-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- an excerpt from: The Untold Philippine Story Hernado J. Abaya Malaya Books, Inc�1967. Quezon City, Philippines 370pps. -2nd Printing- ----- 12 LET ASIANS FIGHT ASIANS Manila, August 1953 Psy-war: A Secret Weapon? A change came when the Republicans took over in 1953. Out the White House kitchen window went the "cowardly and futile policy of containment." In its place, John Foster Dulles, the new architect of U.S. foreign policy, promised an affirmative, dynamic and, at the same time, safe policy. Eisenhower, Dulles & Co. were going to offer "stern alternatives" to both Communists and wavering Allies. To the Communists they would say: If you want to continue making war in Korea you must pay a higher price than in the past. And to the Allies in free Europe: If you insist on the privileges of nationalism you must not expect us to pay the price of nationalism. (James Reston, The New Yor k Times, February 1, 1953.) They were to take "calculated risks." The de-neutralization of Formosa was one such calculated risk. With the cold war going full blast, and the Korean truce talks dragging on at Panmunjom, the power-hungry Republicans mounted the new secret weapon of their foreign policy: psychological warfare. The new policy must be directed at stirring up resistance behind the Iron Curtain. (The ill-fated Hungarian revolt was a direct result of this policy.) The United States, said Dulles, must make clear to the enslaved peoples that "it wants and expects liberation to occur." The mere statement of this wish, Dulles promised, would "change, in an electrifying way, the mood of the captive peoples." He made it sound that simple. Which prompted Elmer Davis to remark acridly: All we need is a sense of mission and purpose; then moral and spiritual forces will penetrate into the minds and souls of those under the ruthless control of Soviet Communist structure, and the edifice of despotism will surely crumple. Just a few toots of the trumpet, and the walls of the Kremlin will come tumbling down. (The Reporter, February 3, 1953.) In fact, said Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., so convinced was Dulles of the efficacy of psychological warfare that he even declared that this weapon could end the Korean war. (Ibid., March 31, 1953.) "We could so deluge the Communist forces in North Korea with effective propaganda," said Dulles in September 1952, "that their rulers would want to get them out of the range of that propaganda and be eager to end the condition which made it legitimate for us to carry on that propaganda . . ." This could be carried to ludicrous lengths. As Gen. Mark Clark did when he made his famous offer of $100,000 to the first Communist pilot to fly a Soviet MIG into United Nations hands in Korea. Sex got into the act, too, in the person of a Hollywood blonde who offered herself as an added premium to the cash price. Senator John J. Sparkman was constrained to ask: "What happens if no Red pilots take up the offer?" The sedate London Times spanked Clark for his "repugnant, stupid and ill-timed" offer, since it came just before the Panmunjom peace negotiations started in the spring of 1953. The conscience of America cried out through Senator Burnett R. Maybank when he told senate colleagues "we can't buy our way to world peace with dollars." The stakes are high in the cold war. And psychological warfare has hurt the United States more than it has hurt the Communist enemy, especially in the battle for the Asian mind. C. D. Jackson, czar of the Eisenhower regime's psychological warfare department, spelled out the essential ingredients of this type of double-edged weapon as 1) fana-ticism, 2) flexibility, 3) money, 4) no holds barred, and 5) no questions asked. Elements incompatible with a free society. When free men become fanatics, they cease to be free men. Flexibility implies deceit. (Following the pattern laid down by Kerman and Dewey earlier with stress on more flexibility in policy.) Money corrupts. Where no holds are barred and no questions are asked, free society disintegrates. Freemen are consumed by fear. They become slaves. Moral and human values are forgotten. Psychological warfare has its role in wartime. It has no place in peacetime in our democratic society. "For an open society," Schlesinger rightfully says, "the only durable propaganda is actuality. We cannot hope to win the free peoples of the world and roll back the Communists by sleight-of-hand, love potions, and voodoo." (The Reporter, March 31, 1953.) Means, as Gandhi had said, are always as important as the ends. If you adopt evil means to attain a good end, said Nehru, the evil means do not lead you to that good end at all. They lead you somewhere else. The G.O.P.'s psychological warfare started boldly with talk of "liberation" in Europe and "blockade of Communist China" and "freeing Chiang Kai-shek" in Asia. And if the Allies should waver, whip them into line with the big stick. Free Europe was disturbed. So was Asia. This talk of blockade, said Nehru, is obviously not talk of peace. Then, in an oblique swipe at Eisenhower, he added: A soldier is excellent in his own domain but, as someone has said, even war is too serious a thing for soldiers to handle. (The N.Y. Times, Febru ary 19, 1953.) Adlai Stevenson was concerned too, especially over suggestions that the big stick be used to make Allies toe the line.