THE GREAT DEBATE

...Their fears would have been largely justified if Chancellor Adenauer's original plans had gone through, for that would have been rearmament under the old Nazi officer caste...

...If Stalin, as is likely, should reject all arrangements to carry out this proposal, would he not at (east stand convicted to a degree which is not now the case before the peoples of Europe as the lover of war, not peace, of conquest, not freedom...

...Hoover thinks that our best hope lies in making a kind of Gibraltar of the Western Hemisphere with Great Britain and some other nations of the British Commonwealth thrown in...

...Despite Nehru's conciliatory attitude, the Chinese marched into Tibet, and Communism in India, subject to Stalin as it is everywhere except in Yugoslovia, continues systematically to carry on a kind of underground war against Nehru's regime...

...IV Mr...

...He should tell us to what degree it may be possible without too great risk to use American men and American money in cooperation with the Europeans and in the process to bring them new spirit and confidence...

...As I write, Mao's government, despite British recognition, is exhorting Chinese in Malaya to new rebellion and new violence...

...We must build up military strength but not blindly...

...We can insist that America must husband her strength but that does not mean we can avoid calculated risks...

...I have examined carefully the reasoning of those who argue that Mac-Arthur's final flamboyant offensive in North Korea brought on the Chinese drive, or that the UN made it inevitable by sanctioning the crossing of the 38th Parallel, or that the whole crisis might have been avoided if Communist China had been admitted to the United Nations...

...Thomas has devoted full-time to public affairs since leaving the ministry in 1931...

...We cannot possibly invest land armies on the Asian mainland...

...Yet, certain clear objectives remain...

...If her lights should be extinguished in totalitarian darkness, ours would be sadly dimmed even if our territory should prove militarily secure...

...we can only chance them in Europe as a means to strengthen European capacity and will to resist...

...On the road to power, Communists may command a temporary respect by effective cooperation against enemies who like Chiang tried to support a corrupt and dying order of society...

...So completely arbitrary was that line that the division could not have been permanent...

...Our Government had to consider not only a choice in principle—whether to back the United Nations and the beginning of world law against aggression—but also a military decision on what was possible at a price we could afford to pay...

...But by no means do I think it possible that the huge, carefully organized Chinese offensive was simply an answer to MacArthur's last drive...

...It has championed the cause of the workers in capitalist Europe...

...It may be wise to negotiate with Mao as one might negotiate with a holdup man...

...It is yet possible that an America which has given 36j^ billion dollars for the peaceful rehabilitation of the world since the end of World War II may show a greater capacity for leadership in that awakening...

...It is probable that the way the UN's war was carried on in Korea made it easier for the Communists to arouse the fears of the Chinese people...

...We Americans have to consider not only what we ought theoretically to do but what practically is in our power...

...Their reward was death...

...One of the ways the dictatorship holds the people is unquestionably by exploiting their fear of war and capitalist encirclement...

...The Kremlin almost threatens war...

...Recognition, even conditional recognition, would have implied a right for Mao to come and take Formosa which might have been a pretty bloody performance...

...Yet there were enough assurances in the actions of the UN, in President Truman's statements, and even in the boast that American troops would be out of the trenches by Christmas, to allay honest fears of the Chinese government...

...Might it not be possible for the Western Powers even now to say something like this: "We also desire a free, demilitarized, unified Germany...

...There are few saints, however, who would agree to receive a holdup man, guns and all, into the family...

...Above all else, we have to find a way to bring home to the peoples of the world that only Stalin can bring world war...

...It amounted to a surrender in the struggle to arouse Western Europe to greater efforts for its own salvation...

...Our leaders and spokesmen have found no way dramatically to refute that fear...

...At least until lately there has been considerable underground war in the Ukraine...

...There is no conceivable course of action which the United States should take or could ever have taken which would substantially alter Stalin's fixed drive for universal power as head of the secular Communist religion...

...He who does not give absolute obedience to Stalin's discipline is, in Communist theory and practice, the enemy of society, doomed to death or slavery in a work camp...

...It is still not too late to do better than we have done...

...The things we have we must defend and Stalin can make their defense mean war...

...The Great Debate By Norman Thomas WHAT is now being called the Great Debate on American foreign policy was precipitated by Herbert Hoover's speech against investing American armies on the European continent...

...that we want enforceable disarmament and cooperative war against hunger...

...That is particularly true of the peoples who are her neighbors...

...As history's helper, he will take some chances but not too many...

...It is principally for the latter reason that I was always critical of the original Truman Doctrine which seemed to commit us to a military containment of Communism anywhere any time...

