THE NEW FRONTIER

...Rather, your task is to help Britain and France to purge themselves of colonialism, and to help Western civilization to come to terms with the new realities of the world, especially the realities of Asia and Africa...

...It is easy to forecast the awful consequences if we fail to meet this great challenge of the second half of the Twentieth Century, but I hesitate to do so...

...H89 Between the Bandung Conference and the invasion of Egypt, however, there was at least some change in the State Department mood...

...I think the world is moving that way," replied Dr...

...In all of these issues the United States at the last session of the U. N. General Assembly either temporized or directly opposed the aspirations of the Asians and Africans...

...Yet half the people of the world live on incomes about one-twentieth of the average American income...

...We have a great tradition of pioneering and adventure...

...Consequently a process has gone on in the United Nations that historically occurred both in Britain and the United States...

...The problem, I think, is precisely to remove the barriers between "us" and "them...

...I think Dr...

...even if we live in large cities we mentally carve them up into fragments we can digest...

...The chief difference between the "white man" and the "native" is > difference in the possession of power...

...In the photograph were various U.N...

...The United States is not willing to give up its veto power, even if Russia were willing to do so...

...There was, consequently, no reason that the newspaper caption writer could discover why a small, brown man on the edge of the photograph needed to be identified at all...

...I asked one of the leaders of the rebellion in Cyprus, Dr...

...But it is the American policy to prefer "bilateral aid...

...In the Union of South Africa, the same Dutch Boers, having extended their rule over the "natives" of Southwest Africa, are consolidating their racism in South Africa under the name of apartheid, which means the ruthless discrimination by two and a half million "whites" against ten and a half million "non-whites...

...The problem of discovering shared values on which to base world communication, however, is an exciting one and one which might well engage the best energies of the best kind of Americans...

...I think the best way to indicate what is required, quickly, is to point out what has happened in the two most recent instances in which a "backward" people have awakened to the possibilities of the modern world: Russia and Japan...

...Nations like the United States, which grow too much food and generate great quantities of capital, would work with nations which have chiefly eager human hands and brains to offer, for the mutual benefit of all...

...It is the force of the formerly "backward" peoples of the world awakening to the possibilities of education, self-government, independence, economic development, medical science, nationhood, and power...

...These are projected mutual enterprises for most of the people of the world...

...Menon has not told us what is being born, however, and—since like most metaphors this one is useful only if not too long sustained—none of us can know with any certainty what in fact is emerging...

...Other discoveries await us...

...The "white race" did not after all "hang together" in the Egyptian crisis— whatever else may be said about it, and whatever might have happened subsequently...

...In the same debate Menon—in another context—restated his metaphor when he declared: "You can no more fold back a national community into its origin than you can fold back a baby into its mother's womb...

...The first rule of effective communication is that only equals can really meet...

...In recent months he has watched developments at the United Nations, where he conferred frequently with spokesmen for nations representing every region on earth...

...We can, I think, be sure only that it is large, beyond the capacity of the imagination to encompass magnitude, even in this day of nuclear explosions measured in megatons...

...U Pe Kin of Burma—the same man who appeared so anonymously on Page One of a New York newspaper—points out that America's Alexander Hamilton once thought the people of the United States were "a great beast...

...delegates and an unidentified "aide...

...The Russian instance is too painfully familiar to need any detailing...

...As it turned out, Bandung was only the opening statement...

...Since the Cold War, agreement between the United States and Russia has been so infrequent that the veto has all but paralyzed the Council...

...But one wonders how sensitively attuned nearby Washington is to this sound...

...Now we are faced with the awakening of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and the question is—as in the cases of Russia and Japan—will they develop with us or against us...

...world and coming to terms with them represent the most important task the United States—together with Canada, Europe, and outposts of Western civilization in Australia and New Zealand—faces in this last half of the Twentieth Century...

...Yet the veto by any single one of the permanent members of the Security Council—the United States, Soviet Russia, Britain, France, or the Formosa Chinese—can block an issue in the Council...