[24] We want no sullen obedience, he said. We want no satellites. We will frighten no Russians by threatening financial sanctions against our allies. Ours must be the role of the good neighbor, the good partner, the good friend � never the big bully. (A ssociated Press dispatch, February 19, 1953.) People don't often realize that we need friends to influence other people. The great "T. R." had the right formula: Walk softly even though you have a big stick. (It was Theodore Roosevelt who launched America on her Manifest Destiny with the big stick.) II U.S. Plots an Asian Army But not the Dulles school of thought (later the Rusk-McNamara school) to which Pentagon brass fully subscribed. They would wield that big stick, and see what would happen. Eisenhower used the slogan "Let Asians Fight Asians" in his campaign. It got him many votes. This was Ike's thinking: Why should American boys be dying in Korea when there are millions of expendable Asians who can man the guns? The Russians are using the Chinese and North Koreans to fight us. Why don't we use Asians, too? What was intended as a vote-getting slogan, therefore, became a major policy in Asia of the new administration. Hardly was the Eisenhower regime a month in office when details were revealed of a long-range program to train and equip the ground forces of "those Asian nations that wish to participate in the common defense of the area against Communist aggression." (N.Y. Times, February 7, 1953.) Planners made it clear they had in mind Japan, Kuomintang China in Formosa, the Philippines and Thailand. They knew the big new Asian nations, who often speak for an awakened Asia, would snub the program, but they were leaving the door open just in case India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Burma should change their minds. Filipinos and Thais would supply the ground forces necessary to hold Russia and Red China in check in Asia, in the event of a war, to enable the United States to reserve her manpower for the defense of Europe and Western civilization. Using Chiang's 600,000-man army as nucleus of this vast reserve, the Eisenhower strategists planned to draw from the nine million of military age in Japan, the two million in the Philippines and an additional two mililon[sic] in Thailand for their all-Asian army trained and equipped by American advisers. The Japanese peace treaty, which Dulles, as Truman's onetime trouble-shooter, negotiated, imposed no limitation on Japanese military forces. The huge Japanese manpower therefore could be tapped. While the Philippines and Thailand had contributed troops to the defense of Korea, it was pointed out that 57,000 Filipinos and 50,000 Thais were serving in the armed forces of each country then, when each nation had two million men of military age. On the basis of enlisting one man out of five of military age, the yardstick Eisenhower planners used in the study, this would mean a force of 400,000 in each of these two small Asian nations. (Ibid.) (The Philippines, for instance, spends up to 40 per cent of its national budget to maintain an armed force of 57,000 men. To saddle the Philippines with a 400,000-man army would completely bankrupt the republic and would mortgage the very freedom such a force is intended to protect. Yet, the Quirino government blue-printed a military setup of 300,000 men for the United States to help train and equip for use if need be, on foreign soil to fight against Communist aggression.[25] Forgetting that before we undertake any rash adventures broad, the home front must be strengthened against Communist inroads by doing something about solving the social and economic ills that plague our nation and poison our lifeblood.) Japan would have, on the same basis, a formidable force of 1,800,000 men, or more than what Japan fielded on the Asian mainland in the last war. The cost of training and equipping such an Asian army of vast proportions would be staggering. But aside from the speculative question of whether America could underwrite this huge army, which would tax American economy to the breaking point, there was the larger question of what it would involve in political cost and prestige. In this policy, Eisenhower had the support of Chiang, Rhee and Quirino. For Chiang, his only hope, a fanatical hope, of returning to the mainland is through invasion, which would mean a third world war. Rhee applauded Eisenhower's policy in the expectation that America would give him a "blank check for unlimited expansion of R.O.K. forces." America had assumed, in her dealings with the Rhee government, an identity of interest that in fact never existed. Rhee expected the U.S. to help him get a dictated peace. One could