THE ROAD TO SANITY
The Road To Sanity IT is becoming clearer every day—despite the scandalous suppression of news in large segments of the American press—that the Allied policy of blind vengeance and planned...
...rather by a carefully worked out system of inspection by expert technicians to be on constant guard against the diversion of peacetime industry to military production...
...IN London, the well known and widely respected Economist summed up Allied policy in Germany, as embodied in the Potsdam Agreement, as containing "not a single constructive idea, not a single hopeful perspective for the postwar world...
...Conditions have become so intolerable that many members of the British Parliament and a number of leading English journals, including some of the outstanding liberal weeklies, are demanding an immediate review of the entire mess with a view to making a fresh start along saner, more hopeful, and more democratic lines...
...There is no disagreement in this nation, or, as far as we know, in any of the Allied countries on the need for destroying the Nazi system, depriving Germany of her capacity to make war, and breaking up the sinister network of cartels which has not only arrogantly dominated the economic life of Germany, but in partnership with British and American monopolists, has controlled large segments of the economic life of the world...
...Commenting on this report, the London Tribune, left-wing weekly of Aneurin Bevan, made this comment which ought to be weighed by every American too: "Imagine for a moment that this report had appeared, not in a British paper in September, 1945, but in a Nazi paper some time before the Battle of Stalingrad...
...But not by wrecking the entire German economy and building up a new persecution complex and a new will to war...
...Smash the Nazi system, of course...
...If the moral conscience of America is dead—a casualty of total war—then our own hard-headed common sense ought to warn us that an economic cancer and political frustration in the very heart of Europe endanger the peace of the continent and of the whole world...
...Graves are to be dug now which rrien debilitated by weeks of undernourishment will not have the strength to dig in a few months' time...
...In this country, conversely, Gove+nment officials and the press, liberal as well as reactionary, are still very much the victims of an hysterical lust for revenge—regardless of the consequences...
...At the end of a mighty war fought to defeat Hitlerism, the Allies are making a Hitlerian peace...
...A wave of horror would have swept the free world...
...BUT there is much more to the grim picture...
...We are as efficient, it appears, as the Nazis were—ordering the men to dig their own graves, before their energy is sapped by hunger, cold, and disease...
...But not by dismantling German factories and shipping the machinery and equipment as loot for our greedy Allies...
...But not by lumping Nazis and non-Nazis together, thus playing into the hands of the former...
...In Berlin, and in other places, almost every piece of machinery, of office furni.ture and equipment of any description .. . bicycles, bedding, telephones, watches, and practically every vehicle that can be got hold of is going East...
...imagine that the town from which it was written was not Berlin, but Warsaw or Kharkov or Amsterdam...
...The Road To Sanity IT is becoming clearer every day—despite the scandalous suppression of news in large segments of the American press—that the Allied policy of blind vengeance and planned prostration for all Germany is on the verge of total collapse...
...The London Tribune sifts through countless reports from correspondents, officials, and soldiers to report that "in the Eastern part of Germany and in large parts of Austria, the activities of the Russian army of occupation have rendered eventual reconstruction, on however modest a scale, well nigh impossible...
...But these sane, long-range objectives are mired beyond recognition in the mud of a policy of revenge for its own sake, of dismemberment for the purpose of looting, of mass punishment for the satisfaction of a lust for revenge...
...Destroy the Nazi war-making system, of course...
...There is no food, shelter, clothing or Jtnedi-cal attention for them there, so they are driven out to die on the roads or to starve in camps, just as the Nazis' victims were left to starve in Belsen...
...rather by giving every aid and encouragement to democratic groups, trade unions, cooperatives, and other anti-Nazi forces in Germany...
...no words would have been strong enough to denounce the barbarity unveiled by this report...
...As The Progressive has said so often: It is not a question, in the long run, of what the Germans deserve, but of what we can afford...
...This is only part of the picture...
...Norman Clark, Berlin correspondent of the London News-Chronicle, reported an item which was widely suppressed in the American press: "Faced with the prospect of a disaster overwhelming a whole nation, the Allied public health authorities are ordering burgomasters to take measures ensuring the easy burial of the dead in the Winter...
...The road to sanity seems to us clearly enough mapped...
...rather by breaking up the trusts and monopolies, encouraging small business and cooperatives, and providing for a far greater diversification and ownership "of industry, just as we do in this country—in theory, at any rate—when we are faced with the specter of monopoly...
...THIS Allied policy of planned misery and calculated degradation of a whole people—the Nazis and the anti-Nazis, the guilty and the innocent—at first bewildered, then shocked, and has now infuriated countless American GI's who had been told that such an ideology was precisely what they had risked their lives to uproot and destroy...
...Wipe out the cartel system, of course...
...And this is not a handful of people: some eight to nine million human beings are affected, among them staunch anti-Nazis...
...The American policy, as disclosed officially for the first time last week by a. jittery State Department, reveals that we have formally embraced some of the most hateful practices of Nazism—the mass indictment of a whole people, planned starvation of helpless civilians, the burning of books, and the totalitarian control of propaganda and education...
...Yet, what is happening- now, after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the collapse of Fascism everywhere, is nothing less than the transformation of a large part of Germany, as well as of Austria, into one huge Bel-sen...
...In violation of the Potsdam Agreement, the wholesale expulsion of all Germans from the Polish-occupied areas east of the rivers Oder and Neisse and from the Sudeten-land in Czechoslovakia is bringing a stream of utterly destitute refugees into the Berlin area...
...This means that the local population is left practically without food and without tools, or other means of repairing their houses, roads, and sewers, etc., and with the means of producing the most primitive necessities of life...
...This is the real measure of their failure...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 43
