THE EDITOR RESERVES THE LAST COLUMN
The Editor Reserves . . . The Last Column PRESIDENT Truman's Navy Day address on foreign policy, ballyhooed in advance by the White House as his most important declaration since taking office,...
...But the Dutch have not had to depend on direct gifts and credits from the United States in order to fight the native independence movement...
...WHAT is the answer, then...
...If the United States means what Mr...
...We have every right—in fact a solemn duty—to use our enormous bargaining power not for selfish gain or national aggrandizement, but for peace and freedom...
...Truman's speech must be read in its proper setting...
...For all his warm-hearted rejection of imperialism and colonialism, the unadorned truth is that even as he was speaking, American money, materials, and munitions were playing the decisive part in maintaining the imperial rule of the British, French, and Dutch in India, Indo-China, and Indonesia respectively...
...Exhausted by the war and faced with tremendous problems at home, these colonial powers would find it impossible to wage colonial wars were it not for the Lend-Lease and postwar credits provided by the United States...
...It is ridiculous for the State Department to pretend that we are pursuing a "hands-off" policy when we content ourselves with asking the Imperial Powers, to remove our emblem from the planes and guns which strafe and kill the independence forces of Asia...
...We want nothing for ourselves—• only peace and a chance for the subject peoples of the world to work toward the independence they seek...
...We may lose some friends, for the moment, among the office-holders of the Imperial Powers, but for every one we lost we would gain a hundred thousand among long kicked-around natives of the Orient...
...Take the case of the Netherlands for a moment...
...a well-meaning restatement of American objectives in world affairs No one, it seems to me, can reasonably quarrel with most of the principles enunciated in his 12-point program, and most Americans will applaud his disavowal of imperial purpose or territorial aggrandizement, his support of self-government and self-determination for the peoples of the world, and his insistence on equal access to the trade and raw materials of the world...
...the fatal flaw was the simple fact we have been and are at this moment acquiescing, in one way or another, in most of the injustices he condemned in the abstract...
...The same story appears in the case of the French in Indo-China and the Russians in Eastern Europe...
...Truman said it does, then we must begin now'to withhold financial and material aid to nations which are engaged, however unconsciously, in sowing the seeds of a new world war by their policies of imperialism and spheres of influence...
...It seems to me not unlike the murderer who wears gloves in order to conceal his emblem—his fingerprints—from any object which would help identify him...
...Up to last July 1, the date of the last Lend-Lease report, the Dutch had received more than $1,500,000,000 worth of free equipment from the United States—most of it, obviously, concentrated in the Far East for the present waV against the natives...
...The weakness of the speech was its vagueness...
...It seems to me clear enough...
...The President's 12 points were not unlike the eight points of the Roosevelt-Churchill Atlantic Charter whose total betrayal is one of the blackest pages of modern history...
...And now a further loan of $50,000,000 is under negotiation...
...But certainly no one in the State Department can pretend for a moment that the mere removal of the label abolishes our guilt of sheds us of the responsibility for making these colonial wars possible...
...The British, who are even greater landlords in Asia and who know how contagious revolts for freedom are, have been pouring great quantities of military equipment into Java to help the Dutch imperialists—and virtually all the equipment, of course, was made in America by American workers and paid for by American taxpayers...
...Subsequently the Netherlands received a postwar credit of $50,000,000 with which to buy Lend-Lease munitions that had been requisitioned but not delivered when the war ended...
...The Editor Reserves . . . The Last Column PRESIDENT Truman's Navy Day address on foreign policy, ballyhooed in advance by the White House as his most important declaration since taking office, was...
...IT must be apparent to even the most casual reader of current affairs that Britain, France, and the Netherlands, if required to depend on their own resources, are • completely unable 'to stem the sweep to freedom and self-government which dominates the politics of almost all Asia today...
...M.H.R...
...Secretary of State Byrnes' announcement last week that our Allies have been requested to remove the U. S. emblem from the military equipmenfbeing used to suppress native independence movements shows, perhaps, that somebody's conscience in Washington has been bothered by the fact that the "land of the free" is financing the shooting of the freedom forces in Asia...
...Everywhere the products of what we were pleased to call the "arsenal of democracy" are being used to maintain imperialism and establish spheres of influence and generally make a mockery of the aims for which we pretended we were fighting the late war...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 44