not really blame him. Dulles gave him all the rope. It was on the same assumption of a mutuality of interest that Dulles, with a big entourage that included Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., U.S. chief delegate to the United Nations, flew to Korea to seal a defense pact with Rhee and, more importantly, to agree on a common front in the political conference on Korean peace. Even before leaving for Korea, Dulles had talked darkly of walking out of the political conference with Rhee should the Communists make the talks a sham. How democracy can be identified with a Rhee who had flaunted the very concept of democracy by his constant resort to force and coercion to gain a political advantage will need some tall explaining. In May 1953, despite strong protest by the U.S. and the U.N., he imposed martial law on Pusan in order to coerce the National Assembly. When Truman warned him in 1952 that forcible suppression of his (Rhee's) foes would play into the hands of Communist propagandists, Rhee's answer was to have his police round up his opponents so there would be a quorum to approve the new constitution he had dictated to assure his continuance in power. (Homer Bigart in The N.Y. Herald Tribune, Jun e 28, 1953.) Many American observers agreed Eisenhower's awkward slogan, "Let Asians Fight Asians," had done America great political harm in Asia. For it could mean, in Asian eyes, only one thing: That Americans want to combine Asian manpower with American weapons. The new nations of non-Communist Asia, as an American editor put it, are likely to see in this policy an evidence of imperialism at its crudest, the exploitation of raw military manpower. (Max Ascoli, editorial in April 28, 1953 issue of The Reporter.) It identifies America, wrote justice William 0. Douglas, with a dying social system against which all Asia is up in arms. It thus strengthens the suspicion, often voiced by Asians, that America is too powerful to cooperate with them and too rich to understand them. (Strange Lands and Friendly Peoples.) America must speak in terms he Asians can understand. Political alliances of an enduring nature will not be built on the power of guns or dollars, but on affection, respect and equality. The cold war is "a battle of faiths." Even the West has begun to doubt its own credentials. This is why Asia views those same credentials critically. "We cannot hope," said Herbert Agar, "to restore our credentials with the most ingenious, the most numerous of bombs. We are not seeking to frighten or kill those silent, watching millions (in Asia). We are seeking to impress them with the goodness of our cause. And this we can do, if we define our cause and serve it with our lives as well as our editorials." (From an article, On the Greatness of Our Faith Depends the Future of Our World. The N.Y. Herald Tribune Book Review Section, March 8, 1953.) As a seasoned American observer in Asia said, "The nearer America moves toward the farmer, both as a voter and as sower, the closer we shall be to Asia." (George Weller, in an article, Indo-China, the Other Korea, April 28, 1953 issue of Th e Reporter.) Or, as John Gunther very simply put it, "we must be on the side of the Asian peoples." (Asia's Danger Spots, article in Look Magazine, January 2, 1951.) America cannot "go it alone" in Asia. Joseph McCarthy and the China Lobby wanted it. Robert A. Taft wanted it. Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater wanted it. (McNamara and Johnson are, at this writing, doing it.) Men of a like mind on Capitol Hill and the Pentagon cannot comprehend what is happening in Asia. The change has come to Asia and it has been the Asians, not the Americans and Europeans, to paraphrase Chester Bowles, who since the war have been deciding the great issues of Southeast Asia and the Far East. "Regardless of how many atomic bombs we may have," he reminded Americans, "we will never be omnipotent in Asia." (United Press, June 5, 1953.) There is no easy victory in Asia. Many problems can be solved only by time. The "Achesons and the Attlees of this world" did not "hamstring" General MacArthur, as McCarthy wrongly claimed, and prevent him from obtaining victory in Korea. (Before the House of Commons, on May 13, 1953, Clement Attlee said: "But sometimes one finds that Congress takes the bit between its teeth and one sometimes wonders who is more powerful, the President or McCarthy." In a typical vitriolic outburst, McCarthy hit back at Attlee and the British and urged the United States to "go it alone," for this nation had "the guts, the strength, to win its battles." At this, reported The New York Times, May 14, 1953, there was heavy applause in the galleries.) It was something bigger than MacArthur and McCarthy. Adlai Stevenson found it in his tour of Asia in the spring of 1953. In Indo-China, for instance, he learned that the best ideas and the best arms of the Vietminh are nationalism and anti-colonialism" (Look Magazine, June 2, 1953.) III The French Won't Leave Nationalism is strong in Indo-China because colonialism