BILLIONS ARE NO BARRICADE

...Once their foot is in the door, the lyrical promises turn to bitter repudiation...

...Neither The President nor any member of Congress spoke up to warn that an avowed atomic arms race could only explode—as has every arms race in history—in war...

...The Cowles report adds up to powerful support of a warning The Progressive has been sounding for more than a year—that naked reliance on rearmament has actually shrunken our stature in the world, most significantly among those who are like-minded in their rejection of Communism but who find our course too negative, too lacking in hopeful, creative alternatives, too tightly wedded to the notion that negotiation is not only hopeless but a sign of weakness...

...Two—Our child-like analysis of the world struggle as a contest between "good guys" and "bad guys" has distorted for us the significance of the great mass movements of the world, and here, again, we are playing squarely into Soviet hands...

...We retaliate by showing films showing 40,000,000 people overseas how many tanks, planes, and guns we are producing...

...Consider that: e Two-thirds of the world's population have an income of less than $100 a year...

...There was talk only of more dollars for more weapons by doomed men whose sole strategy in this revolutionary epoch in history is to try to barricade themselves behind their billions...

...And a brain...

...Although we should know better by now, we have vaguely assumed that something like this has been happening in Asia in our time...

...There was none of this...

...What we do expect them to do but make atomic bombs...

...A Progressive editorial quoted Kent Cooper, executive director of the Associated Press, as saying: "Europe is afraid to death of our defense program—afraid that it might turn into an aggressive policy...

...Translated into the realities of everyday life, these figures chronicle the hunger and the hopelessness which are erupting in rumblings of revolution—or the real thing, revolution itself—in almost every area on earth south and east of the Mediterranean...

...In other words we are exporting everything except ideas, which require nothing more elaborate than a pencil and paper...

...The troubled waters are there to begin with...

...They denounce the feudal land system which makes millionaires of a few and subjects millions of people to hopeless insecurity...

...But the cunning strategy of the Communists involves much more than that...

...It was a measure of what Thomas L. Stokes, the distinguished Washington correspondent, called our "smug and holier-than-thou" attitude that the White House statement decried Soviet manufacture of atomic weapons as evidence that the Kremlin lied when it claimed its work in atomic research was peace-minded...

...We are by no means guiltless, and to recognize that would be the beginning of wisdom...

...But nearly three years after we proclaimed our determination to lend a helping hand to those who need it so urgently, we are still stingily passing out dimes in the manner of old John D. Rockefeller...

...I want to discuss alternatives to present policy in a concluding installment next month...

...Again, last month, Howard K. Smith, European director of the Columbia Broadcasting System, reported to readers of The Progressive from London that: "All our friends over here support enthusiastically the stated policy of winning peace by bargaining with the Russians through strength, but more and more, lately, we seem to have forgotten the end—of bargaining—in the headlong pursuit of the means— rearming...

...Fired with a vision of a more abundant life, the people of Asia are tearing up the maps of their continent faster than Rand McNally can print new ones...

...The same editorial quoted Ernest T. Weir, the steelmaster, along much the same lines: "In Europe it is felt that if war comes it is much more likely to result from some action of the United States rather than Russia . . . Europeans believe that Russia is much more disposed than we suspect to arrive at some basis for world peace...

...Citing the testimony of Europeans and Asians who loathe Communism and want to be our friends, Cowles reported that they are fearful "that through ineptness the United States is going to blunder into war with Russia or that we will become so provoked at Russia's exasperating conduct that we will ourselves precipitate war...

...We act as we do because we are victims of a sort of political astigmatism, complicated by our insistence on looking at the 20th Century world through 19th Century spectacles...

...Communism, feeding as always on chaos and hunger and frustration, has fomented strife and rebellion wherever these could possibly lead to the overthrow of established authority and the coming to power of Russia's own carefully-trained Fifth Columns...

...But a simple fact of recent history is that the Soviets have made giant strides in Asia without the firing of a single shot by a Russian, but rather by making the most of local and national discontent to build native Communist armies...

...For our part we have continued to prop up reactionary regimes which are the symbol of everything the Asians hate, and we have given promises of economic help, on most of which we have failed to deliver...

