredoomed fiasco or, still worse, a new lapse into appeasement, unless it were preceded fay Soviet abandonment of tha mora flagrant forms of aggression, an abandonment proved by deeds and not words...
...National Chairman Guy Gabrielson reveals that the GOP slogan, "Liberty vs...
...Finally...
...Yet it is most unlikely that these terms will be accepted by the Kremlin...
...Many outside GOP ranks wish these efforts well, for a healthy democracy requires a constructive conservative opposition...
...The parts, they really live them...
...Surveying the Republican party's course since its strategy conference of February 7, one wonders whether the GOP is hell-bent down the same suicidal path as the old German Conservatives...
...After Acheson'k seven points the next move is clearly up to Moscow...
...What is important is not acknowledgment of the possibility of co-existence but the terms on which this co-existence can be maintained...
...2. Let the Soviet Union withdraw its military and police forces from the satellite countries and permit free elections, as specified in the Yalta Agreement...
...Where the News Ends Our Peace Terms By William Henry Chamberlin THE PROPAGANDA PICTURE, built up by knaves and subscribed to by fools, of a warmongering America responding td a peaceloving Kremlin with an attitude of stony negation was effectively blotted out by Secretary Dean Acheson's recent speech at Berkeley...
...Vorys readies a vicious axe to cut down a mighty bulwark against communism—ECA...
...They spare no slightest breath...
...And yet they give their all...
...The favorite technique of these individuals is to attach inflated value to any statement in Moscow which is not an open declaration of war and then to accuse the President and the State Department of negativism, if not warmongering, if they refuse to make overtures for a conference with Stalin...
...IN HIS EXCELLENT STUDY of German anti-Semitism, Rehearsal for Destruction, Paul Massing shows how the once-great Conservative party, desperate after a number of serious electoral defeats, let itself be driven into unsavory alliances and extremist appeals which finally worked its doom...
...And while the Soviet rulers are in' flagrant default on carrying out the Yalta terms, so very favorable to them, how can any reasonable person suggest that a new agreement with the Kremlin would be worth the paper it is written on...
...What they are presently trying is a marriage of convenience with reaction...
...If this co-existence were not possible we should be openly at war at the present time...
...If the Soviet Government wants to stop sabotaging the Austrian peace treaty, to permit a free election in East Germany, to repatriate Japanese war prisoners, to admit the" UN commission to North Korea, it can do these things...
...Yea, comedy's still raucous...
...Socialism," Is to be used to smear democratic socialists, liberals and Fair Dealers as "Communists...
...They're paid toy uncle Sammy Who furnishes the hall...
...The footlights burn but dimly In good old Washington, Yat aver gaily-grimly Tha show goes on—and on...
...As Columnist Doris Fleeson has remarked, the Republicans "are especially restive and in a mood to try anything once...
Vol. 33 • April 1950 • No. 13
