Editorial
EDITORIAL National Disgrace After a few days of full-length telecasts of the McCarthy-Stevens hearings, the National Broadcasting Company abruptly decided to cut its coverage down to summaries....
...Iran will now accept U.S...
...officials, unable to get all the Arab countries into a defense plan simultaneously, are trying to sign them up one by one...
...Compare this with the Schine case...
...Israel regards arms aid to her belligerent neighbors as a threat to her very existence...
...Anti-Western factions in the Arab world are gaining, rather than losing, popularity...
...2) it has tremendously retarded Russian economic development, and (3) most important, the ruling class is in many ways the least secure element in Soviet society, threatened constantly from above, from below and from within its own ranks...
...the Arab League is still strongly opposed to any Western defense plan...
...At the very least, they hope...
...But Arab relations with Israel are now at their most explosive state in five years...
...Both principals have bragged about practices which no self-respecting Standard Oil baron of the Nineties would own up to...
...As for the substance of this petty dispute, it has not reflected credit on either side...
...It is the sort of situation which, a few years ago, would have made people yearn for an honorable, respected, "non-political" strong man to clean things up-a man, say, like General Eisenhower...
...The "fanatics" of the MVD readily joined the "class enemy...
...But President Eisenhower, the Alsops tell us, is vitally concerned about the Schine dispute...
...For each who escaped, there are doubtless a hundred others who lacked the courage, and a thousand more who lacked the opportunity...
...Moreover, there is good reason to doubt that the Iraq deal will enhance the possibilities of setting up MEDO...
...Yet, what can we think of the vaunted MVD after the defections of Yuri Rastvorov in Japan and Vladimir Petrov in Australia...
...But Rastvorov and Petrov were not, in fact, comic-book caricatures: they were human beings...
...The agreement was motivated, of course, by our desire to establish a Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO...
...The McCarthy-Stevens row had drawn less than a third of the televiewers who watched the Kefauver Committee investigations in 1951...
...But that investigation had as its subject the Asian policy of the United States for the past decade...
...The reason: The public wasn't that interested...
...gift to Iraq thus increases the danger of war in the Middle East...
...The last time such an extensive report was given was during the Mac-Arthur hearings of 1951...
...It is this last fact, the insecurity of the "Soviet leaders" themselves, that is least appreciated in the West...
...Few who have not experienced it can conceive of a society which maintains itself principally through the manipulation of fears and illusions to divide and paralyze potential foes within and without...
...they think that the vigilance of the secret police, the militancy of Communist party members and the self-interest of the privileged elite insure a power formidable enough not only to subdue 190 million Russian peasants and workers, but to rally them to achievements of which democracy is incapable...
...There seems little reason at this time to aggravate unnecessarily the present Middle Eastern unrest...
...The facts are that (1) Soviet rule faces unceasing resistance, active and passive...
...Washington confirmed this and hastened to add that Baghdad merely used the word "unconditional" to pacify anti-American elements in the country...
...arms...
...According to the State Department, we will decide on the amount and type of arms to be sent to Iraq, and we have already stipulated that they are to be used for "defense" purposes only...
...Once again, the good sense of the American people asserted itself...
...Rocking the Boat A dispatch from Baghdad this week reported that the United States has agreed to grant "unconditional" military aid to Iraq...
...We wonder how the garrison at Dienbienphu feels about it...
...On the first day of the McCarthy-Stevens hearings, for example, one of our favorite newspapers devoted five full pages to a verbatim transcript...
...grave issues of war and peace were inextricably involved...
...What Monolith...
...Insofar as non-Communists accept this, they share the real views (as opposed to the mythology) of Communists...
...Before their defection, both men were of the type which some of our domestic Red-hunters would regard with awe as "master-brains" and "super-spys...
...the contrasting judgment of certain newspaper editors is open to question...
...When their patron, Lavrenti Beria, fell in the struggle at the Kremlin tops, the "Soviet patriotism" of these two MVD men went out the window with him...
...The sight of McCarthy making ethical objections to the monitoring of his conversations is an ironical one, but the very fact of the monitored conversations (as a weapon in the "liberal Republican" camp) is an indication of how low our public life has sunk...
...The U.S...
...What do we have to offer those who stayed behind...
...For, even if there are real political issues in the intra-GOP scuffle, the attention given to the altercation over G. David Schine is, in the context of the total world picture, a national disgrace...
...Newcomers to the anti-Communist field are often deceived by the "monolithic" appearance of the Soviet ruling class...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 18
