The Home Front:
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Some Plain Talk About The Soviets THE OTHER NIGHT on television we witnessed another act in the long history of American dealings with the heads of Soviet power:...
...Russian experts are sent here to take charge of this or that task...
...Lenin, their first leader, had a rare gift for mob leadership and dramatic action...
...I don't know who our next President will be—Nixon, Kennedy, Stevenson or another—but whoever he is, he will know a lot more and be a lot tougher than the cheek-turner we now have...
...But in this particular set of criminals the chances of improvement are slight and the optimistic reformer had better watch his step...
...In Paris, the stumpy, rude and crude Khrushchev had wrecked the summit conference and for good measure had insulted the President of the United States with the toughest, roughest words he could find in the dictionary...
...Opponents were murdered, thrown into jail or sent to forced-labor camps...
...Finally, over radio and television, he revealed his forgiving heart to all mankind...
...Out of all this pacifist reaction to Russian barbarism it is possible to draw only one conclusion: The President of the United States and all of the alert, expert men who surround him do not know what Communism is, or how to deal with it...
...A constitutional convention had been elected by the only fair, general vote ever held in Russia...
...Unromantic newspapers have carried stories of what happened in China, Korea, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and so on and on...
...These men are different from Hitler chiefly in having better theories to hide behind...
...Petersburg, now Leningrad, gave him the brute force he needed...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Some Plain Talk About The Soviets THE OTHER NIGHT on television we witnessed another act in the long history of American dealings with the heads of Soviet power: We saw our innocent, blue-eyed President turning the other cheek...
...The disorganized masses of soldiers and sailors in the streets of St...
...During the 1930s came the famous purges...
...These were crowded into courtrooms, tried and condemned in rapid order, and executed...
...All the British and French imperialism seems simple and honest compared with the brutal crushing of peoples by these Russians who pretend to be operating a people's government...
...Masses of them were driven into freight cars and shipped off to Siberia and what became of them is only vaguely known...
...We must," he says, "continue businesslike dealings with the Soviet leaders on outstanding issues and improve the contacts between our own and the Soviet peoples, making clear that the path of reason and common sense is still open if the Soviets will but use it...
...It is true that if you treat a criminal as though he weren't a criminal, he might reform...
...More than once in Paris Nikita Khrushchev hinted that he is postponing basic negotiations with America and the West until he has another—presumably softer—chief executive to deal with...
...The Soviet Government will never honestly accept and work under any forward-looking and constructive agreement...
...The words he uses betray his point of view...
...If this is really his idea, he couldn't be more wrong...
...After a session of only a few hours it was dispersed by a squad of sailors sent on this errand by the sainted leader...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt believed their promises and they deceived him...
...Then gentle Ike sailed off to receive the shouted approval of the Portuguese and was welcomed home as though with a hero's acclaim...
...The things that have happened in Russia are completely unbelievable...
...In case of need the mysteriously appointed leaders do not hesitate to murder...
...The trouble is that people, including the President, have poor memories, or never did know much about how the Communists came to power and what they have done between 1918 and 1960...
...The brutal proceedings of the Bolsheviks in the outside world should be widely known, but it seems hard for people—even Presidents and Secretaries of State—to recall such things...
...That will take a long time and a lot of straight talk by men who know what they are talking about...
...The Communist parties all over the world are tied to the central machine...
...For more than 40 years the men in the Kremlin have carried on with rare consistency...
...When the peasants objected to being turned off the land which had been promised to them, millions of them were starved in a famine deliberately engineered by the Soviet Government...
...The thing to do is to break through to the Russian people...
...The point is that now, as from the beginning, we are dealing with liars, thieves and murderers...
...Among the old Bolsheviks were some good men of whom the leaders were suspicious...
...Then the dictatorship which has lasted down to the present day was set up by decree...
...The shocking thing is that the President treats Communists just as if they were like other folks...
...But ought we to go on forever in this way...
...Harry Truman made agreements with them and he, too, was left holding the bag...
...Thousands escaped over the border and some of these—with little success—have been trying ever since to tell the American people what this is all about...
...American party members, for example, are often called to Moscow for training...
Vol. 43 • June 1960 • No. 23
