Editorial
Editorial Victory by Default The Berlin Conference is beginning to resemble a party of lost prospectors in the jungle whose communications with the outside world have been cut, and who are already...
...The first of these steps, of course, was the Berlin Conference itself, by which the West clearly extended formal recognition to the post-Stalin dictatorship...
...Editorial Victory by Default The Berlin Conference is beginning to resemble a party of lost prospectors in the jungle whose communications with the outside world have been cut, and who are already beginning to reconstruct reality in the image of past hopes and memories...
...Washington's reactions were, successively, disbelief when the revolt started, inaction when it reached its peak, and relief when it was over...
...The reaction of the Eisenhower Administration to this challenge during the past year consists of two speeches, a general peace program set forth on April 16 and an atomic proposal on December 8. This talk has been dwarfed by its setting: reduced U. S. commitments in the free world, and a positive U. S. aversion to any commitment (other than that of a misleading official and unofficial propaganda) to the peoples behind the Iron Curtain...
...Men who take such a theological view have every right to be despondent now...
...It is a truism that, any time we seek to deal with Bolshevik despots, we discourage the people straining under the despotism...
...helps dissect in this issue...
...The impact was much greater this time, of course...
...George Kennan and Arnold Toynbee have both speculated that the current world crisis is a moral challenge to the West, a supreme test of the sincerity of our democratic convictions and humanitarian faith...
...The test of Eisenhower-Dulles "liberationism" was the East German revolt last June...
...the price of hesitation when that man is emerging is oblivion once he has triumphed...
...Is not collaboration with a Communist order which may yet sweep the world without atomic war a more viable alternative...
...Unless we pursue a policy that clearly bars appeasement and atomic war, people behind the Curtain can only regard us as ever-ready either to sell them down the river or to bomb them to bits...
...If there was any doubt about the true significance of the food giveaway, the ensuing months showed that the Administration's only interest in "liberation" was as a fait accompli...
...If, among these men, no one dares act for peace, or if, among the governments of the West, no one dares pledge our own aid to the potential leaders of a peaceful Russia, there will be no second chance...
...Neither alternative—the non-Communist reasons—promises more than a world Communist society, which may (who knows...
...Aside from its effects in the still-free world, this policy narrows the alternatives for the non-Communist citizen behind the Iron Curtain: If thermonuclear devastation is to be the only effective medium of Western anti-Communism, why should the non-Communist Russian (or Pole or Czech or German) resist the regime...
...The second step was the "new look" defense policy, which Senator John F. Kennedy (D.-Mass...
...if these men can only exercise that power, they can save mankind...
...For the two major policy steps taken by Washington since then could not have been better calculated to discourage East European freedom-lovers...
...indeed be better once "capitalist encirclement" has been lifted and Western cultures and technologies have been absorbed...
...With mankind's greatest murderer dead at last, there are scores of men who, because of the death of the supreme arbiter, for the first time have some real power in Moscow...
...We were right in September when we described the "strong tendency in the Eisenhower Administration to write off the June uprisings in East Europe as an embarrassing incident...
...The East German revolution is stirring again, and in Russia an even greater event may be in the making, as the popular Marshal Zhukov is beginning to slip—or is being pushed—into the background...
...Those who have died and those who will die in the great European battle for liberty are certainly dying for us...
...The paralysis of American policy since Stalin's death is a primary factor in setting such high odds against both the East German workers and the Soviet generals...
...Adlai Stevenson tabbed this one right at the start: He said this program sounded a good deal as though we were telling the East Germans, "Very good, boys, now here's a carrot...
...Last March 16, after Stalin's death, we wrote: "In a terrorist dictatorship, there can be only one Cromwell, one Robespierre, one Stalin...
...if one judges by our craven hypocrisy of the past year, we are not worth saving...
...Afterward, to cover our own guilt (and to dump some farm surpluses), we instituted the food giveaway for a few weeks...
...While the Berlin conferees set forth their well-rehearsed positions, in the manner of endless past conferences, an awesome gap is growing between their talk and the rumble of political storms just outside the conference hall...
Vol. 37 • February 1954 • No. 7
