The Age of Make-Believe
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
PERSPECTIVES The Age of Make-Believe By William Henry Chamberlin As Dickens said of the era of the French Revolution, this may be the best of times and the worst of times. But whatever...
...American foreign policy, he said, is "friendly to neutrals, neutral to enemies, hostile to friends...
...The means to win the cold war are available...
...Edgar Ansel Mowrer, another veteran correspondent, has recently put on armor to do battle with what he feels are the dragons of selfdelusion and complacency in his brilliant, bitter book, An End to Make-Believe (Duell, Sloan andPearce, 241 pp., $3.95...
...On popular illusions: "Adlai Stevenson might laud the United Nations as 'the only hope of the world for peace and security.' Actually it assured the world of neither...
...Its very universality, as well as its cautiously worded Charter, drastically limited its capacity for law enforcement, even if there had been any universally recognized law to enforce...
...it may be only the will that is lacking...
...How else can one explain the solemn rigmarole of disarmament conferences in which hundreds of meetings—there were 353 negotiating sessions during the last nuclear test-ban conference alone—have not brought the Western and Soviet points of view nearer by as much as one iota...
...policy makers seem to live...
...Mowrer calls for more courage and sacrifice, more insight and unity among the Western peoples...
...the substance remained...
...It was not a normal ideology or traditional 'religion.' Nor was it principally a new pattern of economic organization...
...Despite the record of the last two decades, when, as Mowrer puts it, "nowhere did it [freedom] regain anything into which the Soviet bear had firmly fixed his claws," the West still has vastly more strength in manpower, industrial capacity and other assets than the Soviet bloc...
...And as this would satisfy no one in the West, except perhaps a small minority of absolute pacifists, the official fanfare of hope that rings out with every new bout of "disarmamentmanship" seems strangely misplaced...
...But whatever else it is, ours is certainly a time of self-deception in international relations...
...For accuracy and brevity, his definition of Stalin's design on the eve of the outbreak of World War II could not be improved on: "He succeeded in provoking what he hoped would be an equally matched war between Nazi Germany on one hand and Britain and France on the other, in which both sides would bleed themselves white, leaving him master of Europe...
...The form had changed...
...The sole service these meetings have performed, it seems to me, is to make it clear that the only inspection system the Soviet Union will tolerate is one in which it inspects itself...
...Take this pungent paragraph on Communism: "Communism was not just a group of countries, one of them equipped with H-bombs and superior rockets...
...On old Russia in a new mask: "It was soon apparent that, far from having abolished imperial and colonial exploitation, the Red Tsars in the Kremlin were planning the greatest colonial empire ever known to man...
...Here is Mowrer on the folly of letting the Chinese Nationalist regime fall: "North Korean Communists invaded South Korea and within a few days a United States that had refused to risk a fight to save half a billion people from Communism was shedding its blood to preserve the tip of a small Asian peninsula...
...Essentially it was an international power conspiracy whose members were fanatically devoted to destroying the traditional patterns of civilization everywhere and replacing it by a totalitarian organization of society that turned men into ants...
...It embraced these but it was more...
...On Western scientists: "If Western scientists spent half as much time working together as they spent in anxiously discussing the chances of peace with their (handpicked) Soviet counterparts, they could hardly fail to get the jump on the latter...
...Ranging over the history of the last quarter century, Mowrer comes up with many incisive comments...
...Sebastian Haffner, who gave up his job as the London Observer's German correspondent because he believed the paper's policy savored of appeasement, has neatly characterized the make-believe world in which some U.S...
Vol. 45 • April 1962 • No. 7