...The shrewd and experienced fishermen in the Kremlin make no effort to lure the hungry of Asia with such dreary and unappetizing baits as those fashioned by Karl Marx and Lenin...

...Unless we act—and act soon and decisively—to repair the damage, we may find one day that our barricade of billions is as treacherous a shield as was the Maginot Line for the French...

...But sometimes we wonder why you don't come forth with something like Wilson's Fourteen Points or the Atlantic Charter, something men can have faith in...

...We know very well that without your tremendous Marshall Plan there would have been nothing here but anarchy...

...The controlling factor is the rapidly growing conviction among our friends that we have placed all our faith in our firepower, and that we have acquired in the process a dangerously nervous trigger-finger...

...And a conviction...

...Fishermen have a habit of swallowing what their bait brings them and the Russians are no exception...

...Quite the contrary, they spring from the deeply felt needs of the people—from their hunger for a better life and their inflexible determination to achieve national independence by breaking free from their degrading role as coolies for the West...

...We don't do this out of mean or malicious impulses...

...It is difficult for Americans who have not recently talked with political and intellectual leaders in Europe and Asia to realize how widespread this view is...

...They expose corruption in government, the lack of opportunity, and the need for schools and hospitals...

...Each month the voices of protest in Washington grow fewer and feebler in the face of the smear tactics of the dominant school of thought that negotiation seeking an honorable settlement with the Soviets is un-American appeasement...

...Both great power systems would like to shape the revolution in the image of their own society...

...Cowles, returning from a survey of world conditions, expressed the gravest alarm over the worldwide impression that the United States has concentrated exclusively on military power in foreign affairs...

...Fish that are hungry have a habit of rising to tempting bait, and the hungry people of Asia are no exception...

...For all our generosity and goodwill, we have talked bravely and acted weakly...

...The revolution sweeping through the great under-developed areas of the world is a momentous event in its own right...

...This is reassuring to us and possibly to the heads of foreign states and foreign armies...

...There was no one on this side of the Atlantic to plead for a new high-level conference with the Russians, although such a simple, sensible course was urged by Winston Churchill, whose anti-Communism is at least as gilt-edged as anyone's in Congress, and whose experience in face-to-face dealing with the Soviets is matched by no one in the West...

...And they didn't cost one cent...

...The most persuasive evidence of our fatal failure to develop positions of moral, political, and psychological strength—along with military preparedness—is to be found in the growing alarm among our friends everywhere in the world that we have turned our backs on any kind of honorable settlement with Russia in favor of military dominance...

...Sometimes we have seemed to tiptoe to the threshhold of affirmative action as when we proclaimed the Marshall Plan and Point Four...

...The impression has been planted among us that if only the Soviets would behave, or if they won't behave, if only they were toppled from power, peace would envelop the earth...

...The failure of the United States to make effective propaganda use of its desire for peace has resulted in much of the world suspecting that America has deserted her traditional role as a non-aggressive, peace-loving nation...

...V As a nation we have sometimes seemed to sense the nature of the struggle, but then we have recoiled from acting boldly and affirmatively...

...e Literally tens of millions of human beings live beyond the reach of a doctor or a school or a library or a playground...

...Everything But Ideas When I was in Rome, a man in the Italian Foreign Ministry told my traveling companion, Les Midgley, foreign editor of Look, something I've never forgotten: "We Italians deeply appreciate everything America has done for us since the war...

...The agents of the Kremlin refrain from spinning complicated theories of dialectical materialism or Marx's theory of labor value to the untutored ears of a hungry people...

...But hardly to the people who have clutched to their breasts the word that Russia has made its own—peace...

...Stokes wondered...

...e Nearly two out of every three human beings in these areas have a life expectancy of 30 years compared to 65 in the United States...

...The reforms they preach are democratic reforms—reforms which strike deep at the heart of the problems of Asia...

...Without exception the Senators and Representatives responded to the President's news by clamoring for more billions to guarantee American victory in the "atomic race...

...Together these ingredients compose a pattern of common goals everywhere...

...This is the dominant mood of Asia...

...It- is against these intolerable conditions that they are in revolt today...