...There are 80 countries in the United Nations...

...Fear, I think, is not a useful motive here—and our motives will be all-important...

...Let me say first, however, that what we are not looking for is evidence that "we" are helping "them...

...His chief crime is in requiring of Americans a larger mental horizon than we possess...

...The point is that development of Russia and Japan occurred not with the West, but against the West—with results most unhappy for the West...

...Compared to the division between "us" and "them," the division of the world between Communism and non-Communism or anti-Communism seems largely superficial...

...Father Scott, at this session, protested again, as he has done year after year—without visible effect—against the racist rule of the Boers...

...Menon's function in behalf of the people of the underdeveloped countries is, in fact, quite similar to the function of a U.S...

...Even with an adequate world plan for economic development, which could serve to reduce the economic barriers to communication, other serious barriers would be left...

...It is the failure to discover the existence of 1,700,000,000 human beings...

...It is pretty hard for a man whose greatest desire is for a new Cadillac to reach an understanding with a man whose desires are centered on the next bowl of rice...

...It is not planning to attack anyone, and it is not ruled by a noisy dictator, but by one of the world's wisest statesmen and a leading Buddhist scholar, U Nu...

...He is, in fact, the most authentic spokesman yet to appear for the world's more than a billion and a half "natives...

...Menon has become perhaps the most unpopular character in the American gallery of world figures...

...But neither the French response— which has its approximate counterpart in the attitudes of other continental European nations and the British—nor the American response indicates a real awareness of what is going on in this second half of the Twentieth Century, nor a willingness to come to terms with the facts effectively...

...On the eve of the Eleventh U. N. General Assembly last fall, just after Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt, Sherman Adams, assistant to President Eisenhower, was quoted as having told reporters that the "white race" was going to "hang together...

...On the eve of the Bandung Conference—the Asian-African Conference at which leaders of 29 nations met together on the tropical island of Java in 1955 to discuss mutual problems—the State Department's analysis of the impending event was (1) that the "colored" races were ganging up on the "whites" and (2) that in any event Bandung probably would serve the interests of world Communism...

...As a spokesman—not a political leader, but a spokesman—for the world's "natives" Menon is attacking the citadels of Western civilization— and the ramparts are crumbling...

...The briefest review of some of the issues bearing on this question—issues which arose within the last several months in the U. N. General Assembly—will illustrate graphically what the United States is doing, and is not doing, to come to terms with Asia, Africa, and Latin America...

...Nothing less than this, I believe, will do...

...We have not yet begun to offer testimony for the defense...

...Despite the impression to the contrary that many Americans seem to have received, most American bilateral aid has gone either to the already-developed nations—as in the Marshall Plan for Europe-—or for arms or for economic support related to the building up of our military alliances...

...Western civilization, which from classical times has been thought of as roughly synonymous with the universe, is a small part of our world...

...It is not stopping the flow of oil to Europe...

...This situation may not last much longer...

...asks Pe Kin...

...The next largest group is made up of the 20 nations of Latin America...

...The remedy for the deadlock proposed by the Americans and adopted over Russian dissent was the "uniting for peace" resolution, which allows the General Assembly to take up questions blocked by the veto in the Council...

...Increasingly the Latin Americans tend to side with the Asian-African group, especially on issues involving colonialism and economic development...

...They" are brown or black or yellow, we say...

...labor union business agent in behalf of his union...

...In Cyprus, the Greek population—80 per cent of the people-want to achieve an identity as human beings, to "be somebody," not merely the hewers of wood and drawers of water in a British colonial fortress...

...We have been used to thinking in terms of families and villages...

...To many of the Asians and Africans, our action was read as a sort of reluctance to join the human race...

...West Irian, still under Dutch rule though a part of historic Indonesia, as the Indonesians see it, is a symbol of Dutch colonialism, one of the harshest examples of "white man's superiority" in history...

...At the Bandung Conference Thomas Jefferson was the most widely quoted authority...

...This is a bureaucratic phrase meaning that the United States wants to hold the purse strings...

