COMMON SENSE ABOUT THE PEACE

...After the .last war The Nation, then edited by Oswald Garrison Villard and not to be confused with the magazine of the same name which recently gave its blessing to "Bull" Halsey's desire to kick the defeated Japanese in the face, published one of those very few magazine editorials which are brilliant enough to remain in the recollection after a lapse of 25 years...

...would probably reveal a substantial affirmative majority...

...At a time when all Europe needs all the machinery, equipment, and manufactured goods it can get from any source, the most nroductive industrial system in Eurone...

...The alternative would be permanent mass unemployment, hunger that could easily pass over the borderline into starvation, chronic unrest and a complete eclipse of the hope that the previously submerged liberal and democratic forces in the two former Axis states^ could establish stable governments and reintegrate Germany and Japan into a world community of peaceful nations...

...Another contradiction is the thrusting of "millions of destitute refugees into the shrunken remainder of Germany and the decision to eliminate or greatly reduce the industries which might conceivably give these people employment...

...We should look to the future, not to the past, place reconstruction ahead of revenge, and think in terms of building up a united Europe, not of tearing down the economic livelihood of any country...

...It is easy to predict which road will lead most surely toward the rehabilitation of the civilization which has becu almost extinguished in some parts of the world which have suffered most in the war...

...But the kind of peace that was foreshadowed in the secret conclaves of Teheran and Yalta and announced at Potsdam bears no more relation to the Atlantic Charter, or to any principles of decency, humanity, and civilization than the Declaration of Independence bears to a totalitarian concentration camp...

...When <jne considers what the world has suffered from "hardness" and "toughness" during the last generation, a reflective mind might suspect that a little "softness,' which might be better translated as justice, mercy, and humanity, would not be out of place...

...As if one could take the most advanced industrial countries in Europe and Asia respectively and turn them into cesspools of unemployment and hopeless festerintr n">'s-ery without the most disastrous consequences for the economic well-being both of Europe and of East Asia...

...There may be differences of opinion about the precise meaning of the word democracy...

...There has been noteworthy progress in inhumanity in the 20th Century, by comparison with the 17th...

...Some of the glib talk about transforming Germany into an agrarian country would convey the impression that there are vast open spaces waiting for new hands to till...

...a majority in the affirmative would again be registered...

...American responsibility to help feed and clothe the cold and hungry peoples of Europe is often stressed...

...Germany is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe and the population per square mile will be even larger because the eastern regions which have been taken away are more agricultural than the highly industrial Ruhr and Rhineland...

...The road to reconstruction and recovery in any case would have been long and difficult...

...SOME of the criminal blunders of Potsda,m could have been avoided if American public opinion had been better instructed in European history, geography, and economics and if men who know the realities of the situation had not often been intimidated because of the hue and cry set up against anyone suspected of favoring a "soft" peace...

...We should put aside counsels which are inspired sometimes by blind hate and sometimes by desire to serve the interests of a foreign power which seems interested in spreading as much chaos and misery as possible in neighboring countries...

...Perhaps the most hopeless contradiction lies in the announcement of a desire to assist the growth of democracy in Germany while at the same time the "peacemakers" do everything in their power to make living conditions there utterly insupportable...

...There is often a disastrous time-lag, especially dangerous in this atomic age, between a changed situation and popular realization that it has changed...

...There is no danger that the next war, should such a catastrophe occur, will be launched by a shattered and decimated Germany or Japan...

...A poll of American public opinion on the proposition, "Do you believe that the peace should be based on the principles of the Atlantic Charter...

...Even after the savage Thirty Years War, Protestants •who left Catholic states and Catholics who, by choice or compulsion, left the rule of Protestant princes were assured compensation for their property...

...Its reparations arrangements were its worst feature and broke down with a disastrous crash that was equally harmful to victors and vanquished...

...Such vital branches of German peacetime industry as metals, chemicals, shipbuilding, machinebuilding...

...The American peo^Je should understand that they must choose between revenge and reconstruction...

...Quite regardless of whether their internal economic systems are capitalist or socialist, individualist or col-lectivist, Germany, and Japan, as thickly populated countries which cannot be self-sufficient in food and raw materials, must possess a reasonable amount of peacetime industry, shipping, and foreign trade in order to maintain economic equilibrium...

...If there is ever to be a semblance of democracy in Germany and Japan, the people must eat...

...But it did not authorize the wholesale uprooting of populations or deliberately deprive the German people of some of its most important means of national livelihood...

