THE WORLD LOOKS TO AMERICA
Rubin, Morris H.
The World Looks To America By MORRIS H. RUBIN (Editor Of The Progressive) IN A FEW DAYS America—and all the world—will mark the third anniversary of a day that will "live in infamy"—the day on...
...Here is Dr...
...Several prominent Indians told me they believed Churchill had purchased American aid in Europe by giving President Roosevelt a mortgage in India...
...Report From The Orient Here, then, are comments from sources friendly to the Administration dealing with the two great areas of Europe—France and Italy—in which American arms have been a decisive factor in cutting away the brutal chains of Nazism...
...The world waits for direction—for a democratic direction and a progressive program which America, more than any other power on earth can provide, because America has no desire to own anybody else and has every desire to make political freedom and economic opportunity living realities everywhere...
...Public attention, instead, has been riveted on such developments as the conferences at Dumbarton Oaks, where the chief, and in fact, the exclusive reliance was placed by the Big Three—Britain, Russia, and the United States—on force to maintain the peace settlement, with not a thought for the justice of the settlement to be enforced, and not a word about getting at the actual causes of war...
...Earlier that year, in words that rang 'round the world, Mr...
...public opinion is indifferent or uninformed, we shall run the risk of a bad peace and perhaps return to the tragedy of 'power politics' which in the past divided nations and sowed the seeds of war...
...The story is the same across the world, in the Orient...
...It is still a squeak and ope that sounds suspiciously like a "me too" whenever Great Britain or the Soviet . Union makes another move on the vast checkerboard of world politics...
...But three years ago, months before the guns went off for America, President Roosevelt contended that the program of the Four Freedoms "is no vision of a distant millenium...
...But there has been only silence in Washington, only a continuing reliance on makeshift expedients instead of a clear, purposeful, democratic program...
...The people of America, the Bishops said, "must free themselves from hatred, from distrust, from the spirit of mere expediency, from national greed...
...The United Nations have more than a dozen commissions and conferences working now on a wide variety of major problems...
...Aware of the role that America can play in shaping a democratic, anti-imperialist settlement, the Catholic bishops rightly pointed out that "public opinion in our country can exert a tremendous effort in making the peace and determining the manner of international, cooperation for its maintenance...
...THIS, then, is a brief survey—based almost exclusively on the reports and interpretations Of friends of the Administration of the failure of American foreign policy to strike a responsive chord around the world, even, or especially, in countries which owe their liberation to the power of American arms...
...What is needed is a purpose, a plan, a program...
...This judgment, by a representative Of the Administration itself, was all too amply confirmed last week by Abdul Rahman Siddiqui, Calcutta, editor and Indian nationalist leader, who represented India at the International Business Men's Conference at Rye, N. Y. He told newspaper correspondents that leaders of the millions of the Orient—the brown-skinned 400 millions in India and the yellow-skinned 450 millions in China, the Burmese, Indo-Chinese, Javanese—are watching the United States with a worried and skeptical eye...
...It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our time and generation...
...The declaration of these 100 bishops in support of a world organization to preserve peace was played up by press and radio commentators, but the even more significant assertion that no organization can preserve an unjust peace was played down by the disciples of power politics...
...7, 1941, and, all too tragically, it is the one front on which we can wreck the peace and lose everything for which we told our men they are fighting on the battlefronts of the world...
...Anything short of such procedure is tantamount to demanding that the American people sign a blank check which might subsequently be filled in to accomplish purposes which are totally alien to American principles and American aspirations...
...Nothing that has happened since has added body or firmness or purpose to America's voice in planning the peace...
...But these hopes have been crushed, Siddiqui said, by repeated British pronouncements on the preservation of empire and limitation of the Atlantic Charter to the "Atlantic area...
...No organization, no matter how perfect on paper, can hope to preserve peace if the settlement it must enforce is based on imperialism, power politics, spheres of influence, revenge, and all the other concepts of world politics -which contain within themselves the very seeds of the next war...
...The presence of our troops was interpreted as a police measure on our part to suppress political agitation during the war...
...Former Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles has warned us that we are skating on thin ice as we substitute dictation for neighborliness in our relations with Central and South American nations...
...And yet there is mounting evidence of a carefully-planned campaign to shunt this basic question of the peace settlement aside in a hurry-up effort to ram through acceptance of the Dumbarton Oaks plan—a plan which the London New Statesman and Nation warns us contains not a single "memorable phrase or hint of political philosophy...
...Impossible to have such a settlement...
...Our firepower is everywhere the decisive factor on the military fronts, but our influence for the advancement of moral values and forward-looking political principles was never at a lower ebb...
...If justice is compromised, if unreasonable concessions are made to might, grievances will rankle in the bosoms of aggrieved nations to endanger the peace of the world...