has remained. The French fought desperately to hold on to their last outpost of empire in Asia. To the peoples of Indo-China and the rest of Asia, this was � and still is � a colonial war. (The U.S. involvement later only underscored the imperialist nature of the war.) It was not another Korea. It was rather, as many American observers agreed, a carefully blended uprising of nationalists and Communists organized and led by Communists and logistically supported by Peking. By supporting the French with guns and dollars, America became identified, in Asian eyes, on the side of colonialism and against social revolution. (It became a full-fledged American war in 1962.) Hence fear of America developed where there should have been understanding. American motives became suspect. The French, at Washington's prodding, had given the Vietnamese and Laotians and Cambodians a watered-down freedom. This was not freedom but slavery in a gift package. It might satisfy a Bao Dai yachting off Cannes on the French Riviera. (Associated Press, August 4, 1951.) It could not fool the Vietnamese jungle fighter locked in a death struggle with Ho Chi Minh's rebels. With Ho, wrote Gunther, are most of the Indo-Chinese who hate the French, hate economic despotism, hate the past. (Look Magazine, January 211951.) And that past is dead. It did not fool Cambodia's King Norodom "Cambodian justice," Norodom told interviewers in New York during his first visit to America in the spring of 1953, "does not apply to the French, and our police cannot touch them In economic mat-ters, they have our hands and feet tied; we cannot import and export freely and we have no freedom of taxation." And he added ominously: "If we have an invasion of the sort that Laos has suffered recently (April 1953), I am not at all certain that I can call for a general mobilization as did Laos. If there is a menace, the people will say that the French are encircled and that their end has come." (N.Y. Tim es, April 19, 1953.) The peoples of Indo-China wanted freedom � from French rule. They wanted an end to colonialism. But America wanted to see the French stay on in Indo-China. Its loss to the Communists, Eisenhower told a gathering of governors at Seattle on August 5, 1953, would make Southeast Asia, India and Pakistan scarcely defensible. "If we lost all that," he said, "how would the free world hold the rich empire of Indo-China?" Stevenson spelled it out for him: "If Vietnam falls all of Indo-China is doomed. Thailand and Burma would be in mortal danger. If this vast area of the world, with its 175,000,000 peop le, its tin, rubber, minerals and oil, is absorbed into the Moscow-Peking empire, the still vaster nations of India and Pakistan would quickly lose any freedom of action. All Asia would slide behind the Iron Curtain." (Look Magazi ne, June 2, 1953.) In combatting Communism, America must hold the lifeline of empire in Asia for her European partners. It is in her self-interest to do so. It is the overriding interest. The interest of Asian peoples is secondary. So America poured in $400 million yearly to help the French fight that war. "We are voting the cheapest way," said Eisenhower, "that we can prevent the occurrence of something that would be of a most terrible significance to the United States, our security, our power and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of the Indonesian territory and from Southeast Asia." (Italics supplied) Republican Dewey Short, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, had this to say: "We should hit the Reds with everything we've got. We cannot allow Southeast Asia with its rubber and rice to fall into Russian hands. We cannot allow Iran and Iraq with their oil to fall to the Soviets." (CBS TV interview, Man of the Week, May 3, 1953.) (Are these the only considerations that impel America to bar Communist aggression, because some countries have oil, rubber and other raw materials vitally needed by U.S. industry? What of the basic interests of the peoples of these nations, their struggle to free themselves from hunger and want, from fear?) The United States must look after its interests in Asia. That is implicit in the statements we have just quoted from Eisenhower and from Dewey Short. The Asians cannot be less subjective in looking at what happens in Asia from the perspective of their own largerinterests. Here was the crux of the matter. Eisenhower, reflecting the views of a cabinet of "eight millionaires and a plumber," looked at Indo-China, and the rest of Southeast Asia, as a supplier of raw materials for the free world � the free world of the West. Freedom for the In-dochinese, and for other Asians still under foreign rule, must wait. The interests of America, and the West, conflict with the interests of Asia. The status quo must be retained. The Communist threat must be faced first. The principle of common action and understanding in universal human terms must be abandoned to the principle of security � for a dying colonialism. The result was the weakening of the very nations America