WAKE UP, AMERICA!
Thomas, Norman
Wake Up, America! By NORMAN THOMAS EDITOR'S NOTE: Advance proof of this article expressing Mr. Thomas' views on one of the paramount issues of the Presidential campaign, have been sent to the...
...Actually even before this war is won, the power politics rivalry of Stalin and Churchill is acute...
...Worst of all are the so-called liberals...
...It is not yet too late for the American people to wake up...
...The situation in Asia is if anything even more dangerous in its contribution to the death of the generation of my little grandchildren in a war far worse than their fathers are fighting...
...I do not speak merely as a critic...
...At present it looks as if the answer was, yes...
...Not one of these proposals makes sense from the standpoint of our own future interest...
...They are writing off their idealistic demands five cents on the dollar, and they aren't even much worried to find out if the nickel isn't plugged...
...Labor isn't kicking...
...Before and during the present Presidential campaign I have consistently advocated a peace of organized cooperation, political and economic, between peoples freed from any foreign yoke...
...Terms Of Lasting Peace It is complete betrayal of truth to say that the incomplete Dumbarton Oaks agreement changes the picture I have drawn...
...That completely amoral realist, Stalin, in his drive for power, deliberately sacrificed the patriots of Warsaw, whose rising his own radio station had asked, as part of his settled policy of killing the Ehrlichs and Alters so that he could more easily deal with a puppet Poland...
...Unconditional Surrender'*- proposals by leaders among the Allies like Secretary Morgenthau, Sumner Welles, that arch Tory, capitalist, and imperialist, Lord Vansittart, and the Russian official press, permanently to reduce your country to a peasant economy at the cost of more lives than even the war, to partition your nation, to hand large parts of it over to Stalin and a puppet Poland, and to send millions of your sons into the work camps of Russia—would you not prefer to fight to the bitter end...
...It rests on the ridiculous assumption, contradicted by both history and common sense, that the only cause of this war was the wickedness of the German and Japanese people...
...It contains features which are potentially useful but not in the setting of a peace of vengeance and imperialism...
...This race in competitive armaments of itself will make a joke of the Dumbarton Oaks agreement...
...Besides, as one worker put it to me, "Roosevelt put more money in my pocket than any other President...
...He and Churchill know what they want, and in terms of power politics, their programs make some sort of sense...
...The Progressive will print any rejoinders they care to make to Mr...
...We Socialists have proposed the terms to be offered to the German and Japanese people...
...They call for disarmament, restoration of loot, recompense of refugees...
...Under cover of making the peoples of Europe and America drunk with hate, Vansittart and Company are playing a desperate game to keep the masters of Europe divided and to restore private capitalism...
...it was meant to make the people drunk with emotion so that they could not face issues...
...He is underwriting the indefinite maintenance of the Dutch, French, and British Empires in the Far East, none of which can save itself...
...The slogan was disingenuous if not insincere from the beginning...
...What America Wants Suppose you, my readers, had been torn in Germany...
...Sooner or later native revolts will be aided by an outside power, probably Russia...
...Dewey and Dulles seem to approve...
...This campaign so far as the old parties is concerned is, in relation to the magnitude of the crisis, at once a disgrace and a menace to democracy...
...It was not carried out in the case of Italy where the armistice terms, still kept secret from the people, were arrived at after long negotiation with those builders of fascism, the King and Badoglio...
...Britain went to war to guarantee the integrity of Poland, but Poland, her ally, will be far worse treated by Stalin than Rumania her enemy...
...To prevent Russia from taking over the whole Balkans the British landed troops in Greece...
...There can be lasting peace on no other terms...
...But what were you offered...
...Neither of them has a plan fit for lasting peace...
...The whole approach to peace is wrong with regard both to Germany and Japan...
...It was meant to hide the divisions among the Allies...
...Suppose you longed for peace and that your eyes were opening at last to the crimes which Hitler's censorship had largely concealed from you...
...You would want to end the war if you could get any terms that gave any hope at all for the continued life cf a decent Germany...
