The Best of I.F. Stone

by I. F. Stone

  I think it is no exaggeration to say that since last week, when Lippmann wrote what I have quoted, the anti-Soviet atmosphere has grown. It is no longer a question of not “yielding” to the men Lippmann has in mind. They are, if not running the show, at least playing the dominant part in the American delegation and in the conference.

  Some of them have been very open and very indiscreet in voicing their anti-Soviet views at the social functions in which celebrity-dazed San Francisco has been lionizing them. They have been equally open in spreading anti-Soviet propaganda “off the record” to correspondents who are their confidants or mouthpieces.

  One correspondent, on a conservative paper with more access to these circles than I, says the only two members of the American delegation who have not been spreading an anti-Soviet line are Commander Stassen and Dean Gildersleeve. I cannot vouch for that information and it may be unfair to one or two others, but I do not think it is far wrong.

  In an atmosphere of this kind one may be sure that the realistic Russians, who understand perfectly well what is going on, will make few concessions on Poland and other areas important to the security of the USSR. They are no more willing than are the French to rely for their security solely on a new world organization, especially one born in such circumstances.

  If this seems wicked of them, it may well be kept in mind that the United States Navy, on the question of international trusteeship, is equally unwilling to accept the new organization as a substitute for effective American control of the Pacific islands and perhaps some of the African territories where it considers bases necessary to our own security.

  Whether President Truman is aware of, and supports, the kind of maneuvering in which the American delegation is engaged I do not know. Since the death of Roosevelt, the leadership of the American delegation seems to have fallen to Senator Vandenberg.

  Truman’s own attitude is not clear. It is noted that the day after the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union he issued a particularly unfortunate statement that is now being recalled with perhaps unjustified apprehension.

  The New York Times of June 24, 1941, carried a story by Turner Catledge in which he said Congressional reaction to “the newest turn of the European war was reserved except among isolationists. . . .” I do not think that term was fairly applied to Truman, but Catledge went on to quote Truman as one of those isolationists.

  “If we see that Germany is winning,” Catledge quoted then Senator Truman as saying, “we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them think anything of their pledged word.”

  What Truman said in 1941 may be no index of his ideas in 1945, but what he said in 1941 reflects the kind of thinking which has a strong hold on too many of the members of our delegation in San Francisco.

  Part Three

  TWILIGHT STRUGGLE

  Unnoticed News Bulletin

  The last sentence of this story says it all. In a seemingly innocuous report from a committee of the House of Representatives, Stone unearths telling signs that, driven by a resurgence of the anti-Communist fervor that produced the “Red scares” of the inter-war period, American political and business interests are moving to block Soviet development—and support rearmament of Germany—in preparation for an inevitable war with the U.S.S.R.

  . . .

  December 31, 1946

  THE PRESS GENERALLY SEEMS to have overlooked two salient points in the so-called “progress report” on “economic reconstruction in Europe” made public here over the weekend by the influential House Special Committee on Postwar Economic Policy and Planning.

  One is that the committee not only proposes to raise the level of industry allowed Germany under the Potsdam agreements but suggests the wisdom of permitting the Reich to retain its two key war industries, synthetic oil and synthetic rubber.

  The other is that the committee at the same time not only proposes to restrict private American sales to the Soviet Union but to institute a world-wide trade war under American leadership against the USSR.

  One extraordinary parenthetical reference in this report would seem to indicate that the committee would even allow the Germans to do research in atomic and bacteriological warfare, so long as they were subject to “inspection.” Reports of the Allied Control Commission after the last war showed that inspection was circumvented and thwarted even under a Social Democratic regime in the Reich.

  The report urges the State Department to initiate steps to prevent other nations, as well as ourselves, from supplying the Soviet Union with the materials needed for the reconstruction of its war-ravaged industries.

  “Merely to refuse a loan to Russia,” the report says, “is not enough.”

  The report proposes that all sales to Russia be subject to export license control by the Department of Commerce “under conditions set by the Department of State,” with a special view to preventing the Russians from obtaining “American know-how and some of the most secret processes in fields of radar, electronics, communications, catalytic chemistry, etc., basic in the superiority of American defense.”

  That the influential House committee is thinking not merely of defense secrets but of blocking industrial development in the USSR is to be seen in its further recommendation:

  The committee “urges upon the State Department the exercise of the maximum pressure upon other systems to follow this lead, and calls specific attention to the danger of having Britain, Sweden, Switzerland and France operate along these lines, to supply Russia with an industrial development that can only be deleterious to the interests of a secure and peaceful world under present Russian policies.”

  The committee objects in particular to the arrangement by which Sweden will supply a large part of its billion-kroner trade credit to the USSR in electrical equipment. It urges the Civilian Production Administration not to wait for Congressional authorization but to use its export licensing powers to shut off shipment of these and other “capital goods items” to Russia.

  While objecting to industrialization of Russia, the committee throws doubt on the necessity of forbidding Germany in the future to operate two of the key synthetic war industries built up by I. G. Farben between the two first world wars. These are the synthetic petroleum and synthetic rubber industries. The Reich has been most susceptible to blockade in rubber and oil in the past and the Wehrmacht could not have fought as long as it did without synthetics at its disposal.