...II Churchill, who more than any politician alive today is the worldwide personification of anti-Communism, may demand in England renewal of negotiation with the Russians, but to counsel such a course in the United States has become an open invitation to public indictment as a disloyal appeaser...

...We proposed a bold new program known as Point Four, which sent a wave of hope surging through the underprivileged areas of the world...

...These certainly are worthy goals...

...John Crosby in the New York Herald-Tribune...

...They are determined that nothing can stop them on their long march from serfdom to freedom, and nothing has stopped them yet—as the British and the Dutch and the French can testify from first-hand experience...

...But our steps faltered and our vision became clouded with fear...

...To prove their anti-Communism in the face of a cunningly developed doubt, men in public life have allowed themselves to be stampeded into acceptance of the foreign policies of their accusers, torpedoing principles they once embraced, adopting policies they once denounced, and generally lowering their sights to the storm cellar level of their attackers...

...No, what they throw out is a much more inviting menu, and it is not until it is too late, after the victims have taken the bait, that the hooks in their mouths expose the fraud of the lure...

...For centuries they were denied the opportunity to share in the wealth they were creating...

...no talk at all of creative, hopeful, affirmative alternatives to an avowed atomic arms race...

...The measure of the success of characters like Sens...

...For centuries their resources were ravaged to feed the factories of the industrial economy of the Occident...

...Ill The fatal weakness of this kind of American foreign policy shows up on two major fronts: One—Our almost total absorption in winning the arms race has robbed us of our old awareness of the moral, political, and psychological aspects of the struggle against Communism, and here we are playing squarely into Soviet hands...

...From reform they have a habit of returning to repression...

...Joseph McCarthy and Pat McCarran is to be found in the pathetic eagerness of otherwise thoughtful and courageous men to prove that they are more anti-Communist than the professional anti-Communists, many of whom were once taking their orders from the Kremlin...

...In this struggle for the minds and loyalties of the millions of Asia, the Soviets are off to a spectacular head start...

...These goals are national independence, political freedom, economic opportunity, social security, racial equality, and greater health and educational opportunities for their children...

...Through our default we have let the Russians monopolize the subject of peace and embrace peace for propaganda purposes as if it were their exclusive property...

...What the Russians do is to train local fishermen and provide them with bait, and some pretty attractive bait, with which to fish in these troubled waters...

...Both major weaknesses of American foreign policy with which I have dealt flow from the same fatal misconception—that the thing that counts most is armed might...

...But to make rearmament an end in itself, to accompany rearmament with a bull-headed intransigence of our own, and to close our eyes to the importance of almost every other factor in world politics would seem to be suicidal short-sightedness, not to mention moral bankruptcy...

...American Foreign Policy Billions Are No Barricade By Morris H. Rubin IT MAY have seemed to many Americans like just another headline, for there have been so many in recent months shouting the news of billions, and more billions, and still more billions of dollars for rearmament...

...Still further confirmation of this basic failure of American policy came more recently from John Cowles, the conservative president of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune and of Look Magazine...

...This is partly the result of their shrewd tactics and partly the result of our own shortcomings...

...This revolutionary ferment is gaining power and momentum as the people of Asia ride the hope of a better life...

...I refer to the fact that the revolutions in Asia are nor Russian or Communist in origin...

...4, was ominously different in a way: Atomic Arms Race Speeded As Russian A-Bomb Spurs Congress' Demand for More Billions Here, as the story that followed made all too clear, was the signal for an avowed atomic arms race to the finish...

...The result has been tremendous Soviet gains throughout the underprivileged areas of the world, and along with it, a decline of American prestige to the lowest level in modern times...

...It was a measure, too, of the sterility of Congressional thinking that not a single lawmaker who was moved to comment on the President's announcement had so much as a word to say about the desperate urgency of making one last great efort to stop the race itself before it rushes on out of control to the point of no return...

...However much returning scholars, journalists, and politicians may differ on other aspects of what they saw and heard, they are unanimous in reporting the determination of these peoples of many skins and tongues and religions to build a better and freer life for themselves and their children—now...

...v For centuries millions of human beings in Asia have done the bidding of the white men of the West...

...The President himself spoke fleetingly of a new effort to reach agreement on atomic energy control, but rejected any hope of a face-to-face conference with the Soviets and then seemed to repudiate his own support for new efforts at agreement by asserting a settlement was not possible until we reach a higher degree of rearmament than we now have...

