Love for Life

Dear Radical Reader,

Many of you will be familiar with the writings of Douglas Reed, British war correspondent for the London Times throughout the 1930s and 40s. Reed wrote numerous books on political issues of his day and usually published one every year. The following excerpts below are taken from his 1950 work called, Somewhere South of Suez. They represent the final chapters in that work and I believe are very useful to students of history in understanding in greater detail the workings and the history of Political Zionism. I have added further notes below which appear on the website. Please pass this information on to interested friends and associates. As mentioned there are a couple of more chapters still to be typed up which add further insights into this phenomenon.

Peace & Justice for All,

Arthur Topham
Pub/Ed
The Radical Press
Canada’s Radical News Network
radical @ radicalpress.com
http://www.radicalpress.com
“Digging to the root of the issues since 1998”

------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=701

BEFORE THE MILLENNIUM
by Douglas Reed

[Editor’s Note: To my knowledge the following material, taken from Douglas Reed’s book, Somewhere South of Suez, published in 1950, Jonathan Cape, London, has not appeared on the net before. Part Three of Reed’s book focuses on the rise of Zionism throughout the first half of the 20th Century and also predicts with prophetic accuracy the effects of this political ideology on the latter half of that same century. It was Reed’s feeling that the issue would be resolved one way or another by the beginning of the New Millennium. He was close, very close. His thoughts and ideas are paramount to a fuller understanding of how Political Zionism functions and who the players involved were and how they effected their goals and aims via the world’s so-called democratic nations. Please pass this information on to interested parties.

I still have more chapters to type up and they will appear presently. Ed.]

————

PART THREE

BEFORE THE MILLENNIUM

by Douglas Reed

CHAPTER 1

BALCONY OVER DURBAN

For a year, from a high tower over Durban, with the bright city and blue ocean below, I sat back and watched the whirling world spin like a grindstone, and the sparks fly from it as the political banditti of the twentieth century whetted unassuageable knives. After pressing my nose against the great events of the last thirty-five years I was glad for a while to sit in the gallery, among the enfants du paradis. A high place and far vista constantly remind the beholder that this planet is small and a stage at that; that the strutting terrible ones and their victims alike are merely players and that the run is short. Behind the scenes of each new melodrama another is ever in rehearsal. There are no final curtains, only the eternal play.

The current melodrama, a heavy one, plainly approaches its third act and climax. It might be entitled Judas is an Honourable Man, or The World in Fetters, and will be concluded, I think, before the century’s end. Whichever ending it reaches, the villain’s triumph or his undoing, another play will follow; the human comedy does not finish, and put in its right proportions is finally comedy. The timeless universe contains some two thousand million stars, the nearest about twenty-five million miles from this earth; there are thousands of other universes and the Astronomer Royal holds that life exists in several