and the West sought to guard against Communist conquest. The colonial subjects began to lose faith in the cause of the West. And they have become easy prey to the political infiltration that precedes any Communist grab of power. A saying in Vietnam aptly expresses the dilemma of the West: The war against the Communists cannot be won without the French and it cannot be won with them. (This was said of the French. It applies more pointedly now to the Americans.) France had the tiger by the tail but could not let go. (C. L. Sulzberger, The New York Times, June 14, 1953.) Neither the United States nor any other At-lantic Pact partner wanted France to pull out of Vietnam. That would open up Indo-China and all Southeast Asia to Communist conquest. However, by holding on to Indo-China, France and her backers, par-ticularly America, only added to their own burdens and created ill will in the rest of Asia. They could not contain the social revolution sweeping Asia any more than the British could prevent the change that came to America in 1776. For the upheaval in Asia is a belated extension of that revolution of 1776 that spread to France in 1789 and to Russia in 1917. [Christopher Rand said in a dispatch to The New York Herald Tribune in May 1951: "The sudden discovery (by U.S. generals in Korea) that conventional arms lack power against revolutions is no new thing in history. The British lobsterbacks made it in 17 76. Armies of Europe found they could not put down the revolutionary French. The Bolsheviks amazed the world by fighting off the Czarist armies led by the ablest White generals and backed by foreign intervention."] "The terrible courage which the Chinese are displaying in Korea, said Walter Lippmann on May 29, 1951, "serves the best interests of Moscow. But never conceivably could that courage have been manufactured in Moscow. There is behind that courage not only terror and ruthlessness but also the passion which has always moved revolutionary armies and made them so formidable." It is the same movement that has exposed the phony facade of "democracy" in East Germany and in the peoples' republics behind the Iron Curtain. IV Nationalism: The Asian View Charles Malik wrote in 1951: The driving force behind this social revolution in Asia is nationalism. The idea of one's nation, one's motherland, whose independence is to be attained and safeguarded at any price, from which "the foreigner," that is, the white manmust be driven by all means, has taken hold on the Asiatic imagination. For the moment, the important fact is that the Communist movement is identifying itself with resurgent nationalism in Asia. And ulterior Communist motives do not deeply bother the peoples of Asia who are ready to embrace any allies in the fight for freedom. The Indian nationalist, for instance, feels very much as Churchill did when he welcomed alliance with Stalin against Hitler. To such a nationalist, the decisive thing is not the theoretical character of the regime but the practical matter of who rules. (Advice to the West, Life Magazine, 1951.) Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, on returning to the United States on August 3, 1953 after a 10-week tour of Asia, made the interesting observation that the peoples of Asia "have a totally unrealistic conception of Communism, and are more afraid of the United States than of the Soviet Union." Her explanation was simple: "They (Asians) know our strength, but they don't know Russia's. They are not afraid of Russia because they have never seen Russian power." Mrs. Roosevelt overlooked one thing. There is an important difference between Communism as Americans view it and Communism as some of the Asian peoples view it. To quote Stevenson: "When many of the Asian peoples think of Communism they think of what they are going to gain � especially if they believe they have nothing to lose." (Look Magazine, January 2, 1951.) (Manuel L. Quezon, first President of the Philippine Commonwealth, expressed the same sentiment in an oft-quoted statement: "I prefer a government run like bell by Filipinos to one run like heaven by foreigners.") Or, in Stevenson's words: Nationalism, to Asians, means a chance to stand on their own feet, a chance to govern themselves, a chance to develop their resources for their own welfare, and A chance to prove that the color of their skins has nothing to do with their right to walk with respect among their fellow men in the world. It means the end of a legalized inferiority. It means pride, spirit, faith. x x x The answer to Communism is, in the old-fashioned phrase, good works � good works inspired by love and dedicated to the whole man. The answer to the inhumanity of Communism is humane respect for the individual. And the men and women of Asia desire not only to rise from the wretchedness of the body but from abasement of the spirit. In other words, we must strive for harmony of means and ends in our relations with Asia � and indeed with the rest of the world. If we believe the Communist threat to Asia is dangerous to us, then it