LIPPMANN'S NEW ROAD TO WAR
Thomas, Norman
Lippmanris New Road To War V. S. WAR AIMS, by Walter Lippmann. Little, Brown and Company. $1.75. Reviewed by Norman Thomas NO MAN in America has gained so much wealth and reputation as Walter...
...There could be no greater nonsense, as Mr...
...The Communist Party is a world force which Stalin will not abandon and which cannot be dealt with on Mr...
...There will be no world association with any real power...
...Just how Asia will emerge under these circumstances isn't clear to the author, much less to the readers...
...Reviewed by Norman Thomas NO MAN in America has gained so much wealth and reputation as Walter Lippmann by the simple process of continually writing books pontifically to disclaim what previously he has pontifically proclaimed...
...But friendly isolation of the United States from such power politics as Mr...
...The history is often fantastic—as, for instance* Mr...
...Lippmann goes on to prove by his long and unconvincing argument...
...Lippmann's insistence that the Russian terms to Finland in the Spring of 1944 were "generous," or in his comparison of the self-determination of European and Asiatic peoples with the secession of the South...
...He discovered not only the economic adequacy but the ethical virtue of American big business just in time profitably to acclaim it before its handiwork, the great Depression, came upon us...
...Lippmann piously hopes can be assured harmonious backing by the U.S.S.R...
...Socialist internationalism tragically missed the comparatively easy victory which its devotees had expected, but not before it had, like certain great religions, given proof of power to unite men across lines of race and nation...
...We must begin again with lessons learned from old failures and mistakes...
...Like most of you my affections are deeply engaged with those I love on the Atlantic and Pacific fronts...
...The basic economic struggle for bread and the rivalries of nations or their dominant classes for profit are ignored...
...Hitler's...
...I read this book with a kind of cold rage that they should be asked to endure so much, to kill, and perhaps to die, for no nobler end than this...
...and the U.S.A...
...The chief effect on me was to make me thankful that I opposed our entry into the war, which was not philosophically inevitable, and which was recommended to us in the beginning as something infinitely better than a substitution of Mr...
...He supported the Washington Disarmament Conference in 1922, but repented it in 1943 in a book ¦which was an amazing distortion of history...
...Lippmann's plan...
...He repeats, as a comforting refrain, the familiar comparison of Great Britain, and hence the Atlantic Community, to a whale, and Russia to an elephant, moving in such different elements that there can be no conflict...
...THIS theory of major groupings of nations pays some attention to geography (but Stalin may doubt that when he sees Greece assigned to the Atlantic Community) and some attention to a highly selective use of history...
...He or his friends in his behalf hailed him as Wood-row Wilson's youthful mentor in World War I and now he writes gravely of the "Wilsonian negatives" and finds in the self-determination of nations a principle to be repudiated...
...There will be no nonsense about the rights of small peoples except as it may be convenient to recognize them within communities dominated by the great powers...
...Lippmann's extraordinary proposal, none is less truly realistic, and none is less touched with any great unifying ideal...
...the "Russian Orbit...
...It is impossible to imagine a peaceful world under a plan in which the resentments of the weak will be so many and the rivalries of the strong so keen...
...Even now I am persuaded that there is no inevitability about Mr...
...He started his literary career rather precociously with two socialist books...
...I am fairly familiar with most of the plans that have been proposed for postwar world organization...
...There are common interests to unite men throughout the world in the winning of peace and the conquest of poverty...
...Lippmann's inconclusive and self-contradictory argument for basing peace upon the national power of the strong and the illusion that their rivalries for supreme power will not break the present alliance of the Big Three as such alliances always have broken before...
...One gets the impression that Mr...
...He left the Socialist Party because its leader, Morris Hillquit, was too conservative for him...
...Which brings me to this book...
...Lippmann's rival groupings of nations...
...Lippmann proposes would be more likely to give us at least a generation or two of peace...
...Lippmann goes in for power politics writ large...
...Lippmann would organize the postwar world into "the Atlantic Community"—we're in it...
...None of them seems to me more certainly doomed to catastrophic failure than Mr...
...the "Chinese Orbit", and "Emergent Asia...
...IAM not an isolationist...
...Lippmann can hardly convince himself either that his major communities will hold together or that the rivalries for profit and power in Europe, in Asia, yes, and eventually on all the trade routes between the Atlantic Community and the Russian Orbit, will not plunge us into war...
...It is not possible to achieve a final settlement now, but it is possible to enter the road which will lead to a world federation of cooperative commonwealths...
...Somehow these separate groups will be held together by the prolongation of the alliance of this war...
...The greatest of all failures would be to accept Mr...
...Lippmann's brand of power politics for Mr...
...Actually the Atlantic Community and the Russian Orbit will move in the same elements of land, sea, and air...
...Germany will be kept in order and completely disarmed for at least 15 years by the joint power of her neighbors who in the West will be dominated by Great Britain and in the East by Russia...
...They will be driven by the same logic of power and profit to seek their own aggrandizement...
...Something of the same sort will be done to Japan by China which Mr...
Vol. 8 • August 1944 • No. 32
