Where the News Ends:
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Standing Firm On West Berlin What is AT STAKE in the firm maintenance of Western garrisons in a free West Berlin is nothing short of the...
...In this connection, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield's (D.-Mont...
...Surrender in Berlin would undo the most successful and constructive achievement of postwar American foreign policy: the development of a strong and free West Germany, firmly committed to cooperation with the West...
...If a change in the existing situation is required, a more reasonable course would be to declare West Berlin an integral part of the German Federal Republic, with guaranteed access over existing routes of communication...
...If Nikita Khrushchev took seriously his own voluble prattle about Communism conquering capitalism in peaceful competition, he would welcome the opportunity to prove his thesis in Berlin, to make conditions in East Berlin so attractive that refugees would flow from West to East, not from East to West, as at present...
...It would constitute a betrayal of the Bonn Federal Republic and lend some reality to a future adventurous attempt at a GermanSoviet deal...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Standing Firm On West Berlin What is AT STAKE in the firm maintenance of Western garrisons in a free West Berlin is nothing short of the whole meaning and integrity of the defensive alliance of free peoples...
...But here again the element of Soviet consent would probably be lacking...
...This is not to say that the present situation of a truncated Berlin, existing as a small island in a totalitarian sea, is ideal...
...As for Ulbricht's so-called "German Democratic Republic," the very name consists of three lies...
...The freedom of Berlin is far too serious to be risked on vague phrases about "an international authority...
...Moreover, it is virtually certain that the Soviet Union would never consent to the inclusion of East Berlin, regarded as the capital of the "German Democratic Republic," in any scheme for a "free city...
...It was formed by German Communists who had taken refuge in the Soviet Union and returned in the wake of the victorious Red Army...
...The idea of the deeply divided United Nations, already under severe pressure from Moscow to incapacitate itself, managing or protecting a Berlin of which one part would be free and the other Communist is pure fantasy...
...And proposals to "exchange" West Berlin for a slice of territory in the Soviet Zone, or to evacuate all the West Berliners who desired and build a new "West Berlin" somewhere in the Federal Republic, are equally unrealistic...
...Under present conditions, however, given the intransigent hostility of the Soviet government to any reunion of Germany in freedom, the status quo looks better than any alternative...
...The Bonn government derives its powers from the consent of the governed, from a series of free elections, from more than a decade of the rule of law, with freedom of speech, press and assembly...
...It certainly is not...
...The awesome responsibility for war, if there must be war over Berlin, will be Khrushchev's alone...
...The Soviet puppet administration is neither German, democratic nor a republic...
...Under present arrangements, unnatural and artificial as they may seem, West Berlin, with help both from the United States and the Federal Republic, has become a prosperous community, with a rising standard of living and shrinking unemployment...
...To give up, under any form or pretext, this exposed outpost of liberty, to accept some compromise of what is already a compromise situation would destroy all faith in the West's will and power to offer effective resistance to Communist aggression...
...Nothing short of the full maintenance of its freedom will fulfill the moral and political obligations of the Western powers...
...Most objectionable in Mansfield's proposal is his apparent willingness to place the East German regime of Walter Ulbricht on a par with the Government of the German Federal Republic...
...Its oneparty elections are caricatures of democratic procedure, and its unhappy citizens are running away to the West so fast that the Soviet Zone of Germany is the only area of Europe where the population is declining...
...fuzzy proposal to turn the whole of Berlin into a "free city" to be held in trust by an international authority, with "peace teams" garrisoning its routes of access, must be considered both bad psychology and bad timing...
...This is why a firm stance in West Berlin is an absolute must for United States foreign policy...
...And if the Soviet dictator is so drunk with power, so inflated with arrogance that he will start a war over Berlin, he will certainly, even if appeased on Berlin, resort to arms elsewhere...
...it has fulfilled an invaluable humanitarian service as a way station for millions of fugitives from the tyranny of the Soviet Occupation Zone...
...The United States cannot retreat one inch from Berlin...
...The most desirable solution is a Germany united on the basis of free elections...
...West Berlin has repeatedly testified to its desire to be free...
Vol. 44 • July 1961 • No. 28
