HOPE LIVES ON
Hope Lives On WE COME NOW to the time of the year when it is most embarrassing to be a human being. For this is the season when, to the angels or to neutral observers from another planet, man must...
...For the brief moment of this holy season, "Peace on earth, good will toward men" will have equal billing in our hearts with "Unconditional Surrender...
...Who do you think made that stuff—pixies...
...Christmas, with its meaning of love and brotherhood, challenges us to preserve our faith in mankind, to remain true to the best that is in us, to revive our spirits with the beauty and serenity of the holiday season so that we can fight on, harder, for a tomorrow of peace and democracy and opportunity for all...
...Perhaps, however, they may be interested to hear what the men who speak for GI Joe through the Army weekly, "Yank," think of their shabby practices...
...Our annual tribute to the humble Carpenter who taught peace and good will shares the stage with the gospel of hate and the clamor for vengeance...
...Hearts are heavy, and much of the world is in ruins and soaked with blood...
...Your support has never been more generous...
...But hope in people's hearts lives on...
...Fischer utteved an eloquent warning that the Dumbarton Oaks security scheme was a device to maintain and police the imperialist spheres of influence which the victorious Allied powers have been carving out for themselves...
...You can't ignore figures: In the first 109 days, of the Normandy invasion we put ashore 17 million ship4ons of Allied vehicles and supplies, more than twice the total received by Gen...
...Repeated efforts by official agencies, including high military authorities, to present the true picture has had little effect in curbing this vicious campaign—a campaign which apparently is aimed at causing a wild scramble between veterans and civilians for jobs after the war...
...Jay Allen, too, struck a keynote which has been a basic premise in The Progressive's position on foreign policy-—that America's role in world affairs most not be one of weary acquiescence in the imperialism and power politics designs of our Allies, but rather one of leading the way to a great democratic advance based on a Four Freedoms peace settlement...
...Yet people everywhere thirst and hunger for the message of Christmas, the message that all men are brothers...
...With your help, it will grow and fight on for a batter America and a better world...
...For this is the season when, to the angels or to neutral observers from another planet, man must seem his most foolish...
...Both men watched the failure of the Versailles peace settlement of the last war from key posts in Europe...
...Thank you for your faith in The Progressive...
...No, you can't be very enthusiastic about Christmas this year...
...Refreshingly Different TWO famed foreign correspondents, Louis Fischer and Jay Allen, gave a recent Milwaukee audience a pair of lectures that was refreshingly different from the syrup and twaddle which make up so much of the material of those who ride the women's club lecture circuit...
...It is going to be tough enough reconverting to full civilian production without starting a fight among the men who will do the producing...
...This is Christmastime and we of the human family, one half of which is busily engaged in the business of blowing up the other half, will, without hardly lifting our eyes from the brutal carnage, pay homage to the Prince of Peace with the same fervor and sincerity that we go about our appointed task of slaughtering...
...Thanks HERE in the offices of The Progressive, a grateful staff has seen the mailman deliver, this Christmas season, stacks upon stacks of mail from you—your response to our Christmas drive for gift subscriptions...
...All over the earth men and women look to us as the trustees of liberty," Allen declared...
...While they pay bombastic lip-service to "national unity" out of one corner of their mouths, they are attempting, out of the other corner, to create the worst sort of dissension among workers and servicemen by magnifying strike problems all out of proportion to the true production picture...
...Both men saw Fascism and Hitlerism ride the wave of discontent which followed that settlement and plunge the whole world into a new and ghastlier war...
...It is heartening to know that even if a large section of our press and some double-talking politicians haven't the common decency to attempt to get the truth to the men in the service on this critical question, at least the soldiers' own organ has the courage and foresight to do so...
...A recent editorial in "Yank" admitted the existence of considerable ill-feeling among servicemen toward striking.civilians, but went on to say: "But you can't disguise the fact that the AFL and the CIO have outlawed strikes for the duration, that the few you read about are wildcat strikes...
...GI's Look Ahead THERE are in this country a number of unscrupulous politicians and publishers who are playing fast and loose with an explosive situation...
...Heaven help us if we disillusion them again...
...This is precisely the position The Progressive has taken—that failure to get at the basic social and economic dislocations around the world which cause war will prevent us from achieving lasting peace, no matter how perfect the world league we plan on paper...
...We are winning the war by working together, and we will have to work together after the war if we want jobs and prosperity...
...Because of your confidence in The Progressive, hundreds and hundreds of new readers will open this issue and the next 52, and many will enroll in our crusade for a just, honorable, democratic peace...
...The best of holiday greetings...
...It is the time of all times when people feel an urgency to speak from the heart to each other...
...Only through moving toward radical change, through a genuine program of social reconstruction, can we build a true internationalism that will preserve the peace, Fischer asserted...
...And if you begin by setting veteran against civilian, you will end by setting Protestant against Catholic, Catholic against Jew, white against Negro—and you will wind up having the very thing we are fighting the war to destroy...
...Pershing through friendly ports in the entire 19 months of our participation in the first World War...
Vol. 8 • December 1944 • No. 52