...Still, not a few upper-strata American Negroes have become a part of "us," for all their blackness, and many of the Kabyle of Algeria— now fighting so bitterly against the French—are several shades more blond than the Frenchmen who oppress them...

...Who would agree with Hamilton now...

...For one thing, our State Department, using no more complicated tools than a sheet of ruled, yellow paper and a sharpened pencil, worked out some simple arithmetic...

...I am speaking now, not as a student of the "problem of the underdeveloped areas" or even as an American newspaper man, but as a human being who has had some unusual opportunities to come to know the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as human beings...

...The Japanese instance was climaxed at Pearl Harbor...

...But he refers to himself as a "heathen" exactly as a professional American labor leader with manicured fingernails will refer to himself as a "working stiff...

...The oversight was symbolic...

...The answer to this question is, I fear, discouraging...

...The American response to the rise of Asian and African power in the United Nations has been to stave off the day of reckoning as long as possible...

...It was Walter Lippmann, I think, who said that Western civilization was on trial at the Bandung Conference...

...The inescapable point, I think, i" this last half of the Twentieth Century is that "they" no longer are satisfied to be subordinated to Western power...

...Furthermore, the rich of the world still are becoming richer, while the poor get poorer...

...Gestation and birth are here...

...In the United Nations this last session we heard only the faintest echo of this great world event, yet the sound has reverberated to the farthest corners of the earth...

...The leaders of Asia and Africa do not want us to turn our backs on Western civilization...

...Rather, as Charles Malik, an Arab, a Christian philosopher trained at Harvard, and the foreign Minister of Lebanon, told me recently in discussing the colonial problem: "You cannot put the clock back, but at the same time it is not possible for the United States to supplant Britain and France in a new pax Americana...

...On important questions requiring a two-thirds majority, even a portion of the AsianAfrican-Latin American group can block any issue, and no affirmative vote is possible without the consent of most of these countries...

...This incident represents some measure of a serious American failure, however...

...one fears the climax has not yet been reached...

...I think he and Krishna Menon and others like them symbolize something like a force of nature—a tidal wave, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption...

...Race" is largely an illusion—and a Western illusion for the most part...

...We will be judged by the majority of mankind not only for what we do, and do not do, but for why we act or fail to act...

...here is the new frontier...

...They have not yet given up hope for America, however...

...Racism and Communism are both products of Western civilization...

...Menon is, of course, a most sophisticated Western-educated man, a former London book editor and barrister...

...The chief means to this end is to "organize" the Latin American delegates so that they will vote with the United States...

...Of these, 27 are Asian and African countries—and several more from that area will be added soon...

...They are asking to "belong," assaulting the exclusive club of Western—in this case French—privilege...

...The China issue is complex enough, but the fact remains that the people of Asia and Africa generally see in our support of Chiang Kai-shek on Formosa as the "government of China" a fiction masking the old colonial pattern: Chiang is an American creature, and American policy does not seem able to accept the indigenous government of continental China...

...Rossides is right...

...When, last fall, the United States opposed the invasion of Egypt by Britain and France there was, within the U. N. and elsewhere, a spontaneous flush of hope among the Asians and Africans that the United States was on the way to becoming "one of us...

...Krishna Menon is asking us to think in terms of the human race, 2,700,000,000-strong...

...Power in Britain passed from the aristocratic House of Lords to the democratic House of Commons...

...Educated Asians and Africans are themselves in some measure the cultural products of that civilization...

...Effective communication is based on shared values...

...The United States in the last session of the General Assembly opposed both the imaginative and exciting plan to use a world food bank as an instrument for economic development and the plan to further that development with a world capital fund— the Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development, or SUNFED...

...We of Western civilization have lived too long in isolation from them—an isolation made only more pointed by our occasional contemplation of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as sources of raw materials, as tourist haunts, or subjects of anthropological studies...

