WHY THE REDS ARE BEATING THE BEJABBERS OUT OF US
Editorial
Why The Reds Are Beating The Bejabb ers Out of Us Many times in recent years The Progressive has argued, as it did again last month in its "Open Letter to Secretary of State Acheson," that a fatal...
...This is a bold and forward-looking attempt by a nation to rid its mind of the inevitability of conflict and seek solutions which strike at the causes of potential conflict...
...II In our wartime broadcasts we talked of freedom...
...Beech's reply, published as a copyrighted dispatch by the Daily News, strikes us as an extraordinarily candid, on-the-spot report of the facts of life in the Far East today, and we are pleased to publish it in full, as filed from Japan, with the permission of the Daily News...
...Now, in Indochina, we have confirmed their opinion of us by recognizing the Bao Dai regime...
...That could get us into an awful lot of trouble...
...We have talked about democratic processes and parliamentary government to people who can't read or write...
...This is due largely to the fact that for more than 50 years the Japanese have been the most progressive, best-educated people in the Far East...
...Our almost total emphasis on alliances and armaments has shaken the confidence of countries which should be our friends...
...The Communists loved it...
...He had traveled many thousands of miles...
...Why are we losing Asia...
...We have talked of freedom to people whose only freedom was freedom to starve...
...This is an inspired approach to the healing of a bitter and ancient enmity...
...They rode in American tanks and strafed native populations from American planes— to "restore order...
...We came and the Japanese went...
...He was tired, travel-stained— and puzzled...
...Not that I would know anything about Communism...
...But that doesn't mean they like to go on starving...
...Then he blurted out the question: "Why, when we give these people billions of dollars, do they still turn Communist...
...But we didn't know what to do with the ball once we had it, so we fumbled it...
...A grizzled old foreign correspondent a couple of nights before had expressed it in the bar of Seoul's Chosun Hotel: "For a change, I'd like to see us back a revolution instead of buck one...
...And they had a program...
...We poured billions of dollars into Chiang Kai-shek's corrupt government while the Communists were busy liquidating landlords and giving land to the peasants...
...Or do we try something else...
...But because whatever the Communists offered couldn't be worse and might conceivably be better than what I had under the Nationalists, III People have starved to death in China for centuries...
...They could have given him facts and figures and dates and neatly packaged arguments...
...But basically there is only one answer to the Congressman's question...
...And we're getting the bejabbers beaten out of us every day...
...Driven out by the Japanese, defeated and discredited, they were back by force of American arms to reclaim what they considered theirs...
...We certainly aren't going to stop it with the defeated and discredited Chiang, who is trying to set up a model shop on Formosa after losing all China...
...Bao is an expatriate playboy, rather a nice guy according to reports, whom the French picked up off the Riviera and deposited on his throne with the fond hope that he could save their colony from the Communists...
...And we continued to support him when it was obvious we couldn't win with him...
...After three years of vacillation, we "persuaded" the Dutch to give the Indonesians their independence...
...These are some of the reasons why in Asia today democracy stands for the status quo and Communism is the "wave of the future...
...But in the disillusioned eyes of the people of southeast Asia the damage was already done...
...Or with South Korea's President Syngman Rhee, a venerable but querulous old patriot who is holding elections in his country next month only because we put the heat on him...
...Democracy to most Asiatics is a mouthful of words...
...Liaquat Ali Khan's complaint that we seem more interested in war with Russia than peace for the world may not seem wholly fair to many Americans, but there is unhappy confirmation of what he seemed to be groping for in a New York Times article by James Reston, diplomatic correspondent with exceptional access to State Department thinking...
...In all of Asia only Japan seems relatively safe from Communism today...
...Many people, some of them "noted authorities," could have given him many answers...
...They have eaten better, if at the expense of their neighbors...
...Because, since the war ended we have been bucking revolutions in Asia instead of backing them...
...Or with playboy Bao, even if he is a nice guy...
...One reason we have failed in Asia is that we can't believe that people really starve to death...
...Why The Reds Are Beating The Bejabb ers Out of Us Many times in recent years The Progressive has argued, as it did again last month in its "Open Letter to Secretary of State Acheson," that a fatal flaw in American foreign policy is our failure to recognize, and work with, the revolutionary ferment of peoples everywhere, especially in the Far East...
...We are still supporting him...
...We are the most powerful nation on earth...
...We have forgotten that our own country was born of bloody rebellion —against a foreign power...
