The 'Nation': The Ideology of Surrender

...totalitarianism is somehow involved here...

...But Ho would not be destroyed...

...Yet, wiser persons know a lasting accommodation on Korea is possible only as part of a broad East Asian understanding...

...Indeed, a special virtue seems to attach to total ignorance of the facts, the idea presumably being that any attempt to ascertain them would mean conceding that Communist-party membership is a relevant issue and thus "playing into the hands of the McCarthyites...

...The whole Nation approach was summed up in an incredible title splashed across the front page of the April 25, 1953 issue: "How Far Dare We Push China...

...Clearly, one or the other of these ill-matched groups had misjudged the Nation, its audience, and its place in the political constellation...

...One cannot help wondering what John Milton, who dearly loved liberty and hated tyranny in any form, would have thought of the comparison...

...People whose names you see nowhere else...

...Moscow-Peking would "agree to a let-live peace," they predicted, provided the United States permits wide discussion of Asian issues at the [post-truce political] conference...

...A Nation writer went down to Memphis to interview Bennie Smith, a returned "progressive" POW, listened to his "honest answers," then reported that "brain-washing" was a myth and that Bennie had found "many ideas the Chinese expounded to be Christian and democratic...

...Molotov" failed to follow the script, del Vayo complained that "the Western delegates are more interested in maintaining solidarity than in probing for possible points of compromise with the Russians...

...Thus, when the Communist blocmade gains in the June 1953 election...

...The Nation alone clung to the old illusions, confusions and false equations...

...The Communist party emerges in its pages as a rather harmless group of social dissenters, dangerous only in the eyes of certain Congressmen, but endowed with the peculiar property of turning its former members into a special kind of malevolent fiend known as an "ex-Communist...

...writes G. D. H. Cole, a noted British economist who four years ago voiced the hope that American troops would be defeated in Korea, "are linked to our subservience to American policy in sustaining the cold war.'' To this Alex Comfort, a British novelist, adds that "the European public considers the present American government as contemptuous of human life as are the Eastern regimes...

...often European neutralists to whom the rest of American journalism is locked and bolted??are apt to say things in the Nation that you hear nowhere else...

...Not, of course, that the Nation is overtly pro-Communist on all issues...

...Refregier often does political drawings for the Nation, as do Ben Shahn, a Masses & Mainstream contributor, and William Gropper, an editor of M & M and former Daily Worker cartoonist...

...And Foreign Editor del Vayo added in the same issue: "The Soviet Government is moving toward a comprehensive e settlement of outstanding issues...

...Thus, Trygve Lie is accused of "join[ing] the McCarthy wing of the Republican party" when he cooperates with Washington's loyalty probe of American employes of the UN, United States representatives at the UN are charged with "McCarthy-like arrogance," and the Australian Royal Commission hearings in the Petrov spy case [see THE NEW LEADER, July 12, 1954] become an "assault on civil liberties" by "local McCarthyites...

...Its danger is that, by capitalizing on its past and hammering at perennial liberal issues like civil liberties, it has been able to maintain its influence among a substantial group of well-meaning if unsophisticated American liberals...

...it has evonerated in the name of "freedom" the dupes and agents of that despotism...

...And Konni Zilliacus, a semi-reconstructed Stalinist with Titoist leanings who was expelled from the British Labor party some years ago, discovers a direct link between the containment policy and "the pro-fascist appeasement that ended in the Second World War...

...When "Mr...

...American airing of Communist war crimes in the United Nations produced only bored irritation: "To swap atrocity charges is a poor way of approaching peace in Korea...

...In like manner, an article by a Canadian MP on the Jenner Committees efforts to interview Igor Couzenko is headlined "Canada's Revolt Against the United States.'" And one Jean Berlitz I "the pseudonym of a member of the UN Secretariat") offers a simple reason why the UN should move out of the United States: "Even the foreign staff, completely submerged in the American scene, is being gradually Americanized...

...only "fellow-travelers" and "Communist fronts...

...This is illustrated by the performance of one Nation contributor in discussing the case of Barrows Dunham, who was dismissed from the staff of Temple University after refusing to tell a Congressional committee whether he was a Communist...

...Its ultimate revolt is almost certain...