...Russia plays on these desires...

...Hoover is right that we cannot afford similar misjudgments on a larger scale...

...Steps might be taken to organize a potential people's resistance which would not be ineffective...

...even granting that Russian industrial production has increased since World War II as greatly as the Kremlin claims, Stalin still stands at the head of a hungry peasant empire...

...III We have every reason to believe that there is vast discontent behind the Iron Curtain, including the Soviet Union itself, of which the West has not made the most...

...NORMAN THOMAS has six times sought the Presidency as a Socialist...

...The British, I think, made a mistake in granting unconditional recognition...

...I begin with a confession that never have I found it so hard to be sure in detail what is the right course of action to urge...

...But that opposition goes deeper...

...In retrospect, I still believe what I believed a year ago—that once the calamity had happened and the Communists held the Chinese mainland, no matter who was to blame, Chiang's representatives should have been unseated in the UN and the Mao regime told it would be recognized de jure as well as de facto, as soon as it gave reasonable proof of abiding by the principles of the UN and honoring international agreement...

...He is in a very poor position to carry war to the United States unless he can get under his control the skills and apparatus of Western Europe...

...This brings us to our first principle...

...Without Western Europe, the cause of freedom and democracy is in terrible danger...

...In the long run, our intensified arms race of itself will mean war...

...A former Presbyterian clergyman, Mr...

...In the first place, by the things that the American Government did and left undone in the years between Pearl Harbor and the present crisis, it incurred a moral responsibility for Western Europe far greater than it had 10 years ago...

...If in our time such concepts of freedom, tolerance, and fair play as have been partially established in the Western world should be crushed, their revival will be enormously difficult...

...The one price that we cannot pay is surrender to Communism...

...The news of the evacuation of burning Seoul and reports of the misery of the Korean refugees are tonight's heartache...

...Nobody knows but Stalin...

...There is now imposed upon Gen...

...Millions of people in the world fear any German rearmament...

...After June 25, Chinese defiance of the UN meant that to seat Mao's government in the Security Council would have been an acknowledgment that blackmail works and would have contributed to the ruin of the UN as the guarantor of peace and non-violent negotiations...

...Never at any time has the drive of Stalin's imperial Communism for absolute control over the bodies, and souls, and minds of men throughout the world been ended or even long deflected by conciliation or appeasement...

...Hoover's speech went far beyond this...

...The complete dissolution of five autonomous areas after the war and the multitudes of the slaves in Stalin's work camps are proof that the nauseating adultation bestowed upon Stalin by the Soviet press has not won the allegiance of millions of his subjects...

...In the short run, it may deter Stalin and give us the great boon of time...

...Freedom and democracy are tender plants...

...I write in great anguish...

...There must, however, be absolute and effective guarantees of civil liberty and free elections...

...There are some signs that French apathy is not so deep seated as to make the defense of France with all its treasures of history and culture already a lost cause...

...He demands that Western Europe express its will for freedom "in organized and equipped combat divisions of such huge numbers as would erect the sure dam against this red flood" and this before we land another man or another dollar on their shores...

...The UN itself would have lost all standing except as a kind of forum, and the probabilities are that already Communist aggression would have brought war in a new area...

...No course of action is free from some legitimate objection...

...There were parties or sections of socialist and agrarian parties and important individuals in the Baltic and Balkan states, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary who believed that it was possible by decency and some concessions to get along with Stalin's Communism...

...Most of our immediate choices must be between evils...

...There is this chance: the Russian tradition is against beginning large scale war...

...Hence, it seems to be clear that a decision about military aid to Western Europe at the very least needs further examination...

...But war, the only instrument of last resort which mankind has yet developed, is not only terrible but largely self-defeating...

...that we arm only for defense of that which is more precious than life...

...With them his military and economic power vis a vis any Gibraltar we might make of the Western Hemisphere would be extraordinarily great...

...Granting the military power of China on the Asian mainland...

...Within the Soviet Union, Stalin's successor will not inherit his prestige or his power...

...In that spirit, he even made a deal with Hitler...

...That would not long avert war or extreme violence...

...Land reform everywhere dragged and the gap between wages and prices in countries like France and Italy remains so great as to guarantee Communist control of the greater part of the movement...

...But uniformly Communist decency ends with the achievement of power...

...I still think our moral choice right, but our leaders appear to have misjudged the UN's mi 1 i t a r y strength versus its enemies...

