The Evening Star (September 2, 1946)
On the Record…
Open diplomacy now means an open brawl
By Dorothy Thompson
When Woodrow Wilson called for “open diplomacy” he could hardly have imagined the current spectacle in Paris or at Lake Success, the one called a “Peace” Conference, and the other the “United” Nations.
The old diplomatic hands – men who were on hand at Versailles, for instance – wonder just what purpose is being served by these public brawls. Often the speeches seem made for demagogical reasons, having an eye on the political situation at home. Usually one has the impression of witnessing one of those antique Chinese wars where the belligerents marched upon each other in horrible masks, the issue being which could first scare the other into retreat.
Yet every utterance is also a political deed, and the tougher the talk becomes the more difficult is it for any one of the speakers later to retreat, especially since his utterances will be read next morning, in more or less objective reports, throughout the world.
The orators are, of course, men, and not extraordinary ones at that. None of them is the author of a great book; none is distinguished in his own right as historian, artist, geographer, or scientist. Yet each, with all his limitations, which becomes more and more apparent as personalities and tempers reveal themselves, is a tremendous abstract symbol of concrete power.
Their speeches are recorded as those of the “United States,” the “USSR,” the “United Kingdom.” And altogether they speak for peace-loving, freedom-loving democracies, while calling each other all the names with which lately they accused their enemies: “imperialist,” “Fascist,” “warmongering,” “totalitarian,” “oppressor,” “plutodemocracy,” “dictatorship.”
If the men awaiting sentence in Nuernberg have access to reports from Paris and the Security Council they must be inwardly consumed with sardonic laughter. For there is little of which Hitler ever accused Great Britain that is not now echoed by the Soviet delegates. Most of Hitler’s charges against the USSR are now in the mouths of her recent allies. A son of President Roosevelt is engaged, in the magazine “Look,” in substantiating the charges first made against Winston Churchill by Adolf Hitler.
The crimes against humanity charged against the Nuernberg defendants are daily being committed by one or another of the governments that are their accusers – such as forced deportations, slave labor, suspension of habeas corpus, creation of different categories of citizens, expropriation of property for political reasons, and even the creation of “racially pure” states.
Thus, Czechoslovakia, first of Hitler’s non-German victims, celebrates her liberation by repudiating every thesis of Thomas Masaryk in favor of what is hardly more or less than a Slavic copy of national socialism.
Indeed, it seems as though Hitler, though his bones be dust, laughs satanically from the shadows in a miraculous spiritual resurrection, dictating the very phrases of some of the speeches, and the very provisions of the treaties.
The international pattern first set by Hitler was a war of nerves, conducted through public speeches of political leaders and aimed at public opinion at home and abroad, supported by a lackey press and by lackey news agencies, accompanied by a diplomatic battle for satellites, using military and economic pressures, and preceding the actual war of steel.
Nothing in this pattern has been changed by the defeat of the Axis. Its followers have been put out of the running, but the pattern continues, magnified and accelerated by the verbal and diplomatic opportunities afforded by the peace conference and the United Nations.
Nor does the fact that the battle is carried on in the name, of peace change the pattern. A recent re-reading of the speeches of Hitler confirmed my memory that never, on any occasion, did he advocate war. On the contrary, it was he who was protecting his country against the “warmongers”; it was he who was seeking reasonable peaceful adjustments in Germany’s natural sphere, which would never have involved war if it had not been for the “imperialist” powers. If he armed, it was only because “broken-down capitalist scavengers could not tolerate the challenge of revolutionary German socialism.” How could he, an old soldier, who had known personally the horrors of war, invite another one, he asked.
There is, however, one change – a change ominous for all existing governments. The change is in the popular mood, which is skeptical where it is not cynical. This is particularly noticeable among veterans. The mood is anarchical; there is distrust of all systems and all governments and all speeches, and even stark truths are regarded as lies and propaganda.
I suspect this cynicism regarding government invades Russia, too, else why the purges, from circles of writers and artists, to managers of remote factories? Governments, having lost confidence, are losing actual control, and having, by their deeds, robbed of all meaning words that once represented lofty human hopes, the words bounce back like echoes and are nowhere absorbed in human minds or hearts.