LONDON: PEACE VERSUS LOOT
BEALS, CARLETON
London: Peace Versus Loot By CARLETON BEALS EVERYONE knows the parable of the three treasure hunters. They murdered to get their treasure. Then two ganged up against the third. Then the two...
...They will come to America...
...Shades of Goethe...
...But the Italian people were ignored...
...We will probably give and give, even though the sums already suggested would mean the equivalent of giving our whole railway system away, the equivalent of all our school system and more, ten times the value of all our hospitals in all the land...
...Must they impose their totalitarianism and their harsh dogma on all the world ? Yesterday British diplomacy held sway in most of the Baltic and the Balkans, in Poland, in Jugoslavia, in Austria, but it rules there no more and is not likely ever to rule there again...
...Forgotten entirely that once moving slogan, "Open covenants openly arrived at...
...Grab the air monopoly of all Latin-America, and call it good-neighborliness...
...We can't get oil rights and air power in the Mediterranean and the Near East, we can't even get proper trading rights, if the region is a monopoly of either power or of both, or if it is a continuing bone of contention between two rival empires...
...For that not one red cent...
...We can attempt to validate once more the principle of the free determination of all peoples...
...Three treasure hunters (and some little ones), three bands of carpet-baggers...
...That is our card, and we have not played it...
...Before that could be taken up, Russia made a separate unilateral agreement, by which she grabbed fifty per cent of all the resources of that unhappy land...
...Yesterday Italy was the land of Mussolini, who bullied and browbeat and dazzled his people—besides murdering some of them...
...In the American zone "democracy" consists of translations of Benjamin Franklin and Emerson...
...The people of the Mediterranean were ignored...
...One, it has been reported—and the one most arbitrary in his denial of all news to the press—actually did riot know the difference between "Baltic" and "Balkan...
...If joint international control of the Mediterranean, why not in the Orient...
...We can get the league founded in San Francisco in motion...
...And yet they were settling the fate of hundreds of millions of people...
...We can bring the smaller nations and peoples into open conference...
...They called on the inland government of Poland, the present puppet Communist regime, though the tens of thousand of Poles who gave their sweat and blood to help "free" Italy dare not even return to their native land...
...THE Russians were right—dead right...
...But the much smaller men in London wrapped themselves about with even greater secrecy...
...American occupational currency has already drained hundreds of millions of dollars of consumers goods out of Europe and Asia...
...There in London—once the seat of the world's greatest empire, seat now of a dying empire...
...They set out to settle the fate of Italy and its colonies, a land of more than 40 million people, and colonies with millions of Arabs, and all bordered by lands with a hundred million people whose existence depends on the decisions reached concerning Italy...
...It is farther from England than it is from Russia...
...But the treasure-hunters merely quarreled over the loot...
...Forgotten were old pledges...
...Grab the oil of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Ethiopia under the noses of the Russians and English...
...But behind it, the looting goes on...
...But it is closer to the Arab world than to either...
...IT was hoped that the long black-out era of Yalta and Teheran and Potsdam, where a few dictators met in utter secrecy to determine the fate of the world, moving men and nations about the board like pawns, the men who there assumed the mantel of superior God-like wisdom over their fellows, but who blundered and muddled and muddied—it was hoped that such medieval diplomacy was drawing to its end, that the windup of hostilities would make such arbitrary conduct—a la Berch-tesgaden—no longer necessary...
...The London conference is naked...
...They called in Australia on the other side of the globe, but they didn't call in Egypt or the Arab States, vitally affected...
...It may be small change compared to the loss spent in getting hold of it...
...Are we going to pay out billions for the Russians to communize the Arabs for the greater power of Russia...
...Although they did not insult the world with stories of their banquets and wines, their piano and juke box playing, the fine robes and decorations they wore, the splendid, guards that kept them safe, even so the agenda for London was not given out, problems were not aired...
...Today the world of kingly power, the world of the three treasure hunters is naked...
...Under such a tremendous handicap has the peace conference for Europe met and blundered and failed...
...They called in New Zealand, a little island 10,000 miles across the sea, but not valiant Greece right across the Straits of Otranto, for now that land has only a puppet tyranny upheld by the bayonets of British Indian and African troops...
...Treasure-hunting by might and cunning is simply that—treasure-hunting by might and cunning, and it is foolish to get worked up over which one gets the most...
...This with a nation that received billions upon billions of American goods without payment...
