Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS Not-So-Innocent From Red China By William Henry Chamberlin Crimes are sometimes committed in the name of liberalism, as well as in the name of liberty. An organization known...
...The high Communist official Teng Tzu-hui, reporting on the situation in the Central-South Region on November 21, 1951, said that from the winter of 1949-50 to November 1951 more than 1,150,000 "native bandits" were inactivated of whom 28 per cent, or 322,000, were slain...
...Suddenly, I realized where my sense of a twice-told tale had come from...
...recognition and a UN seat for the Red Chinese dictatorship was greeted with a storm of approving cackles...
...But with that time almost certainly far away, the suggestion that the Soviet Union be admitted to NATO is confusing...
...Russia was being put to shame publicly, before everyone...
...Hinton was the reincarnation, 35 years later, of Albert Rhys Williams giving New York audiences the same fairy-tale version of Communism taking power in Russia, publishing his Seventy-Nine Questions about the Bolsheviks and the Soviets, all slanted to produce soothing conclusions: "Q...
...their enthusiasm was excusable...
...Red China, in Mr...
...Indeed, the atmosphere at the meeting recalled a vivid scene in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, a brief summary of which I quote: "The maniac who kept waving his fist behind the scenes suddenly ran onto the platform...
...A frantic yell rose from the whole hall...
...The occasion of the Liberal Citizens' gathering was a speech by a Mr...
...Fu Tso-yi...
...So the Bolsheviks do not want to kill the bourgeoisie...
...Hinton down as a good-hearted innocent who couldn't distinguish a concentration camp from a workers' health resort and who would somehow never be around when a mass execution was in progress...
...Up to the question period, one might have set Mr...
...stand...
...An organization known as the Liberal Citizens of Massachusetts is unmistakably "liberal" in its attitude toward pro-Communist causes, rather less liberal in its judgments of American policy...
...One noticed at a recent meeting sponsored by this organization that any gibe at the bipartisan American policy of opposing U.S...
...Throughout his talk, I was conscious of a strange "this is where I came in" feeling...
...But in dodging questions on slave labor and wholesale executions and on why 15,000 out of some 20,000 Chinese prisoners in Korea preferred Formosa to Red China, he displayed a good deal of the propagandistic cunning that often accompanies emotional zeal...
...In making such a suggestion in Germany, Churchill, to put it mildly, was not helping Chancellor Adenauer...
...An alliance of everybody against nobody, which is what NATO would be following admission of the Soviets, makes no sense whatever...
...On the basis of his speech, one could not have guessed that he had been living in China during a reign of terror, the dimensions of which may be gathered from the following random Communist statements: The Shanghai People's Daily of July 12, 1951 reported that one of the largest mass executions two days before eliminated 277 "counter-revolutionaries...
...William Hinton, who had spent six years (1947-1953) in Communist China working in a tractor station, first under UNRRA, then under the Communist Government...
...Statesmen, like baseball players, make errors as well as hits...
...This proposal was voiced by Molotov at the Berlin Conference early in 1954...
...Hinton's picture, was all sweetness and light, with enthusiastic intellectuals and cooperating peasants all pitching in to build the good society...
...It was far more logical coming from Molotov, who wanted to disrupt the Atlantic alliance, than from Churchill, who in the same speech called NATO the free world's best hope...
...Winston Churchill made a double error when, in a speech at Aachen, he suggested that the Soviet Union might qualify for membership in NATO...
...There never seemed to be any consideration for the possibility that the murder and torture of many American prisoners, the horrible brainwashing performed on others, the continued presence of Red Chinese forces in Korea, and the aggressive anti-Americanism of the Mao Tse-tung regime afforded solid justification for the U.S...
...No, they only want to put them to work...
...If the happy time should come when there is no need for combined defense against Communist aggression, NATO could conceivably be dissolved...
...almost half the audience was applauding...
...Who could fail to roar with delight...
...there was a deafening roar of applause...
...reporting for the Ministry of Water Conservation in October 1952, stated that in the past two years 10,370,000 conscripted workers had participated in water-conservation work throughout China under the supervision of 320,000 armed police...
...Never in the thousand years of its senseless existence had Russia sunk to such ignominy...
Vol. 39 • June 1956 • No. 23
