Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (November 30, 1945)
ON THE RECORD —
United States relegated to an ignominious role
By Dorothy Thompson
In resigning as ambassador to China, Maj. Gen. Patrick J. Hurley has blurted out at least a fraction of the truth and has opened one small window, in one part of the world, on American foreign policy. He could, of course, have extended his charges to include the Middle East as well as China, and Europe as well as Asia.
The United States of America, whose leading and even decisive role in the war was universally regarded by the peoples, and the small nations, as the guarantor of liberty, justice and fair play, has sunk to the most ignominious role of yes-man to the policies of other powers.
There is no precedent for it, as far as I can discover, in history. With overwhelming and absolute superiority of military power, enjoying the confidence and faith of the suffering millions of this devastated globe, the center of the world’s yearnings and aspirations has abdicated everywhere to 19th century imperialism on one side and to the new Soviet imperialism on the other.
And Maj. Gen. Hurley, impulsive, perhaps indiscreet, revealed one of the causes: The scheming ambitions and predilections of certain men in the State Department – and, he might have added, in the other departments as well – who might better be attached to the services of other countries which they could serve with lees division of loyalty and more intellectual honesty.
The situation recalls John of Gaunt’s words about his England in King Richard II:
“This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
This land, bound in with the triumphant sea…
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:…
…Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”
The decay of American leadership has come, first because for reasons of wartime policy, the “necessary unity of the Big Three,” America abandoned step by step all the principles with which we entered the war – namely those of the Atlantic Charter.
In Europe we collaborated at the betrayal of two of our Allies: Poland and Yugoslavia. In both cases men who fought with us, under our directives, were critically overthrown. In one case they were even kidnapped and transplanted to Russian soil, there to be tried as traitors before courts whose procedures we would never (never? it is a dangerous word) recognize as legitimate for ourselves.
In Yugoslavia a despot maintains himself with a private army and a secret police modeled on Hitler’s own, against a terrorized, yet overwhelmingly hostile, population and we accept the outcome of a plebiscite which is exactly as “free” as Hitler’s were.
Both states have, as their rulers, men who have been for years Soviet agents like Birya, who leads the “uprising” in Persian Azerbaijan, under the protection of the Russian armies.
In China, as Maj. Gen. Hurley at last reveals, we play both the game of colonial imperialists and the imperialist Communists, and our own ranks of political and military advisers are split into factions. As Poland was looted, not only by her enemies but by her allies, who then “compensated” her by turning the Polish marauders loose on German looting grounds, to smash also the Potsdam Agreement, so Manchuria is now looted by the same ally – and the news about the wasteland left there by the Russian armies carrying off every scrap of industrial equipment and even household goods – is buried in a small dispatch on the inside pages of newspapers.
In the Middle East, the United States alone equipped to bring some relief and hope to those impoverished, disease-ridden peoples, is second string on the British bow.
Nowhere do we uphold our own starry banner, on our own great motto, “Liberty and justice for all.” Other great powers break the strength of the weak; we, alone, break their hearts by betraying their trust.
But why say “we”? Who are “we”? Is it you? Is it I? Or is it, in Whitman’s excoriating words, “the lice of politics, the planners of sly involutions for their own preferment”?
A terror grips this great nation. Let anyone speak up; let him try, without comment, to state the facts, and he is drowned in organized cries of “warmonger.” If he criticizes colonial imperialism he is called a Soviet agent; if he calls Soviet expansionism by its true name, he is an “American imperialist.” What is America? A colony? A Soviet satellite?
Must all mouths be shut from now on, against injustice and even crime, lest the peace of the powers be endangered? Shall our peace be secured by lies, by skeletons in every cupboard, by shameful secrets that must not be revealed, by appeasements – plus an armaments’ race?
Peace is not the mere absence of war. It is a positive condition of justice. It is the sister of charity and mercy. It is the offspring of honesty and truth.
It is the triumph of principle.