Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Kind Hearts And Soft Heads Unfortunately, a kind heart is sometimes accompanied by a soft head. I am often struck by the naive mentality of people...
...Bailey states that he and his companions found "no obstacle at all" to making contact with Chinese Christians, but he does not report contacts with the considerable number of Chinese Christians who are in jail...
...Sometimes Bailey is downright contradictory...
...This ruling has been criticized as an unwarranted attack on freedom of religion...
...Another subject on which there has been some loose thinking is the State Department's refusal to permit a Soviet citizen, Archbishop Boris, to reside in the United States and administer certain congregations of the Russian Orthodox Church which maintain communion with the Patriarchate in Moscow...
...Bailey represents the Communist Premier as sighing wistfully for contacts with the "many Americans" whom he "counts as friends...
...There is a long roll of martyred Russian Orthodox ecclesiastics who have been executed, sent to slavelabor camps, or have disappeared...
...The men who now head the Orthodox Church have purchased relative tolerance by a completely slavish political conformity, up to the point of parroting Communist germ-warfare and American-atrocity slanders...
...This is indeed a revealing insight into the Chinese Communist concept of negotiation: getting what they want unconditionally...
...The idea seems never to have occurred to Bailey that the murder and torture of thousands of American war prisoners, and the barbarous imprisonment of American civilians, are rather substantial obstacles to the "Let's be friends" attitude which Chou was trying to put over...
...And the United States is held responsible by Chou for the absence of these friendly contacts...
...There is no legal or moral justification for this Soviet attitude...
...He also reports an "Exhibition of American Espionage...
...shown in the major cities of China, "which had clearly the effect if not the intention of stimulating animosities against the United States Government...
...There is every reason to believe that Gerald Bailey, a British Quaker observer at the UN, is a man of high moral ideals who abhors cruelty, tyranny and oppression...
...Giving a Soviet citizen the right to reside in this country and exercise spiritual authority over American citizens is a very different proposition...
...They will negotiate its peaceful transfer to them: manifestly, therefore, a limited form of negotiation on the subject is still possible...
...He reports that be and his companions "came across very little virulent anti-American propaganda...
...The State Department was willing to abide by the principle of reciprocity (although there is no provision for it in the agreement which preceded the establishment of U.S.-Soviet diplomatic relations in 1933) and to admit Archbishop Boris or any other Soviet clergyman for the purpose of ministering to Soviet citizens...
...But that is not the case...
...But in the next sentence he remarks that official statements continue to castigate American Far Eastern policy, and the language of such castigation is nothing if not virulent...
...Hitler had a similar approach...
...Perhaps the high point of naivete is reached when Bailey explains how peace-loving the Chinese Communists are, and how ready to negotiate on the question of Formosa: "By 'the peaceful liberation of Formosa' they mean that they hope (and probably expect) to get it without war...
...Yet, his impressions of his visit to Red China last October, recently published in the Nation in an article entitled "Talk With Chou En-lai," serve as a coverup for the unpleasant sides of life under Communist tyranny...
...The Soviet Government has used the incident as an excuse for holding up the visa of an American priest who...
...In this, however, the atheistic Soviet Government naturally showed no interest...
...I am often struck by the naive mentality of people who see a threat to peace not in the facts of Communist tyranny and aggression, however carefully documented, but in exposure of these facts...
...by treaty agreement, is permitted to minister to the religious needs of Americans and other foreigners in Moscow...
...A larger number of adherents of the Orthodox faith in America have broken their Moscow ties and set up an independent church administration...
...If the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union possessed any freedom in relation to the Soviet state, it would be quite another matter...
...They dismiss such exposures as "warmongering," thus echoing the line plugged by Communist "peace" congresses...
...One may be pardoned the sneaking suspicion that this was also its "intention...
...Anyone as high in the hierarchy as Archbishop Boris is an obedient tool of the Soviet state??a fact which is curiously overlooked by those who would like to see an American welcome mat extended for him...
...According to a recent Moscow radio broadcast, the number of these latter individuals was augmented in October, the month of Baileys visit, by the arrest of the Chinese Roman Catholic Archbishop of Shanghai and his alleged accomplices in "espionage...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 2
