WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH AMERICA
Rubin, Morris H.
What's The Matter With America? By MORRIS H. RUBIN (Editor Of The Progressive) WHAT'S happened to the conscience of America? Has it been so battered and bashed by nearly 4 years of total war...
...We announced to the world that this was a war against racism, but in our first hour of victory we mass indict a whole people for the crimes and sins of their leaders...
...We have denounced the secret connivings of the Axis gangsters hidden away at Berchtesgaden, but today we sanction the secret bartering by our leaders in a guarded "compound" at the Prussian palace of Potsdam...
...But the raids apparently did upset the civilian population quite a bit—which is a good thing...
...We cannot export democracy or tolerance or justice or a way of life, or force these on people at the point of a bayonet...
...We have bragged of a war to end imperialism, but now we not only accept the growing imperialism of our Allies, but also prepare to take a new flier in imperialism of our own...
...We can build respect and a healthy faith in democracy by our national example of what we Americans do—at home and abroad—¦ to make democracy work...
...Where is America's contempt for those who rub noses in the dirt ? Where is our loathing of arrogance and our wrathful indignation for the Hitler doctrine of total hate and total intolerance ? * * # HAVE we been fighting Hitler so long that we have taken on his image...
...Today, we in America have the example of that period and the counsel of a great man to guide us...
...It isn't too late to shake ourselves out of our moral doldrums and face up to the challenge of our time, as Lincoln did in his...
...And what were the results of this Himmler-like terror raid ? The front-page headlines here at home screamed that 80,000 had been arrested, but far, far down in the story was the cold fact that the overwhelming majority were released immediately after establishing their identification...
...The immortal Lincoln, towering far above the petty lust for revenge of his day, dared to stand up to the hatemongers with his noble doctrine of "malice toward none and charity for all...
...But perhaps most pitiful of all was the silence of the American press—and the continuing "see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil" attitude of American liberals...
...Where is the nation's conscience...
...This war, we proclaimed, was to be a deathblow against regimentation, but we are moving now toward peacetime conscription for the first time in our history...
...Edwin Sibert, Chief of Intelligence in occupied Germany, jubilantly proclaimed the "operation" as "very successful," but admitted, according to a wireless dispatch to the New York Times: "The search uncovered no evidence of organized resistance...
...Americans who hadn't realized the extent to which Hitler's ideas have engulfed our own leaders must rub their eyes in amazement at this fantastic statement by a ranking American officer...
...Of all the great dailies which come to this office, only one—believe it or not, the arch reactionary Chicago Tribune—had the courage to speak up of America's shame...
...The memory of this man and his great understanding shine ever brighter through the years—while the small spirits and midget minds who clamored for—and got—their revenge are forgotten or marked in our history as blundering asses...
...This, we shouted, was a war against militarism, but our Allies and ourselves are preparing to embark on the greatest armament race of all time...
...American boys who never bargained for a contemptible Gestapo assignment when they were drafted to fight for the Four Freedoms must have been ashamed of their night-riding, Ku Klux-style raid on the homes of 15,000,000 Germans...
...On the whole, the investigation showed less lawlessness than you probably would find in a similar area in the United States...
...All weapons and other illegal property appeared to be in the hands of persons who individually were just stupid or criminal...
...Aren't we just a little bit ashamed to read that nonNazi Germans in our zone are beginning to talk wistfully of life in the zone occupied by dictatorial Russia, the Russia they feared and hated so much ? Isn't there in this fantastic contradiction the kind of challenge that a free America ought to grasp with daring and courage and a crusading zeal to spread democracy, and not a negative counsel of brutality and vigilantism and bigotry ? * * * AMERICANS, more than any other people on earth, should understand the harvest of hate that comes from this type of treatment of a conquered people...
...BRIG...
...Are we—after all these bitter, bloody months, with a million casualties thus far—to prove Goebbels a great prophet when he taunted us with the prediction that "Nazism cannot be defeated for even if we lose on the field of battle, our ideas will in the end engulf the victors...
...Where is the liberal's love of liberty...
...What IS the matter with America...
...Has it been so battered and bashed by nearly 4 years of total war that we have lost all feeling for freedom, all sensitivity to injustice and oppression ? Last week there occurred in the American occupation zone of Germany the greatest Gestapo raid in history—conducted by American boys acting under orders of a power-drunk, revenge-minded military bureaucracy—and there was hardly a peep of protest in this land of the free and home of the brave...
...We have talked of a war for freedom, and we now agree to the trading of peoples and the extension of totalitarianism...
...Nothing short of a complete reversal of our present policies in Europe can do the job the American way...
...The rest were miserably and contemptibly silent—yes, even those which profess to progressivism and load their mastheads with high-sounding humbuggery about their role as guardians of light and liberty...
...But our memory falters and our conscience sleeps...
...THE people of America have done too magnificent a job in winning the war—on the battlefield and in the factories, farms, and mines—to have the fruits of their sweat and toil and blood and sacrifice squandered away by a new school of cynics and "realists...
...What IS the matter with America...
...Even as we were destroying the Gestapo, we were taking the Gestapo's place...
...The degrading American exhibition in Germany last week will cost us dearly in badly needed good will all through Europe...
...even as we were conquering Nazism on the.field of battle, we were borrowing from Nazism in the field of ideas...
...Isn't the conscience of America disturbed at all when we learn that the name of democratic America is becoming a symbol of hate and bigotry and arrogance in the zone of Germany we patrol...
...This, we told the world and assured ourselves, was a war to carry the Four Freedoms "everywhere in the world," but now "freedom from fear" and "freedom from want" are to be denied millions of people in our lust for vengeance...
...America's great role —to prove to the peoples of Europe by the power of our example that democracy is their best bet in the momentous period just ahead—seems to have been perverted and distorted by an arrogant clique of brass hats—and civilian officials too—into a determination to show the Germans that Hitler had given a system worth imitating and emulating...
...Five hundred thousand American boys, who were once told that they were being conscripted to fight a war for freedom, were ordered out one night last week to search and ransack every home and person—15,000,000 men, women, and children —in the area of conquered Germany that we police and occupy...
...But it is later than we think...
Vol. 9 • August 1945 • No. 32
