Yalta Papers Then and Now

...For its birth had been linked with a system of peace treaties which on major points conflicted with the principles it was proclaiming, and important countries had remained outside...

...At the time of the Yalta Conference, the great concern among "thinking people" was to avert a new Versailles tragedy...

...After discussing at some length the European and UN provisions of the Yalta agreement, the editorial concluded: "Despite all the fine promises, there is no consistent effort to root dictatorship out of the world...

...The growth of the sovereign nation-state and the tendency to set up one's own national community as an absolute above all others and to deify its power organ, the state, must be seen as an independent factor in the crisis of our civilization...

...In the weeks that followed (as in the years preceding), New Leader writers like Norman Angell, William Henry Chamberlin, David J. Dallin, Leon Dennen, Christopher Emmett, Sidney Hook and Jonathan 'Stout continued ti expose the Soviet enslavement of Eastern Europe...

...All of his unilateral actions were okayed and made official...

...The Yalta pattern had already been set at Teheran, though it was being covered up in the majority of the U.S...

...It remains up to the democratic forces of the world to make sure that this war shall not have been fought in vain...

...The editors pretend not to wish to criticize our allies...

...In this area, the chief future task of democratic socialists, according to Mr...

...The second fundamental problem raised by the social crisis of our time is that of the sovereign nation-states and their conflicts...

...Wailing over Yalta today, while encouraging complacency toward our present dangers, is to court similar tragedy...

...policy toward China, Kuomintang-Communist relations since 1923, the United Front period in China, the "agrarian reformer" myth and—most important—Manchuria, described as "the Poland of the Far East...

...The concluding remarks on Manchuria are also pertinent: "Russia has not yet openly demanded Manchuria, and may never do so...

...The two representatives of democracy got promises...

...All she needs is to back up the Chinese Communist armies and install a 'Free Manchuria' government which would give her virtual control...

...In practice, however, the Socialist parties of the oppressed nations were compelled to identify themselves with the democratic demand for national self-determination as part of their general struggle for democracy, while the Socialists of the older nation-states found that every practical success on the road to social security depended on the establishment of publicly-controlled social institutions which linked them more and more closely with the existing nation-state...

...Examination of the files of The New Leader for.the period 1943-1945 indicates that the present professions of "shock," "amazement" and "incredulity" come at least ten years too late...

...Moreover, the League of Nations lacked from the outset the universal authority essential to the fulfilment of its task...

...Now the likes of Everett McKinley Dirksen are indignant over 1945, while blind to the enormous difficulties faced in 1955 by free men in Indonesia (see Sal Tas's article, page 11), Indo-China (see Sol Sanders's article last week) and a dozen other critical cold-war fronts...

...In fact, Soviet deeds were clear enough before Yalta...

...Second of Two Articles) SOCIALISM WITHOUT UTOPIA By Richard Lowenthal Here we present the conclusion of Richard Lowenthal's essay at a mid-century approach to democratic socialism, which began in last week's New Leader...

...This glaring contradiction found visible expression forty years ago when the Socialist International collapsed at the outbreak of the First World War...

...It is Russia that is the sacred cow...

...Lowenthal, is to promote greater worker participation in industrial management...

...Let us not be so anxious to win a comparatively cheap victory in the Far East that we sacrifice both our true friends and our principles upon the altar of expediency...

...This supplement discussed the Chinese war effort, historic U.S...

...Since the collapse of the medieval order, there has been no recognized supra-national principle to restrain power conflicts between states...

...It is true that, even in the victorious countries, the Socialist parties tried to combine profession of the idea of the League with criticism of the peace treaties...

...Perhaps the most prescient, though indirect, comment on the Yalta decisions came on May 26, 1945, when The New Leader distributed a 6,000-word supplement on China, entitled "Comintern versus Kuomintang...

...But they criticize Britain and America glibly enough...

...Some of the GOP isolationists now whooping it up about Yalta were blind to the event ten years ago, interested only in "bringing the boys home," cutting taxes and baiting Britain...

