TWO SURE SIGNS OF PEACE
Fischer, Louis
Two Sure Signs Of Peace By LOUIS FISCHER WE now have two sure signs of peace: the great powers have returned to their pre-war rivalry, and the colonies refuse to return to their pre-war slavery....
...North of that line is under Russian occupation, south under American occupation...
...The relations between the West and Russia likewise play a decisive role in Korea...
...The same sentiment explains America's dynamic endeavors to unite China under a national government...
...Holland, France, Belgium, and Portugal cannot keep their overseas possessions without the assistance and benevolence of one of the Big Three...
...This, naturally, would require the simultaneous evacuation of the Soviet forces—which is what the western powers want...
...France is most likely to succeed because she is the strongest and most important of the second-class powers, and because fear of Russian expansion in Europe is driving her into the Anglo-American western bloc...
...This is the very question which several hundred million inhabitants of Eastern Asia are now asking...
...THE colonies do not want a future that is like their past...
...This was beginning to be evident before 1939...
...ALARM over Russian expansionism is impelling the western nations to become champions of independence and non-intervention in Turkey, Persia, and Korea...
...The United Slates wants early independence for Korea...
...The Indonesian rebels refuse to treat with the Dutch...
...It helps to make matters worse...
...This follows the modern imperialist pattern...
...the oppressed races of Asia appear to believe that it was likewise a war for freedom from Great Britain, Russia, the United States, France, and Holland...
...Asia, however, is not interested in bearing the lazy and fat white man's burden...
...The days of big empires for small powers are drawing to a dose...
...Inevitably, Dr...
...Wavell replied, "We had grown fat and lazy in those areas where nothing had happened for centuries except tin mining and rubber growing...
...They are today reminding the big powers what the war was for...
...Today, the most important trend in world affairs is the concentration of power in the hands of America, Russia, and Britain...
...Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek asserted at the Cairo conference in November, 1943, that, "mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, they are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent...
...ALL this can be understood only against the background of the mounting rivalry among the big powers...
...van der Plas adds that Holland is prepared to grant "autonomy" to Java "in a few years...
...At present, under a previous arrangement, Korea is cut in two by the thirty-eighth parallel...
...It was a war for the Four Freedoms, the United Nations said...
...This is not idealism or anti-imperialism...
...The peoples of Indonesia and Indo-China, of Korea and of other colonial areas, seem to have taken seriously the news that the world war is ended...
...Molotov's fight to exclude France (and China) from the London deliberations on Balkan issues has accelerated the trend towards a new, informal Anglo-American-French triple entente...
...Another interpretation has been volunteered during the last few weeks by the fighting of the Javanese and Annamites...
...Apparently, the Dutch and French had grown just as lazy and fat...
...A similar attitude was adopted by the Indo-Chinese who have not objected to American, British, and Chinese intervention...
...This always helps...
...Charles van der Plas, chief Netherlands agent in Java which, with its 70 million inhabitants is the India of the Dutch Empire, has asserted that the group backing Dr...
...Holland, France, Portugal, and Belgium will of course try to accommodate themselves to the Big Power monopoly...
...Strong pressure is being exerted to withdraw the American Army...
...It also intensifies Anglo-American-French desires to rescue Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria from superimposed dictatorships...
...To them it seems to mean that the pre-war world is also ended...
...This may be true...
...Inevitably, moreover, the Dutch authorities declare that Queen Wilhelmina has already promised Java self-government...
...Soe Karno, the leader of the independence movement, "consists of 40 to 100 people of some education...
...But it does not change the fact that the Indonesians and Indo-Chinese are in revolt against the iniquities of foreign rule...
...They vow they will fight the Netherlands armed forces now en route from Holland and elsewhere...
...Does that include the freedom to be free...
...They did not resist the British occupation which succeeded Japanese rule...
...The United States and China are very friendly to the Indo-Chinese independence movement...
...The second World War will either have brought a new world or it will have brought a new world war...
...Two Sure Signs Of Peace By LOUIS FISCHER WE now have two sure signs of peace: the great powers have returned to their pre-war rivalry, and the colonies refuse to return to their pre-war slavery...
...Inevitably, the Dutch representatives in the Hague and London have stated that the Indonesians were armed and instigated by the Japanese...
...When Great Britain, Russia, the United States, France and Holland announced that the war was a war for freedom they intended to indicate that it was a war to keep them free from Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and militarist-dictatorial Japan...
...Gandhi asked me when I spent a week in Seva-gram in 1942...
...Under the impact of international affairs and colonial discontent, the wartime social and political glacier is beginning to break up...
...The key to peace is change away from the ugly, bloody, hungry, unjust past...
...Lesser imperialist nations which must be carried on the backs of the Big Powers are becoming a nuisance...
...Hence the recent uprisings...
...then, he says, Java would enjoy equality with Holland "in a joint parliament under the Crown...
...It is power politics...
...In India, in 1942, I asked Lord (then Sir Archibald) Wavell how he understood the quick collapse of the British imperial positions in Malaya, etc., under the sudden Japanese attack...
...The United States and Great Britain energetically supported the independence of Syria and Lebanon at the expense of the French empire...
...The United-States and Great Britain have manifested open sympathy for thd Indonesian champions of independence...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 43
