Patrol clashes continue in Italy
By Richard Mowrer
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Editorial: Stalin, Junkers and peace
The most important issue before the Big Three meeting is security through international organization versus security through balance of power. The United States wants the former. Russia has been acting for the latter. Britain goes along with Russia one minute, and the next yearns for better protection than her old system.
At the heart of the problem, of course, is Germany. there will be no enduring peace after Nazi defeat if German militarism can revive, as after World War I. Hence the necessity of making German demilitarization realty effective this time, and of creating healthy conditions under which the European people – including the Germans – will develop toward self-rule rather than another frustrate brand of totalitarianism.
At the Big Three meeting President Roosevelt will have two aces. One is the superior economic, financial, naval and airpower of the United States in the post-war world. The other is the willingness of the United States – including the Republicans, as represented by Sen. Vandenberg – to enter a peacetime military alliance to enforce Axis demilitarization, provided Russia and Britain will accept a genuine international organization instead of their balance of power system.
Marshal Stalin, however, also has aces. He has the biggest land power of the world in the strategic center of the Euro-Asian continents. In Eastern Europe, he has established a solid belt of puppet governments from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, with the exception of Greece – if that is an exception in the end. In Western Europe he has a separate post-war alliance with France.
Moreover, Stalin has a “Free Germany Committee” of Junker marshals and generals ready to rule the Reich after Nazi defeat, if he so decides – as he has used the Hungarian generals for his regime in that country. This would be the opposite of demilitarization; it would perpetuate the caste which always has been the heart and brain of German militarism. As long ago as Nov. 6, 1942, Stalin state publicly:
It is not our aim to destroy all military force in Germany, for every literate person will understand that this is impossible in regard to Germany, ass it is in regard to Russia, but it is also inadvisable from the point of view of the future.
Stalin’s diplomatic achievement in Europe to date is equaled only by his military success, which grows by the hour. How is Russia’s vast power to be used? We assume Stalin’s purpose is Russian security and prosperity
But we question the ability of Stalin or any other leader, no matter how powerful his nation, to obtain world peace through this sphere of influence system – much less to build a peaceful or a free Germany around the Junkers militarists. The Junkers always will find some Hitlerian demagog as a partner; and they not only will destroy world peace again, but also, if necessary, betray their Russian friends as they did in 1941. Unless, that is, the Allies this time wipe out German militarism completely along with Nazism, as they are pledged to do.
So, we hope that President Roosevelt in this meeting can persuade Stalin that an international security organization which makes the settlements and enforces them – in Germany and Eastern Europe as elsewhere – is a better bet in the long run for Russia than settlements dictated by the Kremlin and dependent on puppets. Secretary of State Hull persuaded him of that at the Moscow conference, when Stalin promised to give up his one-man settlements and his “Free Germany Committee” in favor of Big Three cooperation in a free international organization.
But this time the agreement must last.
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