...After the ineffable Corliss Lamont [see THE NEW LEADER, December 22, 1952] defied the McCarthy Committee, he was given space in the magazine to recount his battle on behalf of "the great American tradition of dissent and independent thinking...

...A great part of the Nation's space and energy is, of course, given over to the fight against "McCarthyism"??a term which to Kirchwey and McWilliams, as distinct from most other liberal spokesmen, seems to be roughly synonymous with anti-Communism in any shape or form...

...Only after World War II did the Nation begin to drift from the mainstream of American liberalism...

...It has by now pretty well come round to the view that North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, and Editor Kirchwey will probably concede, if pressed, that the state of civil liberties in Soviet Russia leaves something to be desired...

...Its Foreign Editor is J. Alvarez del Vayo, a leading Kremlin spokesman in the Loyalist Government during the Spanish Civil War and a frank admirer of all things "progressive" from Warsaw to Peking...

...Formosa must go back [sic!] to Peking...

...Somehow, though, Nation writers never seem to work up much passion in these occasional rebukes to Moscow and Peking, and it's hard to down the suspicion that their hearts just aren't in it...

...At other times, Communists are acknowledged to exist, but only as the cause of a deplorable and wholly irrelevant split in the liberal movement between "liberals who will work with Communists" and "liberals who will not work with Communists...

...The Nation has always been able to attract a galaxy of prominent people to its fund-raising dinners and other notable occasions, and its 85th-anniversary issue in December 1950 was graced by a cordial message from the President of the United States...

...Russian distrust of the 'Bonn-Washington axis,' " he added a few weeks later, "is the biggest single obstacle to a substantial change in the Russian position.' As the Geneva Conference approached, del Vayo charged that John Foster Dulles had "probably wrecked [it] in advance...

...Today, the Nations Editor is Freda Kirchwey, a holdover from the Villard days and perfectly preserved specimen of pre-Nazi-Soviet-Pact "liberal" thinking about Communism...

...resigned from the staff in protest against its fellow-traveling policies...

...Fellow-travelers and Communist fronts do not exist...

...A little elementary research would have shown that Dunham is a chronic front-joiner and author of Man Against Myth, one of the more poisonous pieces of ideological confusionism to appear in the early postwar years...

...Wendell Philip Garrison,son of William Lloyd Garrison, was its first literary editor...

...For it is hard to escape the feeling that, to the men and women who sit within, every defeat for American foreign policy is a "victory" for that phantasmal "American people" for whom they claim to speak...

...When China at last allowed itself to be "pushed" into a Korean truce without a "broad East Asian understanding," however, the Nation was not fazed in the least...

...The tragedy of the Nation is that, from a position of eminence in American liberal journalism, it has sunk to the status of a pseudo-"progressive" transmission-belt for surviving pro-Soviet illusions and counsels of appeasement...

...and the artist Anton Refregier, a former editor of the defunct New Masses and frequent contributor to its successor, Masses & Mainstream...

...The United States, complained an editorial, had "ruled out all discussion of such relevant Far Eastern issues as the seating of Communist China in the UN, recognition of the Peking Government, and the future of Formosa...

...and Oswald Garrison Villard, another descendant of the abolitionist, carried the magazine to its greatest heights during his editorship from 1918 to 1932...

...For the Nation has justified in the name of "peace" and "progress" one of the blackest despotisms ever fastened upon mankind...

...defeat in the cold war, still yearns for a new United Front with the Communists THE SPECIAL civil-liberties issue of the Nation magazine published last December 12 carried a curiously mixed assortment of advertising...

...The notion of the rest of the world solving its problems "against the United States" is an appealing one to the editors of the Nation, and it often seems as though the magazine's pages are open to foreign contributors in direct proportion to the venomousness of their anti-Americanism...

...By April 11, all caution had been thrown to the winds: "political dopesters here and abroad are having trouble keeping up with the Russian peace offensive...

...Reinhold 'Niehuhr and Robert Rendiner...

...Alexander Werth, a Nation contributing editor, wrote from Paris that "the feeling against EDC means, above all, resistance to the process that is making France an out-and-out satellite of the United States...

...with its diplomatic initiative restored might also decide that its natural interests were best protected by a return to the traditional policy of rapprochement with Russia...

...On the one hand, there were ads for such eminently respectable liberal groups as the Ethical Culture Society, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (CIO...

