The Evening Star (April 19, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
The pale horse
By Dorothy Thompson
“And I looked and beheld a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was death, and hell followed with him.” – Book of Revelation.
“We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined… to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights… and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom… have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations.” – Preamble to the United Nations Charter.
India is faced with a famine as disastrous as that of 1943.
In the Middle East, countries hitherto self-sufficient for food are clamoring for imports. Even South Africa is petitioning for food supplies.
The ration in Great Britain is below the lowest point of the war.
The greatest food-exporting area of the world is normally that part of the Far East over which war has raged. There is no reserve of rice in Burma to meet the needs of India and Ceylon.
In Australia, one of the four great wheat-producing countries of the world, there has been a disastrous drought and a shortage of farm workers and phosphate fertilizer.
In continental Europe diversion of manpower and shortages of fertilizer and machinery cut wheat production from 42,000,000 tons before the war to 23,000,000 in 1945.
No wheat is now reaching Western Europe from East European countries, normally the bread and potato basket of all Europe up to the Rhine.
In these countries the deportation of native German-speaking populations and hasty and ill-organized land reforms have disastrously reduced production.
The British zone, the poorest food producing area of Germany, now augmented by 2,000,000 refugees, is forced to reduce rations to 1,000 calories per day.
Austrians in cities are starving. There is no inter-zonal pooling of food in Germany.
In most European countries the non-farming population is getting less than 2,000 calories per day.
The three great surplus wheat countries today are America, Canada, and the Argentine.
Canada has kept or re-established rationing and set aside for export to famine areas 10 percent of the wheat that went into domestic milling and 50 percent of the wheat that went into distilling.
Even Argentina is about to take drastic steps.
But American politicians want to be re-elected.
Half-hearted appeals are made to American housewives.
The president refuses to recommend rationing; he says it will take too long to set it up. The crisis is now, he says.
The crisis is accumulating. The year 1947 will be worse than the year 1946.
The Department of Agriculture asks farmers to reduce grain-feeding to stock. But the only way is to set aside grain at the source.
Thousands of Americans are sending food packages to Europe. But the process is attended by unconscionable red tape. Purchases on the retail market are exorbitantly high. Private companies, expediting food, are making pretty dividends. The parcel mails are not yet open to Germany and Austria. The latest plan is that any individual sending packages to relatives or friends in Germany will have to send another for displaced persons. Thus is charity to be penalized.
Meanwhile, the victors play power politics and the politicians, hungry for votes, appeal never to the people’s best instincts, but only to their worst – to selfishness, greed, and stupidity. Mayor O’Dwyer of New York, a “progressive,” I believe, rushes out to assure roller and ice skaters in Flushing Meadow Park that their rink will not long be occupied by U.N. No one, not even a roller skater, must be disaccommodated in order to help save the world from famine and ourselves from another war. Skate on, lads and lassies; you, too, will be voters, soon! Skate on into the abyss – and vote for O’Dwyer!
Nature, a kindly mother, who provides for all her children if they cultivate her soil in justice and in peace, punishes those who offend her in terrible wrath. The pale horse is ridden. With famine will come disease. (Cholera rages in China.) With famine will come the mental and spiritual aberrations that break out in violence and appalling crimes, turning peoples and nations into lawless mobs.
And shall that Age of Darkness be called “democracy”?