  The report is critical not only of the Russians but of the British and the French as well for alleged unfair treatment of the Germans, and says: “Germany is the special responsibility of the Western powers, and on its fate mainly depends the future of Europe in relation to Communism.”

  Thus the old familiar Nazi line of the need to strengthen the Reich as a bulwark against Bolshevism reappears in a Congressional report, less than two years after the second World War ended, and it reappears in a context suggesting that America’s principal postwar concern is preparation for a third world war, this time against the USSR.

  Mr. Smith Pleads for Peace

  Stone is generally thought of mainly as an investigative reporter and polemicist, but, as this piece illustrates, he also had a wicked gift for satire.

  . . .

  January 24, 1949

  IN TAKING OVER THE HIGH OFFICE to which I have been elected as head of the Smith family, I want to pledge myself to peace.

  We Smiths, unlike the Joneses, are peaceful people. A new war would ruin us. There are three mortgages on the old house already. We couldn’t afford another scrap in this neighborhood. That’s why I’m going to do all I can for peace.

  So far as I can see, the prospects for peace would be excellent, were it not for the Joneses over in the next alley. They lie, cheat, steal, pick their noses in public, and forget to put the top on their garbage can.

  As everybody knows, Smiths are righteou
s folk. We meet the interest on our mortgages, shovel the snow off our sidewalks, and we’re in our pew at church every Sunday morning. We stand foursquare with God and we have reason to believe that God stands foursquare with us.

  We’re Presbyterians. The Joneses are different. They’re Baptists. We have statistics to prove that 6,349,742 Baptists every year die from total immersion. That’s the kind of people we Smiths are up against in trying to make this neighborhood a safe one.

  We Smiths believe every man should be free to worship God as he pleases, so long as he doesn’t turn Baptist, or spread total immersion. We’re prepared to lend money to anyone on the verge of becoming a Baptist if only he’ll desist from damnation.

  One of the troubles with the Joneses is they’re too darned suspicious. They keep insisting that we are getting ready to attack them. I have no hesitation in saying that this is a complete fabrication, highly exaggerated, only partly true, and something of a misconception.

  It is true that in return for friendly loans to neighbors of the Joneses we have arranged to set up sandbag emplacements in all the backyards adjoining theirs, and are ready at a moment’s notice to let loose with a new gadget of which we Smiths are right proud, the addled egg.

  These eggs, as prepared by a secret process of our own, are so hard when thrown and so gaseous when broken that a fusillade of them is guaranteed within ten minutes to break every window in the Jones home, kill Mr. Jones, drive Mrs. Jones out of her head, and asphyxiate all the Jones children. But these preparations of ours are purely defensive. The refusal of the Joneses to believe this is another example of that stubborn wickedness to which Joneses are predestined.

  Far from plotting war, we are anxious for peace. The front door of our home is always open to Old Man Jones. He’s a crooked old scoundrel, with a nose like a tomato and a breath that would knock over a horse. Everybody knows he’s an embezzler, chicken thief, bigamist, and prevaricator, but any time he wants to crawl over to my door on that dirty belly of his I’ll talk peace with him.

  We’re going ahead on our own peace plans regardless. We’re going to erect a ten-foot-high picket fence around the Jones house. We’re building up the biggest stockpile of addled eggs in the history of our neighborhood. And we’re negotiating with little Willie Jones, who’s just crazy about lollipops, to supply him with all-day suckers for life, if he’ll set fire to the Jones place next time his old man’s sleeping off a bender.

  We Smiths want peace so bad we’re prepared to kill every one of the Joneses to get it.

  Shall We Take the Gamble Hitler Lost?

  This article was written in reaction to a special issue of Collier’s weekly devoted to the fantastic supposition of a war in which the Soviet Union is quickly and easily overthrown by Western armies. (It’s hard to ignore the similarity to the neocon predictions of a “cakewalk” in Iraq, in which American soldiers would be greeted as liberators by the grateful Iraqi people after a quick and painless military triumph.) Thankfully, most American policy makers in the Cold War era retained enough of a grip on reality so that this hair-raising scheme was never actually tried.

  . . .

  October 25, 1951

  IN THE FIRST DAYS OF THE NAZI ATTACK upon the Soviet Union, when General George C. Marshall himself thought the USSR might collapse within a few weeks, Time magazine spoke of the “pathetic fallacy” that Hitler could be stopped by the same defense-in-depth and scorched-earth tactics which defeated Napoleon.

  Events proved this was no fallacy. The pathetic spectacle was the hitherto unbeatable Wehrmacht after two winters on the vast frozen Russian plain. The experts who drew up the blueprint for Collier’s special issue on “Russia’s Defeat and Occupation” did take note of Napoleon’s defeat and Hitler’s, but only to fall into as serious an error.

  They realize that an invasion of Russia has proved fatal on three occasions. Napoleon, Wilhelm II, and Hitler alike were fatally enfeebled by their attempts to invade Russia. To meet this problem—quite a problem—Collier’s assumes that Russia can be defeated without being invaded!

