Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Moving Forward From Berlin The prospect of any beneficial results from the Conference of Foreign Ministers at Berlin is not favorable. It is mere...
...Then it should be possible to move forward from Berlin, to the creation of a European federation and, in some form, a European Army...
...To accept some specious formula looking toward German neutralization would be to lose one of our biggest assets in the cold war, an anti-Communist Germany, and to expose Germany to all kinds of Soviet intrigues...
...It must be our policy to frustrate these tactics and force Molotov to a plain Yes or No...
...The formula for Austria is equally simple: unconditional evacuation of occupation forces and the right of the Austrian Government to make its own national security arrangements...
...The record shows that every conference between the Western powers and the Soviet Union has been either a deadlock or a disaster...
...Molotov, who has taken to verbose obscurity in his recent note-writing, may be expected to try to drag out the conference...
...If the "top-level" meetings were unmitigated disasters, the postwar conferences of foreign ministers were least harmful when they ended in complete deadlock...
...For information on the psychology of these groups, consult the dispatches of J. Alvarez del Vayo in the Nation...
...It was a happy day for this country when talks with the Soviet Union ceased and a constructive policy toward West Germany was adopted...
...We should be absolutely uncompromising on the issue of free elections, accompanied by freedom of speech, press and assembly??which already prevails in West Germany but is completely non-existent in the East ??as the basis of German unification...
...It should be the American objective to make the talks at Berlin as short and as decisive as possible...
...And America and Great Britain connived at two monstrous crimes: the uprooting of some 14 million ethnic Germans from their homes in East Germany, Poland, the Sudetenland and elsewhere...
...The American delegation should go to Berlin in a spirit of clear, unshakable purpose, and without fear of being reproached as "inflexible" by the faint-hearts, neutralists and fellow-travelers of Western Europe...
...The European Defense Community treaty, initiated more than eighteen months ago, is still unratified, and no alternative scheme has been produced for arming Germany as part of the Western anti-Communist front...
...That policy was one of the conspicuous successes of America's ventures in foreign relations...
...It is important to protect this real achievement at Berlin and to see that Adenauer is not treated as Chiang Kai-shek and the pro-Western, anti-Communist leaders of Poland were treated at Yalta...
...The harsh truth is that, while the situation in Germany was improved by the East Berlin revolt and Adenauer's decisive election victory, the situation in France and Italy has deteriorated...
...He will undoubtedly bring in irrelevant issues like the admission of Red China to the UN, in the hope of setting America, France and Great Britain against one another...
...The balance-sheet of the three "top-level" talks with Stalin at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam is truly appalling: One hundred million people in Eastern Europe were abandoned to the swelling Soviet Empire...
...That a meeting is to take place under present circumstances is a result of Western weakness rather than strength, of the existence of something dangerously close to political vacuums in Paris and Rome, of the widespread delusion that it is always desirable to talk around the samovar with the courteous Mr...
...And if his answer is No, as every development up to this time indicates it will be, the plaintive cry for "just one more talk" with Moscow will lose conviction...
...Fantastically unjust frontiers were traced for Poland and Germany...
...and the forcible repatriation of Soviet political refugees...
...It is mere wishful thinking to represent this conference as a result of growing Western strength...
...After two futile 1947 discussions about Germany, in Moscow and in London, Molotov's clear desire to settle for nothing less than a Soviet-controlled Germany completely exhausted the patience of General Marshall, then Secretary of State...
...We should also insist on the right of an all-German government to conclude any alliances it may choose...
...The groundwork was laid for the loss of China...
...This development is what the Soviet tyrants fear more than anything else, which is a good reason for us to do everything in our power to promote its realization...
...Molotov...
...No one who saw Germany in the ruin and desolation of 1945 and 1946 would have foreseen West Germany's present emergence as one of the most politically stable, economically prosperous and reliably anti-Communist powers outside the Iron Curtain...
...It is a great disadvantage that any meeting with representatives of the Kremlin should take place before this fundamental question is positively solved...
Vol. 37 • January 1954 • No. 4