is in our own self-interest to help them defend and develop, adjusting our policies to the constantly changing circumstances in a world of accelerating changes. (Speech in San Francisco, September 9, 1952, during the election campaign.) The Eisenhower administration, unhappily for a resurgent Asia, did not see eye to eye with Stevenson. Dulles and Co. went into high gear in a hurry in their psychological offensive to seize the initiative in Asia from the Communists. But in their enthusiasm, they forgot T.R.'s advice to walk softly even though one had the big stick. Dulles often showed a reckless impatience to wield the big stick in the manner of a man who wants to show who is boss. Two days after the signing on July 29, 1953 of the Korean armistice, Dulles made the statement at a press interview that the United States' would walk out of the political conference on Korea if it was felt that the Communists were making them a sham. Clement Attlee reminded Dulles that "cooperation does not come from one side alone." To Attlee, Dulles seemed to be laying down conditions and taking a line on the political conference "without taking into account" the views of their colleagues. "It is an extraordinary thing," Attlee said, "that in this conference it is suggested that Korean unity must be achieved or, failing that, the United States would walk out of the conference." (Associated Press dispatch from London, July 30, 1953.) Winston Churchill qualified Britain's signing of the 16-nation pledge to resist renewed aggression on August 15, 1953 when he said: A new factor has been introduced by the behavior of President Rhee. He had improperly released 27,000 prisoners of war, about whom an agreement had been signed with the Communists. He had also talked of the possibility of resuming fighting if his requirements were not met in the political conference. We therefore felt it right to emphasize that the declaration was concerned solely with what we may term an "unprovoked" breach of the armistice by the Communists. This alone could justify the word of warning which we agreed to nearly two years ago. If there were any breach by anyone on our side, Her Majesty's Government would be entitled to reopen the whole question. V A Slogan Returns to Haunt Ike The "Let Asians Fight Asians" slogan of the Eisenhower campaign came back to haunt the Republican administration. The psychological warfare soon lost its wind. It trailed off in a series of qualifying statements about "disengaging" American and French troops from Asia. One drawback in this policy was that politicians. and generals pitched in with their own versions of what a realistic, and tough, American policy should be. Allies at the United Nations were disturbed. And there were broad hints that there be less talk about foreign policy and military decisions by congressmen and none at all by generals and admirals. Reporting to Congress on his first six months in office on August 17, 1953, Ei senhower said on military aid to Formosa: "It is in the interest of the United States to develop the military capabilities of the Republic of China on Formosa." But as with South Korea, the United States has no mutuality of interest with Chiang's Formosa. American association with Chiang has hurt American prestige in the eyes of Asia. For, as Justice Douglas says in North >From Malaya: To the peoples of Asia, the good things that have happened on Formosa with American aid x x x are not the heroic deeds of men who have long struggled for the welfare of the peasants. On the contrary, they represent the belated concessions of men who long stood in the path of change and progress. They represent what was forced on an old leadership, not what was won by an eager one. x x x That is why Asia repudiates Chiang Kai-shek. The flaw in Eisenhower's policy turned out to be, observed the liberal Manches ter Guardian, "the old containment plus the threat of attempted liberation." It was to hold the lines set by Truman and Acheson and simultaneously to threaten to jump over the wall from time to time and pull the Communist tail (or to send Asians to do it). The irony was, added The Guardian, that in the fuss caused by the new American slogan that Asians should be used to fight Asians it had been overlooked that for three years in Korea it had been Russia's policy to use Asians to fight Europeans. (N.Y. Herald Tribune, March 1, 1953.) The plain fact, noted The Economist (June 27, 1953), is that neither of these extreme policies � neither the one that can be caricatured as sabre-rattling nor the one that can be caricatured as appeasement � stands any chance of working. The one would run a grave risk of immediate war. The other cannot be expected to work until mutual confidence has been slowly rebuilt by a long period in which both sides in fact refrain from aggression, open or covert, against the other. In the meantime, the only possible policy is to go on as we have been going, or rather as we set out to go four or five years ago, doing nothing to provoke a conflict, ready to explore every