...It is a common fallacy in pseudo-liberal circles to suggest that a "tou<rh" peace in the sense of the destruction of German and Japanese industry, shipping, and foreign trade will only iniure the well-to-do classes and may be reconciled with the interests of the German and Ja-anese masses...

...are sentenced either to comnlete destruction or to a svstem of foreign control so ri?id as to make normal efficient production impossible...

...It was entitled "The Madness of Versailles," and it was a magnificent indictment of the injustices and mistakes of the Versailles Treaty and of the betrayal of Wilson's Fourteen Points...

...Arguments about a "hard" or a "soft" peace possess little relevance when countries have been so thoroughly decimated by modern bombing as have Germany and Japan...

...What a mockery these phrases are, when one contemplates the spectacle of 15 or 20 million homeless, beggared refugees who have been, are being, or will be driven from their homes and set adrift in the postwar Europe of hunger, cold, and pestilence...

...STRIKINGLY barren as it was in positive results, the recent London fiasco may serve a useful purpose if it dispels certain illusions about the close unity and common purposes of the United Nations and points the way for a strong, independent American foreign policy...

...One of the first signs of such a policy would be to set about the task of genuine peacemaking in those parts of the world which are open to our influence...

...It is high time to bring a little common sense to bear on the problem of the peace...

...These would include several million Poles who formerly lived east of the so-called Curzon Line...

...My italics...

...insofar as it hns survived obliteration bombing, is to be very largely wiped out of existence...

...The contradictions of the Potsdam econornic program are so numerous and flagrant that one-m.,nrht well suspect a purpose not to disarm but to destroy the most productive industrial mechanism in Europe, and thereby increase and prolong the distress in that-stricken continent indefinitely...

...But if the question were worded differently, "Do you- believe in a tough peace for Germany, as laid down in the Potsdam Declaration, and an equally toug'h peace for Japan...

...Yet the whole "Dumbarton Hoax" was framed on the absurd assumption that this was the danger, that the only powers which could conceivably wage war within any predictable future were all somehow "peace-loving" and should enjoy an above-the-law status...

...It is noteworthy that American administrators on the spot, often military leaders who certainly cannot be suspected of "softness" in the undesirable sense of the term, are often more humane and reasonable than certain bac'-'seat drivers at home who are animated by nothing more constructive than an insatiable and indiscriminate desire for revenge not only on all living Germans and Japanese, but on still unborn generations...

...IF the political realities of Potsdam are a travesty on the professed war aims of the United Nations, the economic provisions of the Potsdam Agreement are a complete repudiation of the fourth point of the Atlantic Charter: "They will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all states, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity...

...Finally one must reckon three million Sudeten Germans and an uncertain but large number of stranded refugees, Poles, Ukrainians, Serbs, people from the Baltic States who have strong reasons for not wanting to return to their native lands under existing regimes...

...The millions of uprooted people in Eastern Europe are permitted to take nothing of their property and life savings, except what they can carry in their hands or in any primitive conveyances they may have kept through the ravages of war and plundering armies...

...They cannot have both...

...With the terrific lightning reprisal weapon of air bombing in the hands of the Big Three any attempt at rearmament could be quickly and easily smashed...

...But the territorial and economic decisions of Potsdam have wrought more harm than the most generous contributions to UNRRA can repair...

...THERE is no stronger condemnation of the peace settlement which is now largely an accomplished fact, even though the major victorious powers tied themselves in hopeless knots trying to settle some of its minor points at London, than the phraseology of the Atlantic Charter: "No territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples con-cerned...

...It took away comparatively little territory that was authentically German...

...The right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which thev will live...

...It is a curious example of the age of confused thought in which we live that some of the very individuals who are clamorous in their advocacy of "One World" are equally vociferous in demanding a permanent pariah or helot status for the German and Japanese peoples...

...This is utter and conspicuous poppycock...

...One of the most glaring of these contradictions is the simultaneous declaration that "primary emphasis shall be given to the development of agriculture" in-the German economy and the decision to give one-fourth of Germany's arable land to Poland...

...But Versailles was a model of equity and humanity compared with Potsdam...

...There are also some nine million Germans who have been uprooted in the regions east of the Oder and the Neisse rivers which have been assigned to Poland and the Soviet Union...

...But all experience shows that no system worthy of the name has maintained itself very long when economic conditions have become not only dark but hopeless...