...The Berlin Conference, next stage in Moscow's "peace offensive," evoked a predictable Nation reaction...

...Edgar Snow, a veteran press agent for made-in-Moscow "agrarian reform" movements, commented that, if the United States intervened in Indo-China, "quite a few new private fortunes could be made at the American taxpayers' expense...

...The editors give short shrift to the popular notion that the issue of democracy vs...

...Some months ago, an enthusiastic reader described one of the Nation's special "civil-liberties issues" as "a work to be set alongside Areovagitica...

...and two years later Margaret Marshall, whose anti-Communist book section had contrasted strangely with the rest of the magazine for a decade and a half, followed suit...

...At times, indeed, it appears to be used as a kind of all-purpose ideological shillelagh with which to beat anyone of whom the Nation does not approve...

...This blunt comment might well stand emblazoned in gilt above the door to the Nation's editorial offices...

...See THE NEW LEADER, February 25, 1950.] Others given the Nation's enthusiastic stamp of approval have included Leo Huberman, co-editor of the Monthly Review...

...Hence, the Nation's liberal credentials went relatively unchallenged...

...Finally, when it became clear that Geneva was about to end in disaster for the West, a lead editorial proclaimed with engaging candor: "The overwhelming diplomatic defeat suffered by the United States delegation is a victory for the American people...

...The writer frankly admits having no knowledge whatever of what "Dr...

...while legislation aimed at eliminating Communist unions from defense plants is depicted in an editorial as "the Administration's anti-union drive...

...Long fond of calling itself "America's Leading Liberal Weekly Since 1865," the Nation was once described by Lord Bryce as "the best weekly not only in America but in the world...

...The Nation's attitude toward Communism on "the American scene" is very much of a piece with its attitude toward Communism abroad, making the danger that it will follow the UN Secretariat down the road to Americanization seem very remote indeed...

...The Nation has never allowed its libertarian impulses to betray it into any great indignation against Communist totalitarianism, as perusal of its pages in the 1920s and 1930s will show...

...The Kirchwey-del Vayo Weltanschauung comes through most clearly in the Nation's approach to the cold war...

...See THE NEW LEADER, March 19 and April 2, 1951.] And its Editorial Director is Carey McWilliams, one of the country's most prolific front-joiners and a former officer of the American Peace Mobilization, which fought aid to the Allies until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union...

...Molotov may surprise his Western colleagues with concrete proposals which they will find difficult to reject...

...Thus, Claude Bourdet, a French editor, in an article dealing with the rise of "a new kind of fascism" in America, declares: "I still feel Russia is a world in the making, and as such should be treated with the respect due to courage and youthful achievements...

...On the other hand, the issue contained a startling array of Communist and Communist-front advertising, featuring International Publishers (official publishing house of the CPUSA), the National Lawyers Guild, the National Committee to Win Amnesty for the Smith Act Victims, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (sponsoring a dinner for Corliss Lamont), and the New York Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions...

...In 1951, two of the Nation's few remaining anti-Communists...

...William Appleman Williams, an assistant professor of history at the University of Oregon, propounds the unusual theory that Stalin was a "reluctant revolutionary" after World War II, but "acts of American intervention served to strengthen the arguments of both Stalin's associates and foreign Communists who contended that only a total seizure of power and world revolution could provide security...

...Viewing the world's political landscape through the pages of the Nation is a curious experience, somewhat akin to looking through the wrong end of a telescope...

...We think the UN would be well advised to shelve the matter...

...The whole thing, we are informed by Barbara Castle, a leading votaress of Aneurin Bevan, is nothing but a vulgar brawl between "the capitalist and Communist power blocs...

...while a sarcastic editorial laid the result to resentment over "Italy's role as a minor satellite of the United States...

...Particularly on college campuses and in isolated liberal circles out in the great American hinterland, the Nation appears variously as a solitary champion of academic freedom, a flicker of enlightenment in an all-enveloping fog of benighted "conformism," and a last small voice crying for "peace...

...By March 21, 1953, sixteen days after the old man's death, an editorial was remarking testily: "Premier Malenkov's second bid for negotiations with the West is not being brushed off anywhere except in Washington...