...I charge that his slogan of "Unconditional Surrender," first thrown out at a press conference at Casablanca, but now a matter of Allied policy, is directly responsible for the lives of thousands upon thousands of American boys, lost without excuse by the unnecessary prolongation of the war...
...Doesn't Sidney Hillman sit in the House of Bosses which runs the Democratic Party...
...Thomas' views on one of the paramount issues of the Presidential campaign, have been sent to the headquarters of his two opponents—President Roosevelt and Gov...
...I have said that guidance of so-called backwards people must be to complete self-government, under international authority, not under any empire...
...There was even a moment when Hitler and the Junker generals fell out that you might have considered constructive revolution...
...The question is not an insult...
...Even so Stalin has reached warm water which the British have always tried to deny to the Russians...
...Now they either support or do not actively oppose a program for postwar military conscription in America—precisely the system which has cursed Europe...
...They are still fighting the political battles of, 1941...
...Dewey—for their comment and reply...
...Power Politics Rivalries This program not only prolongs this war at infinite hurt to all that we hold dear...
...They who used to profess faith in the masses rejected the idea of a constructive revolution in Germany in favor of their beautiful trust in Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt...
...it invites the next...
...Two men, each in his own way a political expert and a master of political double talk, unite in fooling the people while they amuse them by a bitter personal conflict with some discussion of secondary issues...
...Are we going to let Roosevelt pledge the lives of our sons to fight against this by agreement at Dumbarton Oaks or anywhere else...
...They told me before Pearl Harbor that we must get into the war or be doomed to perpetual militarism...
...He didn't mind much that it took a war to do it...
...To consent to the plans of Roosevelt and Dewey is to pass avoidable sentence of death upon thousands of our sons and to invite a worse fate for the generation of our little children...
...But the liberals have no'holy cause any longer except to belabor something they call "isolationism...
...But the sands in the hour glass run very low...
...Conscript armies are useless without the latest developments in arms...
...I think there was a time, perhaps there is still a time, when for the sake of American cooperation in maintaining a decent peace, the realist, Stalin, would have moderated his power politics...
...Thomas' article...
...He first attacked Finland as inexcusably as Hitler attacked Poland and then imposed upon her completely destructive terms without open protest from Churchill, who has more important things to save in the game of power politics, or from Roosevelt...
...But we Americans who want nothing but lasting peace and a chance for mutual-ly satisfactory trade with a contented Europe are given no program by our President but "Unconditional Surrender" for our enemies and blind appeasement for our Allies...
...Roosevelt's handling of the German situation (which seems to have Mr...
...Roosevelt has done nothing but appease him in eastern Europe while in western Europe he, together with Churchill, has made so many mistakes in handling Italy and France—consider for instance the reckless bombing of western European cities—that he has all but thrown them into the lap of Stalin and the international Communist movement...
...Its inevitable effect has been to unite the German people to Hitler in a last ditch struggle...
...you did not choose the land of your birth...
...NEVER in my life have I so wanted to cry havoc, to awake my fellow citizens to facts and the meaning of them, to persuade them to shake off the curious mixture of indifference, helplessness, cynicism, and false confidence with which they face the future...
...Dewey's entire approval) is, whatever his motives, one of the outstanding blunders— or should I say crimes?—of history...
...Neither of them has any plan to forestall chronic depression and the unemployment which in itself will be perhaps the greatest single factor in making new war possible...
...But then they promise to all peoples inclusion in the benefits of organized cooperation...
...that if they are completely crushed and if the three principal allies will stick together, we shall have peace...
...They are not terms with Hitler or the war lords...
...Apparently Roosevelt is still playing petroleum politics in the tumultuous Middle East...
...Even the proposal to divide Germany into separate zones for policing plays into the hands of Stalin and his power politics for reasons that Dorothy Thompson has ably been pointing out...
...He had no son at the front, and he refused to think of tomorrow's debt and tomorrow's unemployment...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 43