...But, quite apart from its own importance in its own right, this revolutionary awakening of the Asian giant is a decisive factor in world politics because it comes at just the moment in history when two great ideologies, backed by tremendous power systems, are locked in a great struggle for supremacy in the world...

...And most frustrating "of all, their children could only look ahead to the same hopeless future...

...Ethical considerations aside for a moment, the realistic test of foreign policy is its impact on peoples in the world on whom we must count in any contest with the Soviets—whether it be military or political...

...It leaves out of consideration an overriding reality of the world of 1951—that hundreds of miljions of human beings who never heard of Marx and know little of Stalin and care less about Communism are determined to break free from the imperial chains which have kept them KJfeerable and hungry and hopeless |or years beyond count...

...This fact requires consideration of a vital aspect of the over-all problem, one which is too often ignored in the torrent of words to which we are exposed every day...

...Clearly Soviet intransigence at the council table, and the Kremlin's determination to pursue an aggressive course wherever she could hope to get away with it made rearmament inevitable for the West...

...We are making them day after day, and there have been repeated glowing statements about what a big pile of them we now have...

...Instead, the shrewd Soviets preach straight reform...

...The revolution takes many forms, hut the basic ingredients are the same everywhere—poverty, disease, a yearning for independence, a need for a piece of land they can call their own, and a conviction that they have too long been exploited by the West...

...This has been especially true in revolutionary Asia where we have taken only the feeblest steps toward providing the awakening masses of Asia with a democratic alternative to Communist propaganda...

...In the past, nations bent on aggressive expansion conquered areas like those in Asia by landing troops and shooting people into subjugation...

...These may be just statistics to us, but to more than a billion human beings they add up to an overpowering indictment of the system under which they live...

...Right now we are spending 30 or 40 million dollars a year on Point Four as contrasted with a military budget of more than 60 billions...

...They promise land for the landless, food for the hungry, jobs for the unemployed, honest government, schools and hospitals, and freedom from outside exploitation...

...And yet this one, on Oct...

...Even now, with the revolution still in diapers, we have seen and still see the crumbling of great empires, the launching of new nations, the rise to power of people who were little more than serfs less than five years ago, and the flowering of a new spirit of independence...

...Much of the world thinks that the United States has only one idea, that of confining Russian Communism by military might...

...Its surging power, generating new and more hopeful forces on half the earth, is one of the great dramas of history—unfolding in our time...

...President Truman's announcement that Russia had "recently" exploded "another atomic bomb" paved the way for a flood of statements from members of Congress...

...e Of the billion and a half underprivileged peoples in the world, from 80 to 90 percent cannot read, while in the United States only 5% of the people are illiterate...

...Clearly, they represent the minimum program for which the long depressed peoples of Asia have every right to aspire...

...The Russians have very effectively labeled us as warmongers all over the world...

...This is a dangerous delusion...

...The Kremlin has now arrived at the point when its real purpose becomes apparent—to harness the political and economic life of the nation seduced with slogans to the hardboiled needs of the mother country...

...Many Europeans and Asians say we keep pressing for arms and more arms although every armament race in history has resulted in war...

...IV This fundamental failure in American foreign policy is parelleled by a second great weakness—our insistence on looking at the world struggle as purely a conflict between the Soviet Union and ourselves...

...Recent actions by Congress and the Administration spell out the painful fact that rearmament is becoming less and less an instrument of foreign policy and more and more foreign policy itself...

...Now, for our purposes here, it isn't important that we feel in our own hearts that the purpose of our policy is peace...

...Inevitably this distortion of the hard facts of life has planted grave doubts of our capacity to lead among our European friends and has caused us to neglect one of the decisive forces of our time—the revolutionary stirrings of more than half the human race...

...For centuries they were refused the simple dignity of independence...

...The very desperation of the people's plight has simplified Soviet strategy...

...After circling the globe, I am convinced that American foreign policy needs to be clarified and amplified...

...In recent months The Progressive has reported the disturbing testimony of some of the most conservative observers of world affairs we have—men whose anti-Communism is above even the reproach of a McCarthy...