The Atlantic Charter and the Marxian opium dream

Title

Language

English

Source

The American Chamber of Commerce Journal Volume XXV (No. 4) April 1949

Year

1949

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Abstract

Editorial

Fulltext

Editorials (i... to promote the general welfare” The adoption of the Atlantic Pact, which binds the major nations of the West into a defensive alThe Atlantic Charter and the Marxian Opium Dream liance, was the inevitable outcome of the deliberate wrecking by Russia of the United Nations Charter which it once was hoped would unite all the peoples of earth. The Russian oligarchs from the first have waged a campaign of virulent hostility just short of open warfare against all other governments, and the Atlantic Pact, to be followed possibly by a similar Mediterranean pact and, as advocated by President Quirino, a Pacific pact, is the measure of the price they have to pay, — a world on guard against them. In just retribution, Russia today stands isolated; without a friendly government or people to give it countenance; its only “allies,” those nations on its borders which it has overrun. They would save face by continuing to address their lying propaganda to the peoples of the world over the heads of their governments, but this becomes ever more exaggerated and absurd as they become more hysterical. So much for the “crafty” men in the Kremlin and their Marxian opium dream of world enslave ment to one totalitarian power. History is said — sometimes fondly, and some times with weariness — to repeat itself, and one wonders whether it could possibly repeat Wanted: itself in the present China case. One Another could hope that it might if the hope did John Hay not seem quite so vain. Henry Adams (1838-1918), in his autobiography, “The Education of Henry Adams,” wrote: “The drama acted in Peking, in the summer of 1900, was, in the eyes of a student [Adams], the most serious that could be offered for his study, since it brought him suddenly to the inevitable struggle for the control of China, which, in his view, must decide the control of the world; yet, as a money-value, the fall of China was chiefly studied in Paris and London as a calamity to Chinese porcelain. The value of a Ming vase was more serious than universal war. “The drama of the Legations interested the public much as though it were a novel of Alexandre Dumas, but the bear ing of the drama on future history offered an interest vastly greater. Adams knew no more about it than though he were the best-informed statesman in Europe. Like them all, he took for granted that the Legations were massacred, and that John Hay, who alone championed China’s ‘administrative entity,’ would be massacred too, since he must henceforth look on, in impotence, while Russia and Germany dismembered China, and shut up America at home. Nine statesmen out of ten, in Europe, accepted the result in advance, seeing no way to pre vent it. Adams saw none, and laughed at Hay for his help lessness. “When Hay suddenly ignored European leadership, took the lead himself, rescued the Legations and saved China, Adams looked on, as incredulous as Europe, though not quite so stupid, since, on that branch of education, he knew enough for his purpose. Nothing so meteoric had ever been done in American diplomacy. On returning to Washington, Jan uary 30, 1901, he found most of the world as astonished as himself, but less stupid than usual. For a moment, indeed, the world had been struck dumb at seeing Hay put Europe aside and set the Washington Government at the head of civil ization so quietly that civilization submitted, by mere instinct of docility, to receive and obey his orders; but, after the first shock of silence, society felt the force of the stroke through its fineness, and burst into tumultuous applause. Instantly the diplomacy of the nineteenth century, with all its painful scuf fles and struggles, was forgotten, and the American blushed to be told of his submissions in the past.” A few years after the diplomatic stroke so high ly praised by Adams, came the Russo-Japanese War, one of the results of which was, — thanks to the in tervention of the first Roosevelt, that Russia was ef fectively blocked in Asia for a number of decades. But Japan took Russia’s place as a menace to China and ultimately came near to total conquest. Today, with Japan eliminated, Russia has started rolling forward again, — thanks in part to the second Roosevelt’s concessions at Yalta. And the Russian gains in the North are made the more dangerous by the victories in the civil war of 139

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