The Revolution Asia Really Needs
BEICHMAN, ARNOLD
GUEST COLUMN By Arnold Beichman The Revolution Asia Really Needs HOW LITTLE we know about the world outside of Europe and America. And how little we are fated to know. And how urgent it is that...
...indeed, will there be an inclusive compassion able to create some miracle so that these frail lives will not be extinguished in wasteland and flood and typhoon...
...But we added numbers together and the zeroes grew beside each integer, and the addition and multiplication meant only one thing—but the minister wouldn't speak...
...Burma and Ceylon, were freed because Western rule sowed the seeds of its own disintegration...
...And how urgent it is that we begin to know about the sad and great events which take place in Asia and Africa each day...
...An intelligentsia which once sought answers and solutions about the Soviet Union or Asia and found the quest burdensome has moved its insistent political awareness to Algeria, Guinea, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, where distance and dilettantism combined make solutions and answers easier to come by...
...Somehow humble-and-prideful beggary has the only status on this continent...
...In a quarter of a century, at the present rate of reproduction, there will be three billion people in Asia on the same one-seventh of the world's land surface...
...How about the surplus of people, this omnipresent statistic, for whom there would be no jobs...
...The dry earth must groan beneath the burden of mankind which it must support in India or Pakistan or above the stones of Kowloon and Singapore...
...A real Asian revolution would and must destroy these old paunchy gods...
...Without this real revolution, human life will remain a dusty carpet over which the imperialism of science or the imperialism of Peking will march, impersonal, brutish iconoclasts, and infect the meek with the taint of uncontrolled barbarism...
...We tried again but the division and subtraction still produced the same answers...
...Who will feed them or give them shelter...
...But Asia still fights off the inevitable...
...Informed American opinion has...
...And then what will happen...
...The minister put his palm at right angles to his forehead and then over his eyes...
...But how about those for whom no jobs exist now...
...endogamous life for centuries, immured behind its walls of religious and cultural apartheid and...
...to know deeply about this afflicted portion of humanity which lives in sunken stupor, each man vaguely related to another, lost almost beyond redemption as the struggle for survival overcomes and deadens the merest hope...
...The Five Year Plan would provide...
...in a sense, escaped from the postwar frustrations into the drama of Africa emergent...
...You build and build and it is never enough, and you plant and harvest and it can never be enough, and you heal the ill and the maimed and they die but more than enough are born with each death...
...though conquerors pillaged and invested, destroyed and created, came and stayed and were expelled, nothing changed...
...Not until a 20th century political transliteration fell upon Asia—merdeka, swaraj—the word was freedom and it condemned the past without creating a future...
...Want in a mass society cannot be selective and satiety calls for technological conformity, an equa-tional uniformity...
...When Asia recognizes its false revolution, Asia will be saved for itself and for the cause of freedom...
...It will not be enough because Asia's revolution so far has been a false revolution in which the old gods still mock the essential individualism, the warm humanism that has made our mass civilization bearable and hope-bearing...
...it cries for bread but rejects the price of its achievement...
...He whispered: "It will happen that in the next decade probably 15 million people will starve...
...Asia's liberation, political style, is in reality a triumph resulting from the westernization of its intellectuals...
...The Indian Cabinet minister I sat with in a sunlit chamber in New Delhi's Parliament building answered the question...
...Japan excepted, a still feudal, over-burdened Asia...
...He told me about the Five Year Plan and how it will provide millions of new jobs...
...There would be new jobs under the Five Year Plan...
...It will not be enough to bring the big earth-movers, the huge tractors and road-builders, to create new contours and level old ones, to explode the earth with fertilizers and purify the soil with magic insecticides...
...Today the cry for bread in an industrial society is also a cry for washing machines, television sets, autos and ranch houses...
...But the scientism and technology which regenerated the West have barely touched...
...One-time British dependencies, such as India...
...Yet the destiny of our world is also being shaped in an Asia out of which came the culture and civilization we seek to redeem...
...Asia lived its stratified, cyclical, ARNOLD BEICHMAN has just returned from an extensive study-tour of social conditions in Asia and Africa...
...But the past is now the only future on a continent where lives more than half the world's population—1.5 billion people—and where 70.000 babies are born every day, 25 million a year...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 35
