PEACE OR SECURITY?
Rubin, Morris H.
Peace Or Security? An Editorial On Dumbarton Oaks By MORRIS H. RUBIN1 (Editor of The Progressive) THE preliminary outline of a new international organization charged with maintaining future...
...It begins with an untruthful statement: 'The organization is based on the principle of sovereign equality of all peace-loving states.' "It is not based on this principle...
...A vicious movement, disguised under the high sounding title of the National Tax Equality Association, is spreading throughout this country...
...This new charter for the United Nations creates an Assembly of "all peace-loving states," but the Assembly is given not a single grant of power...
...And today, because it has grown so tremendously, the cooperative movement is under concerted attack by those whose system of exploitation and economic inequality it challenges...
...As Louis Fischer, noted foreign correspondent, wrote in the Nation magazine, the Dumbarton Oaks plan "would be merely dust in the eyes of the common people of the world...
...It is not a plan for a world organization...
...This would appear to be an unexpectedly frank recognition of the fact that the plan, as now conceived, is more concerned with the security of the Great Powers—the maintenance of their boundaries, the protection of their spheres of influence, and the safeguarding of their imperial interests—than it is with the actual preservation of peace...
...The program outlined by the slick promoters of NTEA is dangerous for America...
...These, and many another warning about the scheme which emerged from Dumbarton Oaks, underscore the need for subjecting this new charter of the United Nations to the most searching study and the most careful discussion possible...
...The cooperatives do not menace small, independent business...
...Good folks everywhere would put their trust in it and think, wrongly, that humanity was making progress toward the organization of peace and economic well-being...
...Last week delegates representing America's 2,500,-000 co-op members gathered in Chicago to observe the centennial anniversary of a movement which has for its goal a new era of economic and political democracy for the people of the world...
...21, issued a bulletin —almost entirely suppressed by the press—which made this revealing comment: "The feature of the proposed organization which will concern the general public most is that it could easily be transformed into a dictatorship of the four Great Powers, who could, on the plea of preserving peace, enforce their will on weaker nations...
...But the people of America—or, as far as we know, the people of Britain and of Russia—do not know what settlement the Dumbarton Oaks scheme is supposed to make "secure...
...Prominent among them were some of the large utility interests of this country...
...It is a curious and significant fact that while a number of so-called "isolationists" like Hamilton Fish were endorsing the scheme prepared at Dumbarton Oaks, many a genuine internationalist was expressing distrust which ranged all the way from faint praise through skepticism to downright rejection...
...Are the people of the United States prepared to say now that they want to join an organization which is going to enforce whatever settlements for Europe and Asia come out of the secret conferences of a few leaders, regardless of how imperialistic, how vengeance-minded, how anti-democratic, and how war-breeding those settlements might be...
...if the peace settlement were based on vengeance, imperialism, spheres of influence, and the pernicious doctrine of white supremacy...
...100 Years Of Cooperation THIS is the year that marks the first 100 years of existence for the cooperative movement...
...Dorothy Thompson, whose devotion to the pr'mciples of internationalism is too well known to need amplification here, was even more emphatic...
...This letter listed contributors to the movement...
...Miss Thompson pulls no punches...
...The Progressive recently had called to its attention a money-raising letter sent out by NTEA to business interests in Texas...
...This association, before which President Roosevelt is scheduled to deliver his major address on foreign policy Oct...
...That the NTEA is doing the chores for monopoly business is not difficult to discern...
...Every potentially helpful provision would boomerang...
...Consider for a moment the statement released by the Foreign Policy Association—a thoroughly internationalist organization which has long been in the forefront of the fight for a world league to enforce peace...
...One hundred years ago, in the little village of Rochdale, England, a handful of people established the first cooperative...
...Stripped of all the ponderous verbiage which always clutters up such documents, the plan concocted at Dumbarton Oaks is essentially a scheme to vest with the Great Powers full dominion over the entire world...
...CERTAINLY the plan drawn at Dumbarton Oaks contains features which could and would be enormously useful in preserving peace—if the machinery of enforcement contrived by the diplomats were to be applied to enforcing a just and democratic peace settlement...
...Elsewhere in her analysis she describes the Dumbarton scheme as "an intolerable travesty on the ideas for which we have been fighting," and "a repudiation of democracy...
...All control is lodged wjth the Security Council which is to be completely under the thumb of the Great Powers, any one of which can veto the decisions of all the other nations on earth...
...All the rest of the states of mankind—some 55 of them—lost their sovereignty under this arrangement...
...THIS interpretation is not unique with The Progressive...
...Are these the small, independent business interests whose cause the NTEA so piously professes to serve...
...It is worth noting, we think, that throughout the charter the word "security" is often used in preference to "peace...
...Today more than 200,000,000 people are members of cooperatives...
...Its claim is that cooperation is a threat to small independent business and its goal is to wreck the cooperatives...
...It is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of three to five great powers...
...They are, however, as has been seen in the Scandinavian countries and as Thurman Arnold pointed out in his address to the Cboperative Congress last week, a very serious threat to monopoly...
...A deep-going debate of the issues, one which avoids the smear tactics and impugning of motives which are characteristic of those who are unsure of their position, would not only have a wholesome effect on the whole country, but might well lead to the formulation of provisions which would remedy the major defects of the Dumbarton Oaks plan...
...Certainly the political developments of the past year, in North Africa, in France, in Italy, in India, in Poland, and elsewhere have failed to produce any consistent pattern of freedom and anti-imperialism or any clear-cut democratic design for the postwar world...
...It does mean, though, that there must be a general understanding, a broad outline of democratic, anti-imperialist objectives, before we do commit ourselves...
...ONE of the greatest dangers involved in uncritical acceptance of the Dumbarton Oaks scheme is that it can and apparently is leading dangerously to a complacent feeling that the problems of peace are automatically solved by this plan...
...Said Miss Thompson in her nationally syndicated column: "The Dumbarton Oaks plan comes as a profound disillusionment to those of us who strive for a real world organization for the maintenance of peace...
...A future issue of The Progressive will contain a complete report of the Centennial Congress...
...Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, since the creation of an organization like that envisioned at Dumbarton Oaks doesn't face up to a single cause of war—among the most important of which are imperialism, competitive armaments, social and economic dislocations, and racial discrimination...
...Are the people of the United States prepared to say now that they approve a world organization in which one of the Great Powers, by its vote and its vote alone, could make legal the conquest and plunder of smaller and weaker nations...
...The American people, if we understand their temper at all, are whole-heartedly in favor of joining v/ith the other nations of the world to preserve peace, but they are just as emphatically opposed to signing a blank check which might be filled in to accomplish purposes which they regard as "an intolerable travesty on the ideas for which we have beeti fighting," to use Dorothy Thompson's language...
...An Editorial On Dumbarton Oaks By MORRIS H. RUBIN1 (Editor of The Progressive) THE preliminary outline of a new international organization charged with maintaining future peace and security was given to the world last week when the four Great Powers—Great Britain, the United States, Russia, and China—concluded their historic conferences at Dumbarton Oaks...
...We are glad to note that the observance was a tremendous success and that the American cooperative movement is prospering to the point that it has now been singled out for attack by the selfish monopoly interests of the nation...
...This does not mean, of course, that anyone insists on a perfect, or near-perfect solution of all, or nearly all of the world's problems before we com-mit ourselves to participation in a world organization...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 43