...With the truce signed, the "humanitarians" of the Nation seemed singularly unmoved by the plight of the anti-Communist Chinese and Korean POWs, depicting them as "irresponsible teen-agers" "whipped into a slate of total defiance by Syngman Rhee's press and ministers...

...The dollars [Britain receives from America...

...and it has made it vastly easier for the political Right in America to perpetuate the notion that social dissent in any form implies allegiance to the Soviet Union...

...And it is not hard to discover which of the contestants, in the Nation's opinion, is wilfully prolonging the current unpleasantness and which is making a sincere attempt to "settle outstanding differences," "reduce tension" and "return to diplomacy...

...To the Nation, every measure against a present member of the party is "heresy-hunting" and every arrest of a Communist leader signifies that liberals are "next...

...Moscow is ready to go to almost fantastic lengths to settle outstanding feuds?­.our psychological-warfare chiefs?­ devoted themselves so assiduously to cold-war propaganda that they are practically dumbfounded by the prospect of peace...

...So was Harvey O'Connor, another reluctant witness and regular contributor to the party-line Monthly Review...

...It's all done in very genteel fashion, and the reference is always to "Premier Malenkov" or "Mr...

...and, besides, fascism was the Number 1 enemy...

...When the drift of events at Geneva became clear, del Vayo exulted that "the European countries are discovering that they can solve their problems without the United States, and even if necessary against the United States...

...Dunham's past may have been," then blandly goes on to declare that his "conduct [in invoking the Fifth Amendment] was apparently based conscientiously on principle...

...Any remaining doubts about the Soviet Union's sweet reasonableness were resolved for the Nation's editors by the death of Stalin, who had caused occasional misgivings, and the advent of "Premier Malenkov...

...A France...

...The proper way to fight McCarthy-ism, one gathers from reading the Nation, is to defend all persons accused of Communism by McCarthy or anyone else, regardless of the facts in the case...

...The "basic purpose" of domestic anti-Communist measures, explains one Nation writer, is "to wipe out the gains made by American workers under Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...The number of proven Stalinists whom the Nation has tried to portray as martyred innocents is legion...

...Harry F. Ward and Jack McMichael, leaders of the Communist-front Methodist Federation for Social Action [see THE NEW LEADER, August 20, 1951 and August 11, 1952...

...In those days, however, philo-Bolshevism was the occupational disease of most liberals...

...Study of the Nation's issues over the past few years suggests that it was definitely not the Communists whose confidence was misplaced...

...With Moscow and Peking plugging hard for a "broad Asian settlement"(i.e., a broad Asian sell-out) as the price of peace in Korea, Kirchwey-cum-del Vayo fell right into line...

...As the Korean truce talks moved into their decisive stage, the Nation played an increasing obbligato to all the main Soviet propaganda themes...

...At times, Communists scarcely seem to exist for the editors of the Nation ??particularly in discussions of the Fifth Amendment, a constitutional safeguard which is apparently invoked by witnesses for a great variety of highly complicated reasons, but never for hardly ever) for the purpose of concealing Communist-party membership...

...Some idea of the type of "discussion" contemplated was provided in an article by Kingsley Martin, editor of the British neutralist journal New Statesman and Nation: "recognition of Peking China as a member of the United Nations...

...In their best we-told-you-so style, the editors declared the proposition proven "that settlements with the Communists can be reached through negotiation and mutual concession...

...Russia is acting with its customary drive and determination?­.[Dulles is] desperately trying to limit and localize the peace, while the obvious intention of the Russians is to enlarge it...

...In doing these things, the Nation has betrayed an enviable heritage and clearly forfeited the right to speak for American liberals or for free men anywhere...

...Two days before the conference opened, del Vayo announced that "Mr...

...in Italy, del Vayo gloated that "the elections proved that the period of American tutelage based on the power to give or withhold dollars is over...

...The fine flights of untrammeled emotion are usually reserved for people like Syngman Rhee ("this unbalanced, sinister man"), Chiang Kai-shek ("gargoyle of reaction") and Konrad Adenauer ("strong man of an authoritarian system"), whom the Nation seems able to castigate without any sign of inner conflicts...

...As the tide of Soviet imperialism continued to rise, magazines like the New Republic and groups like Americans for Democratic Action signaled a new capacity among liberals to clear away the myths of United Front days and face the facts about Communism...