genuine prospect of agreement, not actively preparing to deter any attack on the present borders of the free world. The basic strategy, then, continued The Economist, should continue to he that of containment, the middle course between provocative challenge on the one hand and weak appeasement on the other. x x x The policy of the truce, of accepting things as they are, has been accepted by both sides in Korea and the next step should clearly be to extend the principle to the rest of the Far East. That involves no final commitment to acquiesce in the permanent disappearance of China behind the iron curtain; but it clearly implies abandonment of any thought of trying to unseat Mao Tse-tung by war. (This left Chiang out) x x x Save for the large question-mark hanging over Indo-China, there is now reason to believe that the Communists would accept a modus vivendi on these lines. And profoundly unsatisfactory as it is in many ways, it should also be agreeable to the United Nations. The chief obstructions in the way are the stubborn refusal of American opinion to admit that the Communists do effectively rule China and the no less stubborn refusal of the rest of the "free" world to admit that they do not rule Formosa. As for those who were then preaching the doctrine of liberation of the Eastern European satellites like Dulles and Co., The Economist said: The impossibility of carrying a policy of liberation beyond the stage of talk has been sharply illumined by the events of the last ten days (June 20, 1953). In the Soviet zone of Germany, for the first time, there has been open revolt in a Soviet satellite. Moreover, it has happened in full view of western observers, with American, British and French troops on hand. If there is anything in "liberation," asked The Economist, was not this the golden opportunity for action? But what action? And the answer surely is that no action was possible. The Berlin riots are a propagandist's godsend; they should be exploited to the full of what is said. But it is clear that nothing could have been done without running the real risk of immediate war. The moral is clear. We can refuse to accept the enslavement of the peoples of Eastern Europe or the arbitrary re-drawing of their frontiers by Moscow. We can make it clear that a condition of any general settlement is the holding of free elections. But we must equally make it clear that we shall not be the first to send our forces across the truce line. (Ibid.) Edgar Snow very pointedly underscored the problem facing the United States and the West in Asia in these words: To get Asiatics to fight victorious battles for democracy and the United Nations as the Kremlin gets them to fight its battles without involving Russian forces, it is necessary to confront the Asiatic peasant with an alternative of concrete meaning in the narrow compass of his social existence. That means, first of all, release from landlord opposition � and the promise of enlarged hopes and freedom it entails. Equalization of private ownership of the land is not Communism and it is above all hateful to Communists except where Communists control it. Land reform and the abolition of the feudal character of agrarian economy is, on the contrary, a movement which universally signalized the dawn of modern democracy. Without it, democracy cannot rise in Asia. (Letter to the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, August 26, 1950.) The Economist summed it up by saying that the support and extension throughout Southeast Asia, of the landowning peasantry could provide a more solid base for lasting cooperation with the West than the patronage of the landlords, who are no defense against Communism, or of the commercial classes, who are often alien to the soil. No peasant will turn to a Communist Party pledged beyond recall to collectivization (by the most brutal methods) if land for personal ownership can be had from another source. (December 4, 1948) If the Asian could put his feelings about the Western concept of freedom into words, he would probably repeat with Nehru: If freedom is so frail a plant that it cannot be transplanted on new soil under a different sky, to grow there and multiply and provide sustenance and comfort for peoples of varying traditions and a different skin, then freedom is a sorry thing indeed and our vision of a world of free men is only a forlorn hope. So also, if prosperity and abundance are to be the exclusive patrimony of the peoples that now have these, and the rest of us must accept poverty, disease and ignorance as our predestined inheritance, then all the great speeches about international cooperation have been wasted, and the noble words of the Charter are meaningless, and the United Nations itself has no reason for being. (Quoted from Visit to America.) pps. 125-138 --[notes]� 24. The irrepressible Clare Booth Luce, of the royal American family of Time a nd Life, made this blunder when she said in Rome on May 28, 1953, with an eye on the June 7 Italian elections: "If the Italian people should fall unhappy victim