  This needs to be read to be believed. Hanson W. Baldwin in his contribution, “How The War Was Fought,” says, “No deep land penetration of Russia was ever attempted—or indeed ever seriously contemplated.”

  The main drive eastward halts at the Pripet marshes, i.e. on the ancient natural border dividing Russia from the Western lands. “Spearheads” move into Finland and the Baltic states and establish advanced air bases. A southern drive through Turkey ends “in a lodgment in the Crimea, where the last formal battles” are fought.

  “In the meantime,” Baldwin explains, “as the Red armies fell apart in the West, Siberia, and Red China, . . . limited amphibious operations, many of them made against little opposition, put United States and allied troops ashore in Korea, Manchuria and China.”

  As easy as that!

  This picture of the Red armies falling apart and of the Moscow regime collapsing is based on the notion that the Russians are a kind of faceless enslaved mass of what Robert E. Sherwood calls “docile flesh and blood.”

  The impression Collier’s creates is that Russia is one vast slave labor camp where we need only shoot the guards and wreck the gates to be hailed as liberators. The Communist regime, as Arthur Koestler explains in his contribution, “was simply a rule of terror.”

  Millions of lives have twice been staked—and lost—on Koestler’s view that the Soviet dictatorship is “simply a rule of terror.” The first time was in the years of armed intervention which followed the Revolution. The second time was when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.

  The same factors on which our anti-Soviet experts rely today—hatred of the secret police, the harshness of the Bolsheviks in dealing with dissident elements, dissatisfaction among the Ukrainians and other non-Russian peoples, “religious longings,” etc.—also figured in the earlier calculations.

  Twice the collapse failed to occur, though Russia was invaded and large portions occupied. Collier’s would have us believe that this time a collapse would occur without an invasion. This is quite a gamble.

  A great deal is being written in the American press about the danger of some “miscalculation” in a Kremlin blinded by its own propaganda. There is at least as great a danger of a miscalculation in a Washington blinded by its own propaganda.

  Much that is being culled from Soviet newspapers and Soviet refugees is undoubtedly true, as much is true that can be culled about American weaknesses from the American press and American radicals who have gone abroad. But in neither case is this likely to be the whole truth.

  A Russian whose head was full of stories about American lynchings and slums—both realities—might well imagine that at the approach of Soviet armies to our shores the Negroes would revolt and the American workers would hail their liberating brothers. An American whose head is full of stories about forced labor camps and secret police—both realities—can well imagine, as the contributors to Collier’s imagine, a fervent welcome for the Western armies in the Soviet Union.

  There is wishful thinking on both sides, and a fear on both sides of becoming politically suspect if one dwells on the sources of strength in the other country. Even amid the hostile propaganda here, there are glimpses which explain Soviet capacity to survive and which warn against reliance on theories of easy collapse.

  Margaret Mead in her new book on Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority, a study financed by Cold War funds, speaks of “the reserves of zest and energy which the present population [of the Soviet Union] displays.” A nation of cowed slave laborers does not show “zest and energy.”

  Ambassador Alan G. Kirk, just back from two years in Moscow, spoke here October 18 of a trip he made across the Soviet Union. He pictured “imagination and driving force at work” in Siberia. He spoke of the Soviet peoples as “a young race, virile and vigorous, with imagination and inspiration.”

  Regimentation is undeniable but “despite regimentation the individual is made to feel
that he is a contributing member of society—a feeling that adds purpose and happiness to life.” The quotation is not from the Dean of Canterbury. It is from the book written by the wartime director of American lend-lease in Moscow, General John R. Deane’s The Strange Alliance.

  Collier’s blueprint calls for round-the-clock bombing but assumes we can fight Russia’s masters without fighting her people. There is no way to bomb with such pinpoint accuracy as to hit only card-carrying Communists. There is no way to wage a war of liberation with atom bombs. History shows foreign attack tends to solidify Russians against the invader rather than against their rulers, whether czars or commissars.

  Let us listen to a bitterly anti-Communist writer, who himself advocates American aid to counter-revolutionary movements within the Soviet Union. “If,” Boris Shub writes in his book The Choice, “through the continued absence of a positive American peace program toward Russia, the Kremlin does convince the majority that we intend to wage genocidal war, they will have to rally behind Stalin as the lesser evil.”

  “For no matter how much they hate the police state,” Shub continues, “they cannot welcome mass extermination by American hydrogen bombs.” War against the Soviet regime would inescapably be war against the Soviet peoples and their allies in China and Eastern Europe. That is a lot of people, about three quarters of a billion of them. It will take the lives of a good many American boys to subdue them, if instead of collapsing (as in the Collier’s blueprint) they resist.

  A Chill Falls on Washington

  When Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, after nearly thirty years as leader of the Soviet Union, it created a power vacuum in the Kremlin and an atmosphere of anxious uncertainty on the world diplomatic scene. I. F. Stone seized the opportunity to call on his own country to adopt a more realistic and accommodating stance toward the other great power of the post-war era.