The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn A World's Lessons In Government WHEREVER I GO I hear the same complaint constantly dinned into my ears: This is the world's most terrible and dangerous age. The...
...And now 20 new nations have been admitted to the United Nations and some of the natives are so wild and ill-mannered that they don't yet quite know how to play according to the rules...
...Are you sorry it's being learned...
...One part of this complaint is justified...
...But now those terrible atomic weapons have taken the place of the comparatively comfortable and innocent instruments of death with which our fathers were willing to kill one another and practically no one is contented any more...
...Especially distasteful is the unmannerly way in which the Africans are receiving the efforts of the United Nations to introduce modern ways of government...
...South of the Sahara there were regular colonies managed by British, French and Belgians...
...So when things broke, they broke like Kipling's "thunder out of China...
...All this is very unpleasant...
...How long will it take the Congolese—or the Chinese—or even the Russians...
...Now he sits there on top with his Army and the people have no way of getting rid of him...
...There was, of course, hardly any education except for the upper classes and nobody taught anybody anything about government...
...The last third of the 19th century, everyone seems to think, was a lovely time of peace and prosperity with virtually no war and progress in every useful activity...
...First the Russians, then the Chinese, sick to death of their old ways of living, wanted new governments, a better life, a clean break with the old regimes, and they were rude enough not to ask our advice about how to shed the old and build the new...
...Things went quietly for a long time, until these Africans got the notion that it would be fine to run their own countries...
...And then comes Cuba...
...It may have looked fine from London, Paris or New York, but to those we called the "natives" it was far from satisfactory...
...some Africans were even accorded the high privilege of working in European factories, or were taught how to farm in a civilized way...
...Someone should mention this fact to Khrushchev, for it is an interesting item in the history of imperialism...
...The present dictator, Fidel Castro, promised the trusting Cuban people every good thing they have been yearning for all these years and they were fooled into accepting him...
...Everyone took for granted that those intelligent, civilized Europeans knew better how to run a country than did those black Africans...
...But once these Cubans were on their own, what happened...
...The fact that the United States acted in favor of freedom in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, and that Great Britain set a magnificent example in India, merely made old-fashioned colonialism look worse in other places...
...Then we licked the Spaniards, practically by ourselves, set the Cubans free and honorably kept our pledge...
...And so, rather emotionally, these chaps started to murder the French...
...Samuel Adams or Patrick Henry would have got the idea...
...Then came the rebellion...
...For centuries it was a colony of Spain and many of us remember the Spanish-American War stories about how Spanish rulers starved the people, murdered them, threw them into jail...
...And now they are making a mess of things...
...a few schools started to teach them foreign languages and some arts and crafts...
...You couldn't expect great populations to go on forever enduring the world's uneven distribution of the good things of life...
...and every tyrant promised them a fine, democratic regime...
...The missionaries offered them high-class religions...
...What I'm getting at is that all this trouble which fills the headlines is part of one of the more elementary lessons in government...
...But these troublemakers were—and are—after independence...
...They were taken over by one dictator after another...
...So there have been uprisings and down-puttings and blood has been shed...
...North of the Sahara a few million Frenchmen ruled millions of Africans in ways that seemed satisfactory to the folks in Paris...
...The peoples of the world are restless...
...their new societies are worse than the old were...
...Then look at Africa...
...They could never be expected to turn white, but in the course of time they might learn to live respectably with the pale-faces...
...The United States, for no very good reasons, got into it, but before we took the plunge our Congress passed a resolution in which we promised not to touch a dollar's worth of Cuban land or property...
...they never had an honest election...
...You know about our Declaration...
...Add to these pictures the fact that in the 19th century Russia was under the Tsar and India was living peacefully under the British...
...But it has taken us some three centuries to learn the methods of parliamentary government...
...Except for a minority of Europeans and Americans, the populations of the world were suppressed...
...The millions of Asians and Africans who remained peacefully in their places for centuries are now all uncomfortably on the move...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 46
