WELCOME SUPPORT

...Here, as The Progressive pointed out last week, we have a magnificent opportunity to learn from our ghastly blunders in Europe and to abandon our recent practice of going back on our promises...

...JOHN W. SNYDER, President Truman's top reconversion official, reported to his chief, Pearson tells us, that "the entire reconversion picture was being paralyzed by exorbitant Army-Navy refusal to reconvert war plants and hoarding of a tremendous number of men in the Army...

...If the Japanese monarch were to become a creature of a democratically chosen Parliament [as in Great Britain], instead of a creature of the militarists and navalists," Mr...

...Specific actions should include the complete elimination of Army authority in the operation of the nation's economy, a prompt green-light for the Anti-Trust Division to resume monopoly prosecutions which were broken up by the brass-hats, abolition of wartime Selective Service and refusal to enact a program of peacetime conscription, reduction of military and naval personnel to the size determined by Congress to be necessary for our defense, and immediate publication of all documents and reports throwing light on the Pearl Harbor disaster and the general operations of the Army and Navy during the war...

...THE responsibility for shaping the political reconstruction of postwar Japan falls largely on the United States...

...ALTHOUGH these two Congressional experts on the Orient differed on other phases of the Japanese settlement, they agreed that retention of the Emperor would not interfere with the development of democratic forces in Japan...

...This is not what we understand by the much overworked word, democracy, which appears to me to need definition...

...Thomas and Rep...

...They were anxious, they said, to avoid any impression that this had been a "racial war," and here, of course, they ran afoul of American racists who can speak of the Japanese only as "yellow monkeys" and worse...

...Howard boils the whole issue of the Emperor into a few crisp sentences...

...Sen...

...Howard explains, "the basis would be securely laid for a free, democratic, and peaceful Japan...

...Although it is the fashion to blame Congress for delays in reconversion, it is an undisputed fact that the perilous, planless drifting of recent months has been a direct consequence of Army-Navy refusal to permit preparation for peace...

...Drew Pearson, Washington columnist, confirmed last week what The Progressive has long contended —that civilian officials had become errand boys for the Washington generals and admirals in matters of first-rank civilian importance...

...Mike Mansfield, Montana Democrat, both of whom have spent many years in the Far East, and both of whom are forthright progressives...

...Waging of a total war on all the continents and all the oceans of the world has placed in the hands of the brass-hats fantastic grants of power which they have used not only to wage war, but to break up anti-trust suits, prevent orderly reconversion, and short-circuit the democratic processes of a free people...

...The Potsdam Declaration, which we proclaimed with our Allies as the basis for peace with Japan, contains not merely "demands," but specific pledges to the Japanese people—pledges of a settlement based not on vengeance, exploitation, and racism, but a peace rooted in the enduring principles of democracy and cooperation...

...Said Mr...

...Although it is clear that he has no affection for the institution of monarchy or the personality of Hirohito, he recognizes that "the basic issue is control of the throne...

...A Must For America THE loosening of the military bureaucracy's grip on the nation is an immediate "must" for America...

...Thomas, long a missionary in Japan who spoke to the Nipponese by short-wave radio regularly during the war, expressed the conviction that the Japanese themselves would root out the military influences and work toward democracy...

...This appraisal is rejected by such ranting exhibitionists as New York's La Guardia and the Navy's Halsey, but it has won the endorsement of such earnest, honest students of the Orient as Sen...

...The important thing that has to be changedand here again he was on unassailable ground—is the constitutional provision that puts the military and naval ministers above the civil government by allowing them to report directly to the Emperor...

...Sen...

...Bevin: "The governments set up in those countries [Soviet-dominated Bulgaria, Rumania, and Hungary] do not, in our view, represent the majority of the people and the impression we get is that one kind of totalitarianism is being replaced by another...

...Welcome Support THE fight for a democratic peace settlement for Europe—a fight which seems not to interest so many liberals bemused with the "realism" of power politics—won enormous support this week when Ernest Bevin, hard-hitting Foreign Secretary in Britain's Labor Cabinet, launched a powerful attack on the betrayal of democratic principles in Soviet-dominated areas of the continent...

...Thus, while a coal crisis was developing and the railroads were breaking down—both for lack of manpower—the Army arrogantly refused to contemplate release of miners and rail workers although its ranks were bulging with more men to fight a one-front war than had been required in waging a two-front war...

...Elbert Thomas, Utah Democrat, and Rep...

...Mansfield made an excellent point when they recommended the use of Japanese-Americans in the occupation of Japan...

...Opportunity Knocks Again HARRY PAXTON HOWARD, who has lived and worked in the Orient for 25 years and who himself felt the lash of the Japanese war-lords" when he was expelled from Japan as a radical, cuts through a mass of emotional mumbo-jumbo about the future of Nippon in his authoritative article on Page 5 of this issue of The Progressive...

...Two sentences in Bevin's forthright analysis of conditions in the Soviet sphere seem to sum up the burden of many an article in The Progressive in recent months...

...The future of the monarchy should then be decided by the Japanese peoples themselves...

...The Truman Administration should act at once, and Congress as soon as it reconvenes in a fortnight, to strip the military and naval establishments of all authority in all matters except those which have a direct bearing on the maintenance and supply of occupation forces and the recruiting and supplying of the regular, peacetime Army and Navy...

...The War Mobilizer complained that he had been called a man of inaction, but said it was impossible to act unless he had sufficient backing to override the Army-Navy brass-hats...