to the wiles of totalitarianism of the right or of the left, there would follow-logically and tragically-grave consequences from this intimate and warm cooperation with U.S. we now enjoy." This led to the fall, on July 29, 1953, of Premier Alcide de Gasperi's proAmerican Cabinet when the Italian Chamber of Deputies, "angered at American intervention in the country's policies" as a news service reported it, dislodged de Gasperi's center government by a 282-263 non-confidence vote. 25. Even the American-owned Manila Daily Bulletin felt it had to remind the government: "Under the mutual defense agreement between the United States and the, Philippines, the former nation has undertaken the responsibility for the external defense of this country, which it has the power and the means to guarantee. The Philippine government is held responsible only for internal security, which means it need maintain only enough manpower to control rebellion or internal trouble." March 1953. ==== Magsaysay Does His "Homework" Manila, March 1, 1954 Ramon Magsaysay is ignoring all overtures from Taipeh and Pusan (Korea) and from the Knowland group on Capitol Hill that he take the lead in organizing an anti-Communist alliance in Asia. (The Knowland group was identified closely with the China Lobby.) For Magsaysay is busy with what he calls his "homework." He has to tackle the centuries-old land problem and its many kindred problems, the most violent phase of which is the Huk rebellion. Magsaysay knows the Huk rebellion is a result, not a cause, of agrarian unrest. "When your bullets are exhausted," he reminded the armed forces, "the hungry man will get his gun and fight again." He has launched a policy of crushing the Huks by force and at the same time extending the hand of friendship to the people in the Huk-infested areas of Central Luzon to win them over to the government side. He has relied heavily on the armed forces' psy-war experts taking direction from Colonel Lansdale, top U.S. cloak-and-dagger man in Asia. Magsaysay's first motto, wrote Walter Millis in The N.Y. Herald Tribune, June 23, 1952, wa s "brief and brutal: 'Kill Huks.' " (This* has a sinister ring when we consider its militarist origin in our own history. The American GIs of 1898 ac ted on orders to "kill and burn" in "pacifying" the Filipino "insurgents." Magsaysay's adoption of this motto merely abetted suspicions that be was acting on advice of U.S. military men, Lansdale in particular, for it seemed inconceivable" that Magsaysay, who loved the common man, would give the order to "kill Huks," who are, after all, peasants.) "What we need," he has said repeatedly, "is permanent peace not only for ourselves but for our children and our children's children. To achieve lasting peace, the people must have three square meals a day because it is an empty stomach that propels a revolution." Feeding an empty stomach is Magsaysay's biggest challenge. For among the Philippines' 20 million population (then), three out of four people, according to the Mutual Security Agency (now AID) are in want. Every year, there are 500,000 additional mouths of feed. (The estimate today is double this figure because of the unchecked population explosion.) Some 3,000,000 are jobless, and their number is growing. Such a climate breeds revolution. Magsaysay realizes this, and he has undertaken to give his people the one freedom they really never had � the freedom from want. Since taking over, Magsaysay has travelled widely through the countryside. He has spent more time visiting neglected barrios (where three-fourths of the population live) than he has at the presidential palace. He goes to the peasant in his home, eats from the same common bowl of rice with his hands, discusses his problems with him and often directs solutions on the spot. "I have done this," Magsaysay said the other day as he looked back on his. two months in office, "to overcome inertia, to set little fires of enthusiasm and initiative where they are needed most if our program is to move with the speed that it should." Magsaysay did all he could for the peasant. But the deeper implications of the land problem in Central Luzon that produced the Huk escaped him. He could not see that by just giving the landless peasant land free he would not be satisfying the peasant's hunger for land, for the peasant wants not only bread but freedom and human dignity, which, he feels, be must achieve with his own hands. Otherwise, they would have no meaning for him. He lives in a retarded society that has yet to shed its colonial fetters. And the peasant cares for and believes only in things in which he himself can take an active part. The settlements Magsaysay opened in Mindanao did not fare well. He moved the landless peasant to virgin land in Mindanao but left his kin in the same rut in Central Luzon, because the festering problem of extreme concentration of land ownership in a few hands remained untouched. pps. 158-159 <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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