The Evening Star (December 17, 1945)
ON THE RECORD —
No confidence is felt in Moscow meeting
By Dorothy Thompson
One cannot look forward with confidence to the outcome of the meeting among the Big Three foreign ministers. The last meeting broke up over Molotov’s demand for the exclusion of France and China. They will not be present at this one. It was Washington’s turn to be host – but the meeting is in Moscow. The press won’t be there at all.
We are already afraid of the communique that will eventually be issued. Most people will not read it through – for the people are afraid. They have a sense of wrongdoing going on; they do not want to learn more about the wrongdoing, because they can do nothing about it. That is the way it has become with the people. When there is nothing you can do, after a while you cease to think about what ought to be done, or could be done.
Yet the people do not accept what is going on. They do not reject it in any organized way, but they do not accept it either. They know we are not going in the right direction – not at all in the right direction – perhaps not in any direction. The people feel alarm and do not know exactly why. They are angry without knowing why they are angry. Officers and men in the Army are angry; workers are angry; the strikes are a part of that mute anger, which is deeper than the question of wages. The men in the churches sense evil. They all sense it – Protestants and Catholics. All their publications express dismay. It is a very deep dismay as though Christmas and Easter were going to pass away soon, and forever.
The scientists are alarmed. They rush about warning that it is quite possible that the world may come to an end. People believe them, but it is almost as though they did not care much if the world came to an end.
I never remember anything like this before in America.
The people have contempt for their leadership. I do not know how they feel in Russia, for I have not been in Russia for a long time. But in America and Britain they have contempt for their leadership. In America, in the movies, when pictures of the leaders are on the screen they laugh. They do not cheer or boo, they laugh, contemptuously.
The leaders have taken away the peoples’ ideals, and when that happens despair sets in, not despair over material things, but despair that tells them there is no God; that God is dead. When people feel that way, everything becomes senseless; the war was senseless; everything is a lie, as the Atlantic Charter became a lie when Yalta and Potsdam became the truth. Then everybody fears everyone else, because the cohesion of the people is an emotion of faith, an ideal that faith says can be realized; but where there is no common faith in an ideal there is only cynicism, and that divides everybody from everybody else. That is disintegration.
The people mock at the “Big Three.” The Big Three are called “Russia,” “Great Britain,” the “United States.” But the people know that “Russia,” “Great Britain,” and the “United States” are not meeting in Moscow. The Big Three are just three men, and the people do not think they are bigger or greater than other men, like themselves. Their faces are very, very familiar. They are not great faces, nor faces one can greatly love. Their communiques do not sound like “Russia,” or “Great Britain,” or the “United States.”
Lincoln and Jefferson still sound like the United States. Franklin Roosevelt sounded like the United States, when he stayed home. Churchill sounded like Great Britain in the blitz; he sounded like Shakespeare and Burke. But the communiques from Yalta and Potsdam did not sound like the United States or Great Britain or Russia, as I have heard her in her great literature. They sounded curiously like Hitler.
The people feel this. They feel we are not behaving like ourselves, and when you do not behave like yourself you are out of your senses. The people think the world is out of its senses, but they do not know what to do about it. It is as though they were in the world and yet not in it, for they have nothing to say about it. they must just accept it, and they are hurt, and bewildered, and angry.