...America's role as a force for a moral, democratic settlement is shrinking every day that we fail to speak up...
...Anne O'Hare McCormick, talented correspondent for the New York Times, cabled from Rome that the Italians are fast becoming impatient with our failure to act in behalf of democratic elements within that country and our apparent unwillingness to buck the imperial designs of some of our Allies...
...We Americans are not destroyers—we are builders...
...SUPPOSE we examine for a moment the situation as it exists today—three years after the guns went off for America...
...We are now in the midst of war, not for conquest, not for vengeance, but for a world in which this nation, and all that this nation represents, will be safe for our children...
...But this is not the American way...
...It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our time and generation...
...Every thoughtful person appreciates the critical importances of creating the machinery for international cooperation to preserve peace, but the plan to focus public attention on the form of the organization to the exclusion of discussing the substance of the peace settlement itself is fraught with the greatest danger...
...This is a counsel of defeat, a treacherous invitation to seek safety and security by abandoning the fight for justice and becoming a partner in a Big Power scheme to keep the rest of the world from revolting against the surrender to power politics...
...We are now being tbld by the phrasemakers of the new philosophy that "we have come of age," that "we have outgrown our youthful idealism," that "we live in a world of hard realities" and must consequently play the game of power politics for all it is worth...
...In China, we have succeeded in antagonizing vast segments of the literate population, fiust by the Administration's blundering, indiscriminate praise for Chiang and all his works, and then by our abrupt and violent denunciation of Chiang and all his works...
...We have no confidence in a peace which does not carry into effect, without reservations or equivocations, the principles of the Atlantic Charter...
...Now there is only talk of the "Big Three," of "security by force," of "spheres of influence," of "power politics," and our "right to security bases" 10,000 miles from home...
...Or else, that the United States, worried over the impoverish-jnant of her strongest ally, England, is willing to permit deals and "arrangements" which destroy the democratic intentions of the Atlantic Charter...
...On Dec...
...In This Hemisphere Too American silence, the Indian editor reported, is being interpreted in the Orient and the Middle East as meaning President Roosevelt didn't actually mean all peoples should choose their own government...
...Siddiqui recalled that informed natives in the Orient were greatly heartened by the adoption of the Atlantic Charter as indicating a British-American desire for a rising standard of living, and promising "respect for the right of all peoples to choose their own form of government...
...7, 1941, the fantastic power of American arms has become the central fact of the world and the war...
...We feel, too, that it should provide assistance for prostrate nations in reconstructing their economic, social, and political status...
...That good will is running out slowly but surely, as anyone can see who has been here...
...1 This same lack of affirmative program and democratic direction is costing us dearly in our own Western Hemisphere where the Good Neighbor Policy, one of the genuinely great achievements of the Roosevelt Administration, is now in serious jeopardy...
...Nearly two months ago, when he appealed to President Roosevelt and Governor Dewey to speak up with an American peace program which would capture the imagination and win the hearts of the plain people of the world, Bob La Follette said: "Peoples everywhere who have been electrified by the might of our arms and the productivity of our farms and our factories have been dismayed .to hear that the voice of this giant is only a tiny squeak in the councils of the victorious powers...
...The simple fact is that we have no policy that is related to the historic symbols of America—freedom and opportunity—but rather we have tied ourselves to the imperialism and power politics of our Allies...
...Consider the facts, as jreported even by firm friends of the Roosevelt Administration...
...This is precisely what the Catholic bishops of America must have had in mind when they issued t'\eir historic statement on the peace a fortnight ago...
...Here, as The Progressive has emphasized so often, is the very heart of the whole problem...
...A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear...
...It can still be recaptured, but it will have to be quickly...
...I say "faster than most Americans suspect" because the strategy of the new school of power politics in America—the school of "realists" who have now embraced force as the symbol of peace and security—has been to gloss over news of these developments around the world...
...That last-named front is the only one on which America today is weaker than on Dec...
...7, 1941, the moral outlook, the political purpose, and the great underlying peace aims of the United States were far more democratic, far more meaningful, far more freedom-minded, and far more in tune with the deep, inner strivings of the plain people of the world than are the cynicism, compromising, expediency, and war-weary escape into power politics of today...
...The True Goal' Three years ago this week President Roosevelt said: "The true goal we seek is far above and beyond the ugly field of battle...
...Roosevelt proclaimed the Four Freedoms as America's goal, and after enumerating them (See Page 12) said: "This is no vision of a distant millennium...
...Nearly three months have gone by since we arrived in Paris to as heart-stirring a welcome as the world has ever seen...