...But, at that stage, Western society showed no strong trends to transcend national sovereignty by supranational association...

...Its Asian counterpart was an article in the January 27, 1945 New Leader by Lin Yutang, entitled, "The Totalitarian Dictatorship in China Is in Yenan, Not Chungking...

...He declared that the first historic problem of socialism—that of fixing society's responsibility for the economic welfare of every citizen —had been largely met, in the sense that the principle of the welfare state was now universally recognized in the democracies...

...To the solution of this problem the Socialist movement has not made any decisive contribution...

...Under the impact of this shock, democratic Socialists in the interwar years looked to an obligatory international rule of law for a solution and became the main supporters of the League of Nations...

...Nor could such an outcome give us lasting peace in the Far East...

...If, in our anxiety to save American lives by getting Russia into the war, we sacrifice China, we shall also sacrifice all our war aims, since there could then be no lasting peace in the Far East...

...In the first part, Mr...

...Lowenthal defined the need for a socialist movement without Utopian pretensions...

...press...

...Yet, it is far more than a reflection of the conflicts of capitalist competition...

...Modern nationalism is certainly the product of the bourgeois-revolutionary age, and capitalist interests —like other power interests—have sought to exploit it for their own ends...

...The failure of the first attempt to establish an international order thus came to serve as one of the main arguments for Hitler's nihilistic and nationalist revolt...

...The theme of this supplement was as follows: "It would be a tragic paradox if all of America's costly victory over Japan should result in China's 450 million people being cut off from the West both economically and politically...

...As William E. Bohn wrote on January 6, 1945: "During the year 1944, American newspapers have failed the 'people at the most important point and at the time of their greatest need...

...he is now the West German correspondent of the London Observer...

...When the Yalta conference ended, a front-page editorial (February 17, 1945) declared: "Joseph Stalin got the better of the bargain...

...In the life-and-death struggle against this revolt which ensued, the Socialists once again joined hands with all defenders of the humanist tradition...

...A front-page editorial in The New Leader just two weeks before the conference was headed: "Stop the Murder of Polish Patriots...

...If China unites with Russia through a Communist revolution, or by the Communists uniting with the Kuomintang Government in order to give it the kiss of death . . . there will be no Open Door in China...

...These documents add little of substance to the postwar revelations of Churchill, Hopkins, Stettinius, Byrnes, Leahy, Grew, Forrestal and others, as well as the exhaustive testimony on Yalta in the Senate MacArthur hearings of 1951...

...We cull these old comments to indicate that the time to get excited about developing tragedies is while they are developing...

...But she may be aiming at more than this: control of the whole of China through a 'friendly' government...

...in facing the past, we ducked the present and signed away the future...

...He was confirmed in his control of eight or ten nations stretching from the Baltic to the Adriatic...

...But they were unable to prevent large sections of the population in the defeated countries from regarding the idea of the League as a mere ideological facade to hide the victors' interests, and the League's propaganda as "hypocrisy...

...Moreover, since the birth of the ideas of democracy and the nation-state in the French Revolution, these conflicts have been mixed up with the passionate striving for freedom on the part of oppressed peoples and minorities —the striving for the free development of their own culture, for self-government and the use of their own language...

...But the common war...

...Lowenthal was active in the German Socialist movement before Hitler...

...Its original internationalism 9imply ignored the problem in one way or another—either in the naive liberal belief that, with the growing interdependence of the world economy, national conflicts would automatically disappear, or with the doctrinaire assertion that quarrels between capitalists of different nations were no concern of the workers and would in any case be brought to an end with the abolition of capitalism...

...Stalin got power...

...documents on the Yalta conference (February 4-11, 1945) has stirred political controversy at home and abroad...

...The old themes of save-money, save-the-boys and suspect-England are still current, though these themes contributed almost as much as liberal naivete and Communist propaganda to the disaster Yalta symbolizes...