IS CHURCHILL THROUGH?
Hanighen, Frank C.
Is Churchill Through? Washington, D. C. Good Neighbor Or Big Stick By FRANK C. HANIGHEN Twilight Of A God? CHURCHILL, rewarded with a dukedom, will retire from the premiership before long,...
...Now I will admit that this picture of Poland was the one I believed in before I visited that country in 1938...
...As a result, 82 per cent of all land-holdings in Poland belonged to small peasants at the outset of the present war...
...Hull Reaches For A Shillelagh Here is where Secretary Hull seems to be abandoning the good, grey policy of Good Neighbor and reaching for the shillelagh...
...These, at any rate, are reported to be the political considerations now entertained by the British ruling group...
...My observations in prewar Poland check with those of Buell on this subject...
...If the busy postwar planners want to do something positive, instead of re-drawing maps to give Russia a part of Poland and Poland a part of Germany, they would do well to direct their attention to this, the fundamental economic problem of Poland —and not to some fantastic Marxian-inspired picture of a pre-war Poland that never existed...
...The question of recognition of the new revolutionary government in Bolivia has apparently brought the matter to a head...
...The economic set-up in Poland was quite different from that pictured by the Communist and leftist press in the rest of the world...
...Also, the United States by its policy of isolating Argentina diplomatically and trying to force that country to abandon its neutrality, to which it stubbornly adheres, has produced a counter-diplomatic offensive from the tough Argentine military government...
...These leaders, in order to achieve the task of winning the war, have compromised themselves too heavily to assume a quite different—and perhaps contradictory—task, that of winning the peace for the Empire...
...He deserted the role of civil servant and behind-the-scenes adviser early in 1938, when he was elected to Parliament from a Scottish University seat (which, in British parlance, means that the ruling class chose a surefire seat in order to shift him to the open political field...
...Or his illness may merely offer an excuse for the Tories to relegate him to political Valhalla...
...The balance of power in Europe, as usual, lies at the bottom of this movement...
...Other reports in the capital confirm Brown's statement...
...Indeed, Anderson served as the political brain-trust-er for Chamberlain while Sir Horace Wilson acted as economic adviser...
...This chapter in Sir John's record bears recalling today...
...Its Deputy Leader then, M. Mikolajczyk, is now Premier of the official Polish-government-in-exile in London, and at present battling the Russian government over the boundary question...
...This was part of the "Green Revolution" as M. \V...
...In fact, this explosive situation has had sympathetic repercussions in at least six South American states...
...CHURCHILL, rewarded with a dukedom, will retire from the premiership before long, according to Constantine Brown, whose column in the Washington Evening Star has become the most significant column in the nation's capital since the passing of Alsop and...
...No intelligent observer in Warsaw at that time, whether Polish or foreign, would confirm this Communist view in any detail...
...This fact of his career, too, bears consideration...
...Churchill was long a precious asset to the British ruling class for his ability, as many of them put it, "to handle Roosevelt...
...He may well be ill and tired, and that may provide the convenient exit door...
...This should be no surprise, for the Rumanian and Jugoslav governments of that era similarly sn-gaged in intensive land reform and land distribution...
...The problem in Poland, then, (and in a free postwar Poland, if Moscow permits such an entity) is the siphoning of 5 to 8 million of its teeming rural population into industry, as Raymond Leslie Buell pointed out in his book on Poland...
...Even a Polish Communist fellow-traveller with whom I talked rejected it...
...Indeed, this experience as an Empire policeman may make Sir John highly valuable in years to come, when not only India, but new additions to the imperial structure—like parts of the old Belgian, Dutch, and French empires—require something a bit stiffer than the Golden Rule...
...If all these landlords had been expropriated and their land distributed to the peasants, the fundamental problem would not have been altered to anything more than a negligible extent...
...Fodor, in his book Plot and Counter-Plot In Central Europe, described the land reform wave which successfully swept the Balkans and Eastern Europe in those years (with the exception of still feudal Hungary...
...Sir John, in the years following the last war, won distinction among the ruling set as a civil servant in the effort to put down "rebellion" in Ireland...
...This government, as a matter of fact, has a truly more liberal Complexion than pre-war governments...
...Not only Churchill, but Anthony Eden, his Foreign Minister, have personally made too many commitments and agreements with other countries to serve efficiently a new pattern of foreign policy...