...After citing the fact that the Communist press in Paris was constantly reminding Frenchmen of Russia's role in liberating France and encouraging her in her program of reconstruction, Uhl wrote: "Where does this leave the American who knows that his own country has poured out its blood and its resources in a magnificent military effort which has made the liberation of France possible and yet has so fumbled the political and diplomatic policy that, brutally speaking, we pay the bills and get none of the credit...
...America believes in the Four Freedoms...
...It is much like the situation, it seems to me, in which the young, idealistic public official or union spokesman is lured away from his crusade, with promises of affluence and security, into the councils of the big corporation he has been fighting...
...That can be created when we have agreed on a peace;settlement...
...George B. Cressey, chairman of the Department of Geology and Geography at Syracuse University and author of Asia's Lands and Peoples, who has recently returned from the Far East as a special representative for the State Department: "I had expected to find Indian nationalists sympathetic to the United States," he said in a speech last week, "but instead they were suspicious we have political designs on their homeland after the war...
...Last week, too, the Chicago Sun's Washington bureau predicted an imminent "press explosion" unless the State Department removes its "hush-hush" from Latin American affairs...
...This failure to proclaim an- American foreign policy not only robs us of vitally needed bargaining power with our Allies, but prevents us from crystallizing the worldwide sentiment for a democratic peace...
...As a result, our popularity and prestige are declining rapidly around the world...
...Not The American Way But now, three years afterward, "the moral order," "the good society," and the "Four Freedoms," no longer dominate the vocabulary of American statesmanship, or find their way into plans for the peace...
...F.D.R/s Opportunity There is no urgent need for more international machinery...
...Don't take my word for it...
...Roosevelt would rededicate himself—on this third anniversary of Pearl Harbor—to the Four Freedoms and announce his determination to translate them into the terms of the peace settlement...
...To that order we oppose the greater conception—the moral order...
...In India, America is no longer regarded as the symbol of freedom and democracy, but as the pawn and partner of imperialists...
...America believes that, translated into the specific problems of the peace settlement, the Four Freedoms mean a peace which rejects vengeance, crushing indemnities, spheres of influence, imperialism, competitive armaments, social and economic inequalities, racial and religious intolerance, the political and economic Balkanization of a continent like Europe, and territorial aggrandizement...
...Alexander H. Uhl, Paris correspondent for PM, couldn't have found it pleasant to send the dispatch from-which this is quoted: , "I hate to keep harping on this French business, but things just keep on happening that keep accentuating more than ever the miserable state of our relations with France and the absolute need for correcting them...
...So say the defeatists—those who pin their hopes for peace on instruments of force and reject the counsel that security is impossible without justice...
...See adjoining columns for full text of Atlantic Charter...
...We are drying up, faster than most Americans suspect, that great reservoir of good-will about which the late Wendell Willkie used to speak so urgently...
...Americans who yearn for lasting peace, who are hopefully prepared to join with the other nations of the world to preserve a just, honorable, and democratic peace, must demand, in ever increasing numbers, that the general outline of the peace settlement be debated and considered at the same time that we are debating and considering the mechanics of enforcing that settlement...
...No international organization will be able to maintain a peace which is unfair and unjust...
...Since the United States has remained silent, he pointed out, imperialist declarations by Winston Churchill have set the precedent for the French to hold Indo-China and North Africa, the Dutch to hold the Indies, and the Belgians to hold the Congo...
...The common man everywhere on earth would rejoice if Mr...
...In each case the answer is the same— the lack of a dynamic, democratic American policy has cost us dearly in good will...
...The World Looks To America By MORRIS H. RUBIN (Editor Of The Progressive) IN A FEW DAYS America—and all the world—will mark the third anniversary of a day that will "live in infamy"—the day on which rampant Japanese militarism struck us a paralyzing blow at Pearl Harbor and plunged us headlong into World War II...
...Having just conducted a free election in the midst of a global holocaust—the only nation on earth to permit the most meaningful expression of a democracy in the midst of war—the United States had more than ever been in a position to assert leadership in the fight for freedom...
...The miracle of American production, which has no parallel anywhere, anytime, has turned the tide of battle, and today, three years after Pearl Harbor, the two surviving Axis partners are everywhere in retreat, delaying their day of doom only by bitter fighting, costly rearguard actions, and the incredible weakness of Allied diplomacy and political warfare...
...When we resort to force, as now we must, we are determined that this force shall be directed toward ultimate good as well as against ultimate evil...
...In the three years which have shot by since that memorable Sunday, Dec...
...That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb...
...If prostrate nations are not assisted in giving to their peoples fair economic opportunities, they will become the arena of civil strife and turmoil...
...These native leaders feel, he said, that the United States is innocently selling itself down the river or silently had adopted imperialism...
Vol. 8 • December 1944 • No. 49
