The Evening Star (April 29, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
The realities of peace
By Dorothy Thompson
Pontius Pilate’s remark “What is truth?” might be paraphrased into “What is peace?” Peace is perhaps life in truth, or in principle. But since the powers who control destiny share no common view of truth, they have no common aim of peace.
This is clear in the U.N. debates, where every speech reveals profound cleavages of principle and interest between the Allies.
Mr. Gromyko’s statement on Thursday, April 25, revealed that the United Nations do not even agree on what is war. The United Nations Charter seeks “to insure… that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest,” the common interest being suppression of acts of aggression against U.N. members.
But the Soviet delegate apparently assumes that a certain form of state, however weak, is by its nature an aggressor, and should be dealt with in advance of overt action. By implication he suggested that it was within the province of the United Nations to foment civil wars. “Civil wars have not always had bad results. … The historical place and significance of the American Civil War is well known.”
Mr. Gromyko could hardly have chosen a worse illustration. The American Civil War was a dreadful catastrophe, which wiser counsels. North and South, might have averted. But it was not a total catastrophe only because it was fought without foreign intervention. Had it been not only a struggle between American citizens but an international struggle, the nation might have been lost, and had the outcome been decided by foreign intervention, it would never have been freely accepted as binding.
One of our greatest problems following the American Revolutionary War was the embarrassment we suffered from our French assistants. England being at war with France gave America the chance to strike for independence, and the French, having a common enemy, lent us aid. Afterward revolutionary France attempted the ideological conquest of America, whose own revolutionary ideas were not Jacobin. Pro-French Jacobin clubs were organized, and there was the famous Genet Affair, which utterly disgusted even the Francophile Thomas Jefferson, and was an inspiration of Washington’s farewell address.
That we were eventually able to come to lasting peace with Britain, and France as well, and build a tremendous free nation, was because we neither became satellites of our liberators nor prisoners of wartime hates.
Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet journalist, when asked the other day to define “Fascism,” said, “the test is hatred of the Soviet Union.”
Hitler, who, I presume, was a Fascist, hated the Austro-Hungarian, monarchy, the Versailles system, the French Republic, the British Empire, the United States, representative government, pacifism, Jews and the Soviet Union. He hated everything, that is to say, that stood m the way of the German “New Order.” To define Fascism as “hatred of the Soviet Union” is to paraphrase a Fascist idea that makes an enemy out of every one who is not a 100 percent supporter. For the Soviets interpret as “hatred” every form of opposition or criticism within or without their borders.
There is, unfortunately, a growing hatred of the Soviet Union, but it does not come only from Fascist sources, but from those anti-Fascists who find the worst characteristic of Fascism its desire to undermine, direct, and control other peoples under a totalitarian idea and system, and who hate this under whatever name.
Mr. Gromyko’s outline of the preface to this war had peculiar blanks. Every appeasement of the Axis by the Western powers is brought into his indictment. But no reference is made to the early love affair between the Soviets and Mussolini, nor to the Russo-German pact, nor to Mr. Molotov’s statement of October 1939: “Ideological wars are reminiscent of old religious wars… that brought economic ruin and savagery; … a war of this kind has no justification whatsoever. … The ideology of Hitlerism, like any other ideological system, can be accepted or rejected – that is a matter of view. … Everybody will understand that an ideology cannot be destroyed by force. … Therefore, it is senseless and criminal to wage a war for the destruction of Hitlerism, covered by the false banner of a struggle lor ‘democracy’.”
This business of totally reversing attitudes to suit the exigencies of power politics is the death of real politics and the assassin of peace. The civil wars being advocated and fomented are in no single case spontaneous movements of a majority or near-majority of the people. They are weapons of power politics, made the more horrible by the hypocritical mask of smiling humanitarianism and democracy, clapped as covers upon their fearsome visages.
Non-intervention in Spain was a bad policy only because it was not universally observed. Franco was a product not of nonintervention but of intervention. Satisfactory intervention in Spain is today impossible because the interests of the great powers cross in the Mediterranean, and those interests, and not the wishes or welfare of the Spanish people, will be predominant.
Thus, though Franco’s Spain was in part created by the Axis, a genuinely free Spain cannot be created by U.N. That hope, like many others, is a casualty of the destruction of the Atlantic Charter.