Editorial
EDITORIAL since sarajevo June 28, when Sir Winston Churchill held in Washington what is described as the largest press conference in history, was by pure coincidence the fortieth anniversary of...
...Yet, we must point out that recent policy in Washington has been a shaky attempt to combine the two approaches, an attempt which has only maximized the disadvantages of both...
...Any such conception would have to take note of the lessons we have absorbed since Sarajevo...
...Of the young men of 1914, more than 8 million (or twice the population of the United States in 1790) were to die in the Great War, and untold other millions in the postwar famines and civil conflicts...
...Here is the heart of Sir Winston's approach: "I am of the opinion that we ought to have a try at peaceful coexistence...
...Looking backward, one can see how World War I, while toppling the Hohenzollern, Hapsburg and Romanoff dynasties, was the midwife of a new horror, aggressive totalitarianism...
...I would like to make quite sure that the Russian people would not feel that they might gain far more by a quarter of a century of peaceful development in their own country than they would by pressing matters to a point where we should all be led to a situation which baffles the human imagination in its terror, but which, I am quite sure, would leave us . victorious on a heap of ruins...
...But I do beg you to make sure that no stone is left unturned in this period to give them a chance to grasp the prospects of great material well-being which will be offered to all those millions...
...Sir Winston's contribution did not lie, however, in the area of specific nostrums for specific situations...
...schools and colleges today) were to be killed in the Second World War...
...Nothing is more likely to bring about a modification of the rigorous Russian system of Communism than contacts between the Russian people and the peoples of the Western World, cultural contacts, and trade contacts, and the magnification of the exchange of goods and services...
...EDITORIAL since sarajevo June 28, when Sir Winston Churchill held in Washington what is described as the largest press conference in history, was by pure coincidence the fortieth anniversary of what may have been the most critical event of our era: the assassination at Sarajevo of Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand...
...It was altogether fitting that on the anniversary of Sarajevo the attention of the world was focused on Sir Winston Churchill first, because he has played such a great part in the events of the last forty years, and, second, because he more than any other statesman possesses the heritage and the capacity to view today's problems against the panorama of the ages...
...It is our view that a democratic policy of liberation would be...
...the other, to which the Churchill policy is diametrically opposed, is the policy of liberation, as propounded often here in The New Leader...
...I am not anti-Russian...
...I would like to make sure, to save the consciences of the democracies of the world, that no step or stage has been neglected in endeavoring to test the reality and the imminence of our danger...
...Of those who were children during World War I, more than 23 million (about the number of children in all U.S...
...Hee evaded a firm commitment with regard to the war in Indo-China...
...It doesn't follow . that the men in the Kremlin will always be able to be largely independent of the opinion of the vast Russian masses...
...Rather, he made clear a coherent, long-term British approach to the global struggle, a position grounded on certain ineluctable historical realities...
...in the long and the short run...
...He seemed vague on the subject of enforcing the coexistence he propounds in the face of Kremlin bad faith...
...I am violently anti-Communist...
...Surely those who believe that means determine ends can find grim confirmation in the history of the four decades since Sarajevo, four decades in which an imperfect, but viable, world way of life has given way to a globe in which anxiety is total...
...He did not deal with the political and economic malaise which grips large areas of Europe...
...I am most anxious that the real mood of the people of Russia should be known and that every opportunity should be given for its expression...
...The effects of the two wars on the stability of society and the sanity of the individual human being have been incalculable...
...Many in Washington will be inclined, therefore, to brush off Sir Winston even as they brushed off the late Ernst Reuter and other advocates of liberation, Yet, if we are to answer Sir Winston we must do so not with improvised slogans and partial formulas, but with a clear conception of democracy's ends and means in the present struggle...
...Sir Winston did not disappoint his public...
...What Sir Winston proposed was, in fact, one of the only two consistent policies available to the West...
...more realistic than that propounded by Sir Winston...
...He failed to discuss frankly the vital Anglo-American differences in respect to Communist China...
...True, on the level of day-to-day concerns there was much to criticize: Sir Winston overlooked the ideological challenge of dynamic Communist movements in underdeveloped areas...
...and how World War II, which defeated Nazism, extended the power of totalitarianism and brought into use new means of destruction which now threaten the existence of human life on this planet...
...The pistol shots fired in Bosnia led within five weeks to the First World War, in the shadow of whose consequences we have all led most of our lives...
Vol. 37 • July 1954 • No. 27
