PEACE PREREQUISITE
Nelson, Stuart
Peace Prerequisite COLLISION OF EAST AND WEST, by Herrymon Maurer. Henry Regnery Co. 352 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Stuart Nelson THE thesis of this thoughtfully conceived and highly informative...
...To Japan, Korea owes much in her modern economic life and her spirit of nationalism...
...inwardly she changed little...
...Westerners, on the other hand, are described WILLIAM B. HESSELTINE is a pro-lessor of American history at the University of Wisconsin...
...Against such a cultural background, the author discusses the complex relationships between East and West with special attention to the collisions involving Japan, China, Korea, Russia, and the United States during the decade between 1936 and 1947...
...The liberty-loving, proud, politically conscious and politically fiery Koreans have been greatly influenced by Chinese culture, for Korean culture is a strong admixture of Buddhism and Confucianism with native Shamanism...
...Hu Shih's Introduction to the book gives strong reinforcement to Maurer's deep conviction that in the absence of mutual respect among men and nations there can be no peace...
...The tragedy is that this lesson will probably get small hearing amidst the din of those who even today feel that the East should bow subserviently to what the West has decided is the wise and the good...
...Fischer spent a dozen years in Russia before and during World War 11...
...Their sense of loyalty constitutes a high and weighty barrier between them and the West...
...To seem to become westernized was only to adopt such Western ways as might insure her emancipation from any form of inferiority to a West capable of Oriental Exclusion Acts and the constant assumption of superiority...
...Japan was assaulted by a thousand new ideas from the West, but these ideas were added to a structure which was Japanese...
...EOIN McKIERNAN is an assistant professor of English at State Teachers College in Geneseo, N. Y. STUART NELSON is dean of Howard University...
...Japan appropriated forms of Chinese culture but remained herelf, and welcomed the artistic methods of Chinese art but rejected its robustness and imagination...
...he has studied in India on several missions, during one of which he worked with Gandhi...
...Rightly the book dwells at some length upon the cultural heritage and character of the East, selecting for this volume China, Japan, and Korea with the promise that other books will follow to include a study of collision with Russia, India's collision with the West, and the theory of cultural collisions...
...GEORGE FISCHER is director of the Free Russia Fund, an organization recently established in New York by the Ford Foundation...
...Lao-tze as to how it should be done...
...Lao-tze, who trusted to deep inner urges, cried for inward truth rather than outward order, opposed fussiness in all things, and saw the most successful ruler as one who emptied people's hearts and filled their bellies...
...PHILLIPS L. GARMAN is on the staff of the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois...
...To this reluctance was added a language inhospitable to Western ideas and an absence of enthusiasm for a people who had "made off with not a little of their territory and a good deal of their wealth, and who, by treaty dictate, managed such lucrative enterprises as the salt gabelle and the customs service...
...Generous treatment is given to the role of Confucius and Lao-tze in shaping Chinese life — Confucius, who viewed society in static terms and made no provision for change and who taught that static society to live by ritual and rule...
...The lesson with which this penetrating and richly purposeful volume closes, and which we of the West should ponder, is that the simplest thing in the world is a give-and-take between friends, something, says Maurer, which "was one of the rarest things during more than a century of East-West contact...
...Certain sections of opinion will welcome his emphasis upon our Government's efforts to steer Chiang Kai-shek into cooperation with the Chinese Communists, although they will note his warning that it will be fruitless to "seek evidences of disloyalty amongst those Americans who believe in fact that landlordism was China's great evil, coalition its great cure, and Communist-United States cooperation its chief hope...
...he recently completed his doctorate in Soviet history at Harvard...
...Reviewed by Stuart Nelson THE thesis of this thoughtfully conceived and highly informative book is that the collision of East and West is cultural in origin and that personal and international disaster are certain to follow action not based upon a profound inner awareness of other persons, nations, and their cultures...
...as entertaining the myth of Chinese v corruption, ignorance of government, cunning, and general backwardness...
...The Japanese are a people of paradoxes capable of extremes of restraint and extremes of excesses...
...The writer is acid in his view of Yalta and is pro-MacArthur...
...As a student and U. S. Air Force officer, Mr...
...Westerners remained convinced that their role in Asia was to impose . as far as possible the standards that prevailed within their own culture...
...that in the absence of such an awareness there are no political, economic, or military solutions to the current state of misery and violence in the world...
...In the presence of Western culture China was reluctantly "chewing endlessly, tasting much, swallowing little, and suffering vast confusion...
...Among his many books is "The Rise and Fall of Third Parties...
...a people docile in appearance but not docile in nature...
...The individualism in Chinese culture and the movement of cultural influences from the bottom to the top are contrasted with the strong group consciousness of the Japanese and the imposition in Japanese society of culture from the top...
...Confucius convinced China as to what should be done...
Vol. 15 • October 1951 • No. 10
