Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS Of Scaremongers And Softheads By William Henry Chamberlin Totalitarian regimes advance their designs by a calculated strategy of terror. This consists of a rapid alternation...
...The softheads assume that there is little difference between the nature, purposes and psychology of countries which live under free institutions and those of the Communist Empire...
...In this same issue, Alexander Werth tries to cast the fallen Malenkov in the role of a dove of peace spurned by a provocative and aggressive West...
...Shortage of food, a result not of natural disaster but of tyrannical exploitation of the peasants, is one of the best guarantees that the Soviet Union and China will not resort to large-scale war...
...Defeatist scaremongering reaches its high point in a recent dogmatic assertion in the British New Statesman: "Western Europe faces the certainty of annihilation in the first thirty hours of any war" (italics supplied...
...Two conspicuous recent examples of softheadedness are the campaign spearheaded by the Fellowship of Reconciliation to bombard the White House with token sacks of wheat in an attempt to promote a free gift of grain to Red China, and the proposal, which apparently received serious Cabinet consideration, to make a substantial grain offer to Russia...
...Obviously, not at all...
...Werth wrings his hands over "the totally negative attitude of the Western powers toward Malenkov's conciliatory foreign policy" and declares: "Provocation followed on provocation—first, the rearmament of Western Germany, despite endless appeals and warnings from Russia and second, the 'aggression' against China at Formosa and in the Formosa Strait...
...the political anatomy of the world in which we live in the year 1955...
...This strategy of terror is mightily advanced by two groups, quite articulate in free countries, which may be described as defeatist scaremongers and well-meaning softheads...
...Another recent example of well-meaning softheadedness is the suggestion, put forward in all seriousness in a letter published in the New York Times, that all the war aviation of all nations be pooled under the authority of the United Nations...
...A team of scaremongers went to work in a big way in a recent issue of the Nation...
...The frequent emergence in print of the scaremonger and the softhead calls for redoubled efforts to explain, patiently and repetitiously...
...The former systematically exaggerate the elements of strength and underestimate the elements of weakness on the enemy side and apply the reverse process to our side...
...Starting from this profoundly false assumption, they quickly convince themselves that schemes for assuring peace which might work between nations with no thought of aggression would bind dictatorships bent on conquest and a continuous campaign of subversion in foreign lands...
...And, even if Red China were as powerful as del Vayo would have us believe, the question arises: How would our long-range position vesters of the Chinese war prisoners in giving in on the issue of Formosa...
...Alvarez del Vayo tried to make the flesh creep by depicting a Soviet-Red Chinese air force in the Far East far stronger than the American, a Red Chinese army "second largest in the world," a Soviet Union firmly resolved to give Red China all the aid called for by their mutual defense pact, etc...
...This consists of a rapid alternation of threats and soft words, of assurances that the latest territorial or political demand will be positively the last, of dire hints that world catastrophe will be the consequence of failing to give them what they want...
...Fortunately, Sir Winston Churchill, whose recent brilliant, realistic, courageous speech on nuclear weapons marked a return to his "finest hour" of 1940, is a more authentic British spokesman...
...Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin and his successors, the Chinese Communists have all shown themselves expert in this technique of winning bloodless victories through blackmail...
...He conveniently forgets the superior quality of American planes demonstrated in the Korean War, the extreme backwardness of the Chinese economy, the morale condition reflected by the refusal of three-quarters of the Chinese war prisoners in Korea to return home...
...It is reckless irresponsibility to propose to weaken this guarantee, especially as there is little possibility that food sent to a Communist regime would ever reach the people who need it most—the slaves in the concentration camps, for instance...
...Werth does not say that the rearming of West Germany, unfortunately, is still a plan, not a reality: that this plan was a very belated reaction to Soviet arming of East Germany and other European satellites: and that aggression in the Formosa Strait, if it comes, will be from the Chinese Communist side...
...As if an organization that has proved its incompetence to settle very minor disputes could conceivably undertake such a task with any prospect of success...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 12
