Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS Westbrook Pegler's 'Anti-Communism' By William Henry Chamberlin Commenting on world affairs must, unfortunately, rank as one of America's unskilled professions. Perhaps half...
...If there were a decoration for the American who has done the most effective practical work in fighting Communism in Europe, on a difficult sector and with a shoestring budget, Irving Brown would be a leading candidate for it...
...And even if it were true, which it is not, that co-determination means trade-union control of German industries, this would be syndicalism, not socialism, though Pegler would be hard put to it to define either term...
...Some twenty years ago, Irving Brown, then a very young man, was briefly connected with a little splinter group known as the Revolutionary Policy Committee of the Socialist party and wrote what he now regards as adolescent, half-baked articles for an obscure publication called the Revolutionary Socialist Review...
...It has been a hard job, because in some European countries, especially in France and Italy, both workers and employers behave along Marxist lines to a degree that would seem fantastic in the United States...
...For years, he has been doing everything one man could do to put heart and life into the European trade unions that have thrown off Communist domination...
...His reports not only on trade-union conditions, but on the general political and economic situation in the various European countries, would be a credit to a professional diplomat...
...So it may be worthwhile inquiring how this nonsense got started...
...To anyone who has talked with Brown or is at all familiar with what he is doing, this kind of stuff suggests the raving of a lunatic...
...The Communists single him out, and with good reason, for a stream of abuse and vituperation...
...An example of the low standards, ethical and intellectual, of some widely-read commentators is the poison-pen campaign that Westbrook Pegler has been carrying on against Irving Brown, European representative of the AFL...
...To call Brown a Communist is a libelous falsehood...
...He helped create the anti-Communist dock workers' committees which have seen to it that United States munitions reached Europe without Communist obstruction and sabotage...
...Thus, the Socialist goal of state control of the means of production has been achieved by an American Communist acting with Ike's blessing, but without the slightest authority from the people of the United States...
...Pegler has another count against Brown: his supposed "promotion of socialism in Europe...
...Brown left the Socialist party in 1936 and has been impartially helping Socialist, Catholic and non-party trade unions in Europe...
...In Pegler's lying and libelous book, Brown is "a bloodthirsty Communist a few years ago" who has never abandoned his "declared purpose to overthrow the Government of the United States by bloody warfare in the streets and to substitute a system of Soviets...
...But Brown has been remarkably successful...
...Brown's friends in the French Socialist and trade-union movement helped organize a protest to the Soviet Embassy in Paris against the repression of the East German workers last June...
...Perhaps half the individuals who have access to nationwide audiences through the radio or syndicated columns show reasonable qualifications for the job: first-hand knowledge of foreign countries and a solid grounding in history, political science, economics and related subjects...
...There is not the slightest basis for attributing responsibility for the German co-determination law to Brown...
...I hope and believe that Brown will get wry amusement out of Westbrook Pegler's venomous fiction...
...Unfortunately, there are some people who believe everything they see in print, even if it is signed by someone as erratic and unreliable in his numerous hates and feuds as Pegler...
...Writes Pegler: "Brown has imposed on much of the industry of Western Germany a deal whereby Socialist union bosses were supposed to have been given authority equal to that of the owners...
...The other half are a sorry crew -scandalmongers, peephole gossipers and downright incompetents in politics and economics...
...even in his young "revolutionary" phase, he never belonged to the Communist party or any of its fronts...
...These intellectual wild oats have no more to do with Brown's present attitude and activities than similar passages in the early writings of such staunch anti-Communists as Whittaker Chambers, Max Eastman, Eugene Lyons or the author of these lines, but they are grist for Pegler...
...Brown is the kind of man who never stops working and never stops fighting, no matter how unfavorable the odds may be...
...Brown has also been a target of abuse for the 200-per-cent "anti-Communist" Pegler...
...Many similar examples could be cited...
...Even the American High Commissioner could not have forced such a law on Germany-much less a private American citizen without official standing...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 18