...I am persuaded that MacArthur's action unnecessarily worsened not only our military position but our moral prestige in world public opinion...

...Among his many published works are "America's Way Out — A Program for Democracy," "Appeal to the Nations," "We Have A Future," and "War—No Profit, No Glory, No Need...

...It is part of our tragedy that it is easier to say what should have been done than what should be done now...

...There must be no appeasement of Stalin and his Communism...

...Hoover had merely used his influential voice to warn the American people and our allies of the Atlantic Pact, that America simply dare not risk a vaster and far more terrible Dunkirk, he would have performed a service...

...If the UN had not acted at all in Korea at the end of June, much suffering might have been avoided in Korea...

...He will have to deal with rivals or those whom he fears as possible rivals...

...Stalin's Marxism makes him believe that history dooms the "capitalist" West...

...Inevitably, more Titos will emerge...

...The Korean situation illustrates my point...

...VI Would such a policy avert war...

...more than anyone else, should be in a position to tell us whether the rather suspicious national sovereignties of Western Europe can be united effectively for the defense of freedom...

...II Amid all uncertainties there is one grim fact that is inescapable...

...In the second place, there is no reasonable doubt that Stalin's immediate objective is the acquisition of the enormous productive capacity of Western Europe...

...That time must be used as no one has yet used it to arouse the nations out of the madness that leads to destruction...

...The united Germany must be free of its own volition to join any European federation...

...There must be controls of its industrial output so that it will be used to arm neither the East nor the West for eventual war...

...The fundamental weakness of American policy lies in our failure by word and deed to capture the imagination of mankind and prove that the United States and its democratic allies are the champions of peace and freedom eager to share in a cooperative war against the world's hunger...

...The average citizen does not know enough to dogmatize on all points of policy...

...Nothing is more certain than that someday Russian imperial Communism will come to a violent end...

...In the meantime, a police force might be built which would at least be able to repulse sudden aggression simply from East Germany...

...The question is how can we defend our liberties on terms which most likely will avert a third world war, or at the very worst give us the best hope of victory in it...

...Actually, that is only one phase of the extraordinarily complicated problem we face...

...They will not easily grow in soil watered by the bloodshed which would attend the breakup of universal Communism...

...Without exception they failed, as Roosevelt had failed in his well-intentioned policy of appeasement—a policy which some of us felt at the time involved the sacrifice of honor and common sense...

...Germans do not want civil war with their brothers in the East but unity, and they will not be forever content with an inferior position in the European family of nations...

...He needs it badly in his scheme of things...

...There are three major reasons why the United States cannot give up the effort to strengthen Western Europe in order to deter Stalin from aggression or to give it some hope of resistance...

...Possibly the Chinese offensive might have been postponed if there had been no crossing of the 38th Parallel...

...Communism has not been winning by its philosophy of its fanaticism so much as by its ability to exploit the resentment of colored races against the old colonial imperialism practiced, alas, by the nations we call democracies...

...The process has been repeated on the international field...

...Eisenhower an opportunity and a responsibility such as few men carry...

...Even that is doubtful...

...The fate of Jan Masaryk of Czechoslovakia is typical of the fate of all collaborators with Communism wherever and whenever Communism achieves power to enforce its will...

...The opposition of the German people, led by the German Socialist-Democrats, to anything of that sort has already been effective...

...We ought long before this to have taken the leadership for fool-proof disarmament under a strengthened United Nations and cooperative war against hunger...

...The business of American foreign policy is to make it not easy, but as hard as possible, for Communism to exploit the revolutionary mood of Asia and pose as the friend of peace...

...granting that Russian military equipment includes atom bombs...

...it does threaten serious consequences if Western Germany should be rearmed...

...Such a Germany must, of course, be subject to a supervised demilitarization...

...The way in which our State Department is now haggling on the issue of talks with the Kremlin on Germany seems to me bad in itself and worse in its effect on world opinion...

...But in itself and in its effect, Mr...

...In the third place, our culture, our civilization, and our democracy are not so much American as they are Western...

...The third principle of our foreign policy must be recognition of the extraordinary importance of averting a third world war...

...Lenin had non-Communist allies on the road to power in Russia...

...Unquestionably, certain good actions by the United States, like the Marshall Plan, have aided the revival of Western Europe and checked Communism, but, in the process, too small benefit seeped down to the masses...

...If Mr...

...Our second principle follows as a corollary...

...V The German situation is more difficult...

...We cannot, however, trust to this breakup of Russian imperialism as a guarantor of a decent world...

...In a peculiar sense Europe is our motherland...