CHANGE OR PERISH
Fleming, D. F.
Change or Perish Cold War and Common Sense, by Thomas W. Wilson, Jr. New York Graphic Society. 211 pp. $4.95. The Price of Peace, by James J. Wadsworth. Frederick A. Praeger. 127 pp....
...He thinks, too, that "the Soviet representatives came to the table in 1958 and 1959 with a genuine desire for agreement...
...3.95...
...He learned at first hand, in north Iraq, about the Red atrocities which had the result of turning Iraq against Communism...
...On American policy, Wadsworth urges that our commitment to arms reduction should be absolutely clear, that we must find sound policies and stick to them, that an international police force is the eventual goal, and that the channels to the Kremlin must always be kept open, apart from formal negotiations...
...He sees that we are "perilously overextended" and that some contraction of our global sway is overdue...
...He is sure that Southeast Asia is anti-Chinese and certain that our new policy of tying economic aid to social reform is the only winning one...
...His chapter on "The Free Society" is an exciting' catalogue of all the things we must do to help the people, not their oppressive rulers, of the underdeveloped lands...
...He suspects that neutralism may soon become the dominant mentality of Europe and knows that is true of nearly all of the former colonial countries...
...The villages "will respond quickly and eagerly once it is known that American aid is conditioned by democratic ideals...
...They will help the reader to understand that with Communism and every other way of life rapidly changing, and with the bulk of the world's peoples in full revolution against misery and want, it can be fatal to us to refuse to let our thinking advance with the times...
...An Approach to Peace and Other Essays, by H. Stuart Hughes, Athe-neum...
...He believes that many peoples will reject our "free enterprise" control of large parts of their economies and urges that we refuse to contest the nationalization of American properties abroad but compensate our corporations for their losses...
...Under this policy both Ache-son and Dulles based our policy "on fire-power...
...Though he fully accepts the view that any negotiation with the Soviets "is part of a grand strategy aimed at the eventual total defeat of the other side," he does not despair of negotiations with them...
...Little reached the people, and the leases of the feudal rulers on power were extended...
...For many years he has gone on long trips in remote foreign countries, getting down into the squalor and filth of the villages...
...Having come to feel "a genuine respect and affection" for some of the Soviet negotiators, he understands that they have felt us to be at times overly stiff and uncompromising...
...Douglas has seen with his own eyes that this business of maintaining and fattening corrupt status quo is self-defeating...
...This little book ought to become the bible of all those who hope to .moderate the arms race and turn the world away from a nuclear Armageddon...
...4.50...
...No society has been established anywhere that remotely resembles Marx' vision of 'Communism.' " Wilson denies that there is anything in Communist ideology that binds nations together or that there are any assets in Communist dogmatism...
...Communism" in Europe and Asia is the result of the two world wars, and no people, with the possible exception of Cuba, has ever adopted it...
...He points out that there can be a great many stages in disarmament by example, on the way to world government which is our only ultimate salvation...
...Reviewed by D. F. Fleming The book, Cold War and Common Sense, by Thomas Wilson, Jr., is a commendable effort to relieve some of the frustration about the cold war that seems to drive some of our extreme conservatives out of their minds, and to demonstrate that Communism is not the wave of the future...
...As a man who has sat through almost numberless negotiating sessions with the Russians on disarmament and on banning nuclear tests, former Ambassador James J. Wadsworth speaks in The Price of Peace from long experience on the most difficult problem of our time...
...Nor does he shrink from recognizing that China must be brought into world society and into the solution of its crucial problems, and that "an overall political settlement with Russia is our foremost need...
...204 pp...
...Wilson's book shows that Lenin greatly changed Marxism, that Stalin largely modified Leninism, that Khrushchev's "Communism" is still different, and that there are wide variations in the various national communisms...
...All four of these books stress vividly the one unalterable fact of life, the law of change...
...He says: "We can be twice as strong as all the Great Powers combined and still witness Asia, Africa, and South America in the throes of revolutions that our armaments cannot stop...
...Because of our obsession with military containment and the preservation of status quo, he has "never visited a village in Asia where America was revered as a symbol of freedom and justice...
...Overhanging our imperative need to keep adapting to a changing world is the desperate necessity of escaping from the world's final arms race, before it destroys us, first economically, morally, and spiritually, then physically...
...Hughes challenges the domination of our minds by the domino theory that all is lost if one untenable outpost is evacuated...
...48 pp...
...2.00...
...On the other hand, the Kennedy Administration is now attempting to deal with the world as a whole and has consciously adopted a policy of social change for the backward peoples...
...While condemning in the strongest terms every aspect of Communism's tyranny over the mind of man, he advocates conceding its respectability as an economic system...
...Though brief, Democracy's Manifesto, by Justice William O. Douglas, is one of the most powerful and convincing books I have ever read...
...It begins by recognizing that containment as a policy was "obsolete even when it was announced, as it put the problem of Communism in negative terms...
...On these matters Justice Douglas does not speak from hearsay...
...He, too, believes that "the best chance for the salvation of humanity lies in an understanding between the Soviet Union and the democracies of the West...
...Doubleday...
...In An Approach to Peace and Other Essays, H. Stuart Hughes, professor of history at Harvard, has revealed himself as a courageous and constructive thinker...
...The CIA under Allen Dulles, in addition to its Cuban fiasco, "conversed only with the heads of government or with foreign military people," "offered millions of dollars to get votes" against the Iranian nationalist Prime Minister Mossadegh and sent agents "to overthrow the Sukarno government" in Indonesia...
...Douglas believes in the nationalism of all the rim countries around Russia and China...
...He faces our mutual interest with Russia in a zone of military disengagement in Germany and Central Europe...
...Hughes can find no alternative to "the renunciation of thermonuclear deterrence as an instrument of national strategy," and he urges with impressive cogency gradual unilateral disarmament, relying only on conventional weapons for our defense, and for aiding those who have done likewise...
...He understands that the great array of new states will have to go through a period of one party rule before they can approach our kind of democracy...
...Democracy's Manifesto, by William O. Douglas...
...On the key issue of effective control of disarmament, he reproduces the remarkable McCloy-Zorin joint statement of agreed principles of September 20, 1961, and thinks there is room for much negotiation to implement them, even though the Soviets want first to remove our striking power and we seek everlastingly to inspect and verify each arms reduction step they take...
...Billions were poured into the feudal oligarchies around Russia and China to make them strong militarily, giving these oligarchies undreamed of wealth...
...This is a book which no person who is concerned about the approaching end of our civilization, on our present course, can afford to miss...
...Indeed "in the eyes of the common people of Asia and the Middle East we were bent on war," war to be fought in their midst...
...To his own knowledge "the commissions have run as high as 95 per cent," ten per cent being considered normal...
Vol. 26 • September 1962 • No. 9
