Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Appeasement On the Right Appeasement can be fairly defined as one-sided retreat in the face of an insatiably aggressive enemy. It is immoral...
...Then he sets up and gravely knocks down a familiar straw man: "It is not the mission of the United States to go charging about the world to free it from bad nations and bad systems of government...
...Every act of indecision and retreat has merely compounded the hostile force with which we have to deal...
...It is obvious that if Hitler had been stopped by joint French and British military action when he remilitarized the Rhine-land in 1936, he would have been unable to start the Second World War...
...And, during the Korean War, the head of a Cleveland electrical company circulated a pamphlet suggesting that we ground arms and apologize and pay reparations to North Korea and Red China presumably for blocking their aggressive design...
...If someone who has joined 30 or 40 Communist fronts proposes steps in American foreign policy that would please Molotov, his voice does not carry very far...
...At least they are behaving logically...
...The appeasers on the Right are just dismally and discouragingly wrong-headed...
...But if similar recommendations are made by someone who has voted the Republican ticket all his life, whose views on domestic issues are unimpeachably conservative, the issue becomes confused for many people...
...I recently received a copy of the magazine Faith and Freedom, which stands well to the right on domestic issues...
...A few though not the majority of the appeasers on the Left are secret or open Kremlin sympathizers...
...How much stronger would our international position be today if we had forced a showdown with Stalin at Yalta...
...But the issue today is not a quixotic crusade, but very elementary hard-headed self-defense against an inherently and incurably aggressive system that already has at its disposal one-third the population of the globe and is constantly reaching out for new conquests...
...The delusion of appeasing Communism has been, in the main, a disease of the Left, as the delusion of appeasing Hitlerism was chiefly a blunder of the Right...
...This point has been driven home by so many recent experiences that one would imagine that the philosophy of appeasement had been completely discredited...
...Weir trots out the hoary platitude that "Communism is an idea, and no idea has ever been eradicated or changed by...
...It is immoral because it usually involves the sacrifice of smaller and weaker peoples...
...if we had hit back with all our air and naval power when the Chinese Communists attacked us in Korea in 1950...
...The inevitable end of the appeasement road is war under circumstances far less favorable than those which would have prevailed had a firm stand been taken right at the start...
...Weir's essay goes on in this spirit...
...He would have us "retire completely from the fray" on such issues as Germany and Korea, pull out of NATO, "withdraw the military from foreign bases," recognize Red China and "re-establish free and unhampered trade with the Communist countries, by our own nation and by all other nations...
...Appeasement, unless advocated by an enemy agent, is a fool's game...
...Arthur Koestler, in The Yogi and the Commissar, pointed out the deadly parallel between the reaction of the Right to Munich and of the Left to Yalta: "There was the same impatience with the annoying victim who refuses to be murdered in silence and the same desire not to antagonize the aggressor...
...Another contributor to this conservative magazine, Aubrey Herbert, lays down a blueprint for American policy tailor-made to the specifications of the Kremlin...
...There is similar nonsense in Louis Bromfield's Pattern for a Tired World...
...a show or application of force...
...I predict for him honorable mention as a "progressive, realistic representative of capitalism" in some Soviet publication...
...Apart from the authorship, this article could have appeared in the Nation, perhaps even in Masses and Mainstream...
...At the present time, most of the pleas for appeasement of Moscow and Peking come from sources that may fairly be considered leftist in general sympathy...
...One of its articles was by the steel manufacturer, Ernest T. Weir...
...How about absolute monarchy in England, feudalism in France, slavery and the right of secession in the United States...
...his views have already been widely circulated in the Western world...
...First, Mr...
...if we had gone all-out in military support of Chiang Kai-shek instead of pursuing the will-o'-the-wisp of a Chinese coalition government...
...And it is self-defeating because the danger represented by the aggressor, instead of being diminished by appeasement, continually grows...
...The rest of Mr...
...But there are some influential voices of appeasement on the Right, and these are probably more dangerous in the present state of American public opinion...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 20
