Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Aspects of the Soviet Challenge There is fairly wide agreement that the policies of the Soviet rulers constitute a more formidable challenge than...
...I would be inclined to agree with the consensus that the odds are against any Soviet act of naked massive aggression, calculated to produce World War III...
...There is an abundance of evidence to confirm John Gun-ther's impression that the great majority of the Soviet people are still "sordidly poor...
...Communism has been stopped cold in Western Europe...
...Statistics about coal, oil, copper, iron and what-not have very little to do with the everyday living standard of the people...
...But a few things should be noted, if this picture is to be kept in perspective...
...But about the nature of this challenge and how it can be most effectively met there is considerable disagreement...
...Knowledge of what Communist rule has meant in East Germany has practically killed sympathy with Communism in West Germany...
...So, according to his computations, Soviet gross national product was about 33 per cent of American in 1950, about 40 per cent in 1956 and may be 50 per cent by 1962...
...What we need most of all is clear consciousness that, in all probability, we are committed to a marathon, not a sprint...
...We also need constancy of purpose and sufficient intelligence to discern and avoid the traps which, we may be sure, the Soviet rulers will continue to set for us...
...For the United States to direct, as the Soviet Union habitually does, one line of propaganda to one part of the world and a diametrically different line to another would be to court ignominious failure...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Aspects of the Soviet Challenge There is fairly wide agreement that the policies of the Soviet rulers constitute a more formidable challenge than the Lnited States has ever faced in time of peace...
...These are our free press, our critical public opinion, the existence of an opposition party which now controls both houses of Congress, and the fact that we have allies who must be convinced and persuaded, who cannot be coerced...
...Victory in non-military competition will not come automatically...
...One need only recall what the United States west of the Mississippi was in 1865 and what it had become in 1905—a period comparable with the life span of the Soviet regime...
...There is the obvious military threat of a dictatorship whose rulers have repeatedlv vowed that Communism will ultimately rule the world, which disposes of a large reservoir of trained military manpower and the most modern weapons of destruction...
...Secretary of State Dulles, without claiming that our own propaganda had always been as effective as it might have been, accurately spotted four reasons why we can never hope to compete with the Soviet Union in free-wheeling mendacity...
...Allen W. Dulles, who runs our intelligence operations, pointed out in a recent speech that the Soviet economy has been growing at a rate about twice as fast as the American...
...The present picture of military stalemate could change ominously if we fell behind in ability to produce and deliver the most up-to-date weapons, if our alliances in Europe and Asia were allowed to crumble, if we accepted some Soviet Trojan Horse of uninspected, uncontrolled disarmament promises...
...Immediately adjacent to Red China, the overwhelmingly Chinese population of Hong Kong, unlike Cypriots, Maltese, Guianese and other restless communities under the British flag, never utters a peep against "British imperialism...
...Inconsistencies of this kind would be quickly exposed...
...the Hong Kong Chinese know from hundreds of thousands of refugees in their midst what Communism has meant in China...
...The prospects for freedom under the impact of the Soviet challenge are not so dark as some Cassandras would have us believe...
...Yet the Soviet record in propaganda has not been one of unmitigated success...
...Russia was always recognized by serious students as a land rich in natural resources...
...Phenomenal changes, involving spectacular increases of output, are always possible in big undeveloped areas, rich in industrial, mining and farming possibilities...
...Our development was achieved without setting up concentration camps or starving millions of peasants or uprooting other millions and forcibly resettling them elsewhere...
...But I would attach an important condition: that we should not for a minute relax our military and political vigilance...
...It is safe to assume that most of the industrial, hydro-electric and mining projects of which the Soviet Government is so proud would have been put in operation under any government that might have succeeded the Tsars...
...And they are likely to remain in this condition so long as their economy is not determined by consideration for consumer needs...
...only the surface had been scratched at the time of the Revolution...
...The Soviet rulers are often credited with superhuman success in propaganda...
...This undoubtedly is a Soviet propaganda asset and, with the passing of time, this growth of output, especially in oil and minerals, may give Soviet diplomacy new trumps in dealing with foreign countries...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 21