...These are the people who live in Asia and Africa, and they are joined in anonymity by most of the 179,000,000 people of Latin America —the poor village people, living in obscurity on short rations out of sight of the garish tourist traps of Rio de Janeiro or Caracas...

...In Southwest Africa, in fact annexed by the Union of South Africa without legal title, some of the tribesmen speak in the U. N. only through that remarkable Englishman, Father Michael Scott...

...It is therefore discouraging to find the United States acting contrary to the basic sentiments of the people of Asia and Africa on such colonial issues in the United Nations as those involved in the questions of Algeria, Cyprus, West Irian, Southwest Africa, South Africa, and the admission of Communist China to the U. N. • In Algeria, 9,000,000 Berbers and Arabs have been second-class citizens in their own country, subjects to 1,000,000 French colonials...

...In the U. N., the Assembly, where one nation has one vote—no ideal arrangement, perhaps, but generally more democratic than great-power rule in the Council—has become the predominant organ...

...Burma is not about to be taken over by the Communists...

...Discovering the "natives" of the DONAtD GRANT, interpretive news editor for the St...

...It is fairly easy to define this force, but the definitions do not properly suggest its magnitude...

...Zenon Ros-sides, why he seemed so confident that Cyprus would achieve its independence soon, despite British power and the fact that all of Western civilization including the United States seemed to be siding with Britain...

...Collectively this majority of mankind is known as "natives...

...We" are white, mostly, and rich, and enjoy comparatively good health...

...This maneuver has been successful, so far, because Latin American governments do not, for the most part, represent the ordinary people of their countries, but only a governing elite .—that happens to be strongly oriented by education and Catholic faith to the Western European tradition...

...Neither force was predominant at Bandung, as I observed the event...

...But he has not stopped there...

...If the Asian, African, and Latin American countries vote as a bloc they can control the General Assembly with their 47 votes, where a simple majority is required...

...In the process of exploring it we will discover that by no means are all of the better values Western values...

...If this admittedly simplified formulation is accepted, it seems proper to ask, next, what are we doing to encourage the development of Asia, Africa, and Latin America "with us...

...He is, indeed, an extraordinary man, but that does not altogether explain his success...

...In West Irian, the Indonesians want to consolidate the self-rule they won from the Dutch in a heroic struggle that began under the Japanese...

...Finally, I think, the problem is one of communication—between the United States and Europe, and between all of us in Western civilization and those in other world groupings...

...This is an interesting projection of Western attitudes...

...French and British diplomats at the U. N. meanwhile were telling newspaper observers that the invasion was necessary to "stop Communism...

...This is, of course, exactly the situation the United Nations Charter was designed—by the Great Powers—to avoid...

...Christian Pineau, French foreign minister and the frankest voice of parochial Western civilization, is undisguised in expressing his fear that this development will enable the masses of people in Asia and Africa to control world events...

...touis Post-Dispatch, has roamed the world for that paper...

...Organization" of the Latin Americans takes several forms —economic pressures, flattery, logrolling for committee posts for Latin American delegates, among others...

...Decisive authority was to go to the Security Council, controlled by them...

...Instead of merely closing ranks with fellow members of the exclusive club of Western civilization, it seemed to the Asians and Africans that the United States was judging the issue on its merits, as if Americans were, after all, members of the human race...

...Rossldes...

...The "aide," as it happened, was Ambassador U Pe Kin of Burma...

...They kick—and I think the kick is the sign of life," said V. K. Krishna Menon of India during the Algerian debate in the U. N. He was talking about the Kabyle, and the other Berbers and Arabs striking out for self-government in Algeria, but the statement has more universal application...

...The U. S. Senate—where the "rich and well-born" were to have exercised decisive power—has been democratized and forced to share power with the House of Representatives...

...It is significant that Mexico, where the voice of the American Indian masses speaks loudest, is the least reliable member of the American U. N. "team" among the Latin American countries...

...certainly they are poor, sickly, and their lives short...

...The first thing we must decide is whether coming to terms with these people is necessary, because it will not be easy...

...The former division is so fundamental that there are not terms to describe it...