...Forgotten was the San Francisco conference...
...And then the lone survivor was too weak to carry away the treasure and left his bones in the desert...
...It means a world where American goods cannot enter unless paid for by the American tax-payer himself...
...Bulgaria is quite as capable of governing itself as is Cuba or Guatemala...
...To hell with the rest of the world...
...German properties, companies, factories, shipping concerns, haciendas, air-lines have been snapped up at bargain rates all over the world...
...When we told the Soviet Union she could not have it, we declared a type of war on the Soviet Union...
...Out of this war the Russians have grabbed a new empire almost as big as Hitler's and have run most of it as brutally as did Hitler...
...Her answer was to appropriate four billion dollars for atomic bomb research...
...After all wars, there is loot...
...How about joint control of Japan and the Pacific islands, the Kuriles, Manchuria and Mongolia...
...In the Pacific, we are dead set against such an idea...
...They called in Ukraine, back beyond the Black Sea, but they didn't call in Turkey, though the Dodecanese islands are within swimming distance of her shores...
...Let's carry the step farther...
...How about "liberated" Korea, still administered by Japanese overlords...
...But their failure is tragic...
...THREE men at that conference had had no prior experience with world affairs...
...Loot is loot...
...For the mightiest and cunningest will get the most and should...
...They forgot all about Ethiopia, except the Americans who grabbed off an oil concession...
...Even while the London conference Was in session, it was scheduled to arrange a peace treaty with Hungary...
...and not till then did they hastily call in some of the people whose fate was to be decreed—some of them...
...They are part of the loot of victory...
...If England wishes the money to buttress up her closed empire trading system, that means economic disaster for Latin America...
...In the Soviet zone, "democracy" is Communism...
...Must the peoples of the Mediterranean, knowing little of freedom, now have to be ruled by little Communist cliques as in Bulgaria, and all dissenters be shot or enslaved...
...Perhaps the London conference should have begun with the atomic bomb...
...And so our delegates bobbed up with a joint trusteeship system for Italian colonies...
...But how will peace and stability be helped by Russian grabs in the Mediterranean, which means a combination of armed might and fervent appeals to the subjugated peoples to free themselves from the capitalist yoke, not for their own freedom but for the greater power of Russia and the glory of Stalin...
...We can do away once and all with secret covenants secretly confabulated and let the full light of day fall on international negotiations...
...They were mere beans to be grabbed out by the handful from the loot-bag...
...The Soviet Union, it was said, wanted the Dodecanese to fortify, Eritrea, Tripolitana...
...We got 'em...
...A starved and broken Italy is putting up her old art masters on the odd-sized shoe counter...
...We object to the government of Bulgaria, insist on having a say there...
...They were merely trying to find a way to divide up the loot, without too many snarls, and before the world could protest...
...But if we dicker with the treasure-hunters in dark corners, it can only degenerate into a struggle over loot...
...Surely we should get something better out of that than grabbing of loot...
...The Americans are also right—dead right...
...And if we insist upon the internationalization of the rivers of Europe and the Dardanelles, don't be surprised any day to hear the Soviets demanding trusteeships over Cuba or the internationalization of Panama with joint Soviet control...
...They had no principles to enunciate...
...It was a child who shouted, "He is naked...
...They wanted all they could get...
...The hopes were noble hopes: Peace for all men, international cooperation, rapid action, just settlements, free men and free peoples...
...They called in White Russia up there in the cold north, but they didn't call on Brazil, whose troops fought and died for the supposed liberation of Italy...
...It was hoped that the new league of nations, though it had been created in San Francisco by browbeating small nations back into their places, would find justification in the operations of the London council, that the Big Three, leading toddling France and China, would prove, by their wisdom, their honesty, their sense of justice, that they were capable of guiding the world and healing up the wounds of war...
...We'll keep...
...The Soviets in Berlin wouldn't even participate in an international sports tournament unless the outcome was censored...
...Even so the little second-line men provided nothing upon which valid democratic public opinion could study and rally to...
...WHATEVER the deterioration in international affairs, and the world can't all be patched up at once, we can refer everything to the pattern of a democratic international system...
...And so, the little bobbing corks on the dark flood tide of imperialistic rivalries—the little men bobbing in the dark in London—could only bob on the tide...
...In fact there is evidence that they wanted this fateful conference ignored in the press as much as possible, even though the peace and welfare of the whole world were at stake...