...Millions will starve there this year under the Communists...
...Or with Philippine's President Elpidio Quirino, a shifty politician who is on our side only so long as we continue to funnel more millions into the Philippines...
...We had the ball when we liberated Asia from the Japanese...
...It is also due to the fact that in the nearly five years since Japan's surrender we have completely dominated this country...
...When the war ended we didn't have a program for Asia...
...But I saw enough in China to convince me that if I were a Chinese peasant I would be a Communist...
...We were ready to write off more than a billion people, because of our abysmal ignorance of their culture, their hopes, their aspirations...
...But we are already in a lot of trouble out here...
...And some Americans will say, "See what heartless brutes the Communists are...
...AS THE plane left Korea's barren brown hills and sped swiftly over the deep blue waters of the Japan sea the Congressman sat brooding...
...BEECH'S incisive indictment of American foreign policy (see above) was published during the same week that a visiting Asiatic leader was making much the same point upon his arrival in the United States...
...We lost China because Chiang sold out the revolution he inherited from Sun Yat-sen...
...But there is always the menacing magnetism of a Communist Asia to contend with...
...Discussing the reaction of American high officials to the whole problem of peacemaking with Soviet Russia, Reston reported that "while nobody quite admits it, the Iron Curtain is slowly but surely being drawn across quite a few influential minds...
...They've been running ever since...
...We didn't care...
...to back a revolution instead of buck one...
...Perhaps when we open our minds to the possibility of peace and our doors to the negotiation of a settlement, we may find that the Soviets will still insist on an aggressive policy which must explode in war...
...If that happens, Japan will go the way of China...
...It could be that the answer is to help people rather than governments...
...Do we go on taking a beating...
...And there is the ever-present danger that in striving to regain its place as the workshop of Asia, Japan will become the sweatshop of Asia...
...But the Russians cared...
...We gave the Philippines their independence, although the results have been discouraging...
...They carried American arms...
...We've been running, too—backward, sometimes falling over ourselves...
...And after us came the colonial masters of southeast Asia—the British, French, and Dutch...
...Some fairly intelligent people—not Reds—think so...
...He had talked to many people of different races— Chinese, Japanese, Americans, Filipinos, Malayans, Indians, and Indonesians...
...We began to lose Asia the day we won the war...
...To our credit, we tried to feed them...
...They wore belts "made in U.S.A...
...The Russians picked it up and started running...
...It may be too late to stop Communism in Asia...
...In Southeast Asia some people listened and believed— and waited for the day when we would come and free them from the Japanese...
...But our great strength is our greatest weakness...
...But China's rich got richer and the poor got poorer...
...This is a heartening demonstration of the fact that there are creative and constructive substitutes for conflict when minds are open to hopeful alternatives and doors are open for discussion and negotiation...
...Recently, the Chicago Daily News, an impeccably conservative, Republican newspaper, asked its Far Eastern correspondent, Keyes Beech, to report on the state of the "cold war" in Asia...
...You can't eat freedom...
...Creative Alternatives MR...
...We are too well-fed to believe it...
...I found it hard to believe myself until I saw it happen in China...
...We are foo fat, too prosperous, too self-absorbed, too soft to face up to the harsh realities of the postwar world...
...France, whose understandable fear of Germany has been a retarding influence in the quest for a solution of Europe's problems, has recently demonstrated high courage and creative intelligence in proposing the integration of the Franco-German coal and steel production as a first and great step toward the economic unification of Europe...
...American prestige throughout the Orient couldn't have been greater...
...The peoples of the world have sensed this somber fact for some time, and they are deeply worried...
...They're letting millions of people starve rather than take food from us...
...But, at the very least, enlightened selfishness should direct us to a course which would win the confidence and the cooperation of the peoples we would want on our side—the peoples whose views the man from Pakistan and the American correspondent in the Far East were expressing...
...Developing much the same thesis emphasized by his rival, Prime Minister Nehru of India, on his visit to this country last fall, the leader of Pakistan reported a deep-seated feeling among the people of Asia that the United States is not doing all that "it should do to secure peace," especially in failing to recognize the extent to which "the living conditions of the people in the East are a decisive factor in the world situation...
...Although, as a guest of our country, he was understandably reluctant to speak too sharply of his host, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan of Pakistan blurted out his conviction that the East believed America was interested "only in the possibility of war with Russia, and not in the peace of the world...
Vol. 14 • June 1950 • No. 6