...A Note On Poland The other day, I heard a radio commentator glibly explain the economic situation of Poland — obviously depending on propaganda statements from Moscow...
...Sir John, and folk like him, deserve attention in the piping times before us...
...Kintner...
...It was remarked at the time in London that Sir John, in his representation of British arms interests, rivalled Leopold Amery, now Secretary for India...
...The fact is that Poland, even under reactionary governments, had engaged in widespread distribution of the land to peasants in the two decades of her independence...
...Rebellious developments are appearing not only in Paraguay, but in Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Uruguay...
...Among those who derided it in conversation with me was Victor Alter, prominent Polish Socialist, later executed by Stalin's GPU...
...The Administration is hardly unmindful that it must face the voters next Fall...
...He was made a director of the Midland Bank, the ICI chemical trust, and the Vickers arms firm...
...For, if we do agree to deliver such supplies, then the Administration must be prepared to institute a rationing program in this country that will make all previous programs seem like the horn of plenty...
...But the picture is false...
...If Sir John Anderson is their man, they have chosen a political figure well adapted to a new policy with an accent on Empire and a twist different from that of Churchill...
...In short, the old political trick of letting new men execute the double-cross...
...The Administration is now trying to handle that hot potato...
...Informed Washington sources say that the Secretary, aroused by the Argentine policy, asked the British to join with us in an export and import embargo of the Argentine...
...Yet another yellowing page must be examined...
...With his recent conflict of view with the President at the Cairo and Teheran conferences, and with the new "honeymoon" between Roosevelt and Stalin in full swing, Churchill seems to have lost his usefulness...
...Ecuador's situation is said to be particularly interesting...
...Brown also reports that Churchill will hand over the reins of premiership to the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Anderson...
...In thus wise, does the British ruling class adorn and fortify its chosen ones...
...They simply asked us whether we were prepared to supply the large quantities of beef and wheat which Argentine habitually ships to Britain, and which are an important part of British supplies...
...If true, these reports forecast a new political pattern to conform to a new foreign policy for Britain, forecast by F. A. Voigt (as reported in this column several months ago), and as outlined by General Smuts (See The Progressive, Dec...
...Briefly, the United States by selling arms to Brazil •has made it the most powerfully armed nation south of the border...
...There are good practical reasons for such changes now...
...Sir John's Qualifications But Sir John's career possesses other interesting aspects...
...The British, it seems, said neither "yes" nor "no...
...In any case, a new front must be formed for the security of England and the Empire...
...Overshadowed by other world events, and insufficiently explained by the daily press, a very serious situation between the United States and South American republics has developed in recent weeks...
...This has upset the balance of power formerly existent between Brazil and Argentina, and other republics...
...Britain again as in 1939, when Chamberlain began to change from "appeasement" to "resistance", is engaged in a highly interesting wheeling movement...
...Later, Sir John served his King as Governor of Bengal, in the years 1932-37—a highly important post in the British Raj, as Bengal was one of the acutely troublesome centers of Indian independence activity in those days, requiring stern police methods...
...The trouble with Poland was that British and American moneylenders preferred to provide funds for German industry rather than Polish in the years following the last war...
...With him, in the cabinet of this government, are two more members of the Peasants Party...
...He painted a picture of Poland—pre-war and present—as a country composed entirely of a mass of land-less peasants writhing under the knout of a few rich, aristocratic landlords, and the new puppet Polish government in Moscow as harbingers of freedom for these masses oppressed by landlordism...
...His name is associated with the "Black and Tans" policy—the policy of using strong-arm gangster squads to terrorize the Irish people...
...Few men labored as strenuously as he in the effort to avoid conflict with Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy in the years 1937 and 1938...
...For if Sir John is elevated, it may not rest so well with the Left in Britain...
...Poland's Real Problem The Peasants Party, in fact, was one of the most important parties in Poland before the war...
...During the days when the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain was in full swing, anti-ap-peasers bombarded him with opprobrious epithets...
...Land reform in Poland, despite the survival before the war of a comparatively small number of large landlords like the Radziwills, was not the fundamental economic problem of the country...
...New Front Men Needed Also, political techniques call for new front men...
...But there is far more in all this than meets the naked eye...
...When any power or coalition of powers threaten Britain by aspirations to dominate the continent—as Russia seems to be doing today—then British spokesmen announce a new motif, and alterations in the political set-up follow...
Vol. 8 • January 1944 • No. 4