...After our Civil War, our carpet-baggers and northern industrialists had a monopoly on loot in the South, but today the treasure hunters are three...
...They quarreled over who should and who should not be allowed to help decide his fate...
...Even so the eyes of all the world rested on London, despite the secrecy...
...All the world was looking at that little group of men, meeting in deathly silence, unwilling to show any of their handiwork to the light of day and to the suffering folk the world over...
...Must their resources be grabbed and utilized by Russia and removed from the commerce of the rest of the world...
...There is no reason that the Mediterranean should be a British lake...
...In the Near East we want a system of trusteeship...
...But Norway is gone, and Sweden on the verge...
...Perhaps the London conference should have begun with the billions of dollars that England and Russia and France and others wish us to give them...
...The loot is territory, vast areas ruled by puppet governments, strategic advantage, concessions for raw materials, control of the seas, monopoly of the air...
...But if you want joint trusteeship for Tripolitana, why not for Gibraltar and Malta and Suez...
...But Italy was also the land of Dante, of Titian, of Michael Angelo, of Verdi and of Mazzini...
...No international system of free peoples can grow out of such a dark cellar...
...There is no moral reason for her occupation of the Near East...
...And the treasure hunters, forsooth, fell out...
...The atomic bomb must enter into any sound international system...
...There is no reason, other than power and greed, past aggressions and past thievery, that gives England an eternal claim on Gibraltar, on Malta, on Cyprus—stolen in the last war to make the world safe for democracy and stripped of its constitution, its legislature and all democratic rights in the year of Our Lord 1931...
...it means more revolution and hunger on the continent of Europe...
...Tear out the mulberry trees in Japan, then page the smiling men of rayon and nylon...
...Even before this war, we couldn't get past British trade controls in Palestine and Egypt...
...How about a little straight independence here and there...
...The council met to carve up Europe—though it called it making peace treaties—to determine the destinies of hundreds of millions of people no longer considered competent to decide upon their own destinies, not even considered worthy to hear about the making of the decisions that will condemn them to their slavery...
...Then the two quarreled, and the stronger killed the weaker...
...FINE names for all of it: free enterprise, national defense, collective security, balance of power, regional spheres of influence, liberation, reeducating the world for democracy...
...For many lands, facing a Winter of cold and starvation, the London conference held the hope of a chance to work and produce and survive...
...The Americans wanted to clinch their oil in Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia, to win trade, and to gain the air-mastery of the Near East...
...The London council of foreign ministers, one of the most portentious conclaves in the history of man, has been burning incense before the Golden Calf of war loot...
...The British are right—dead right...
...That may be better than the British or Soviet way...
...How about Indo-China, where Japanese troops are being used by the British to shoot down citizens striving for independence...
...The little men worked -there like busy moles in the dark...
...The British want to keep the Mediterranean a British sea so as to keep on exploiting the peoples of the Near East and India...
...They called in Jugoslavia, under the iron heel of Tito, but they didn't call in Albania, one of the united nations wiped off the map as a nation by Bulgarian and Soviet troops...
...Eyes rested there in hope in spite of the sour odor of betrayal...
...For it involves not merely the partitioning of the Mediterranean...
...EACH of the powers is right, dead right, in what each demands...
...Forgotten was the Atlantic Charter...
...it forecasts the collapse of democratic government in Italy...
...Forgotten was the atomic bomb...
...We struck a blow at international solidarity by our one-man decision about it...
...You have all heard the parable of the king who ordered a new robe, and the tailors sewed and sewed night and day drawing imaginary thread through imaginary gossamer, and the king then walked abroad, and all the people saw him naked but such was their bedazzlement and their sychophancy, that all shouted, "What a beautiful robe he is wearing...
...And it is also moveable loot: the Red Army scampering off with cows, brandy, and machinery, even before a reparations policy was agreed upon...
...Do they want all the earth...
...No wonder they wanted no light...
...It means the exploitation of cheap colonial labor...
...Is the game lost...
...Although the consortium in Berlin and the administration of Austria have produced headaches and bickerings over every pound of bread, every litre of milk, every pound of coal...
...British diplomacy has kept its clumsy dominance on the ravelled fringe of Europe: by bayonets in Greece, by ukase in Italy, by dickerings with dictators Franco and Salazar, by utilizing the fears of propertied minorities in France, Holland, Belgium and Denmark...
...And Cuba is as close to the Soviet Union as Bulgaria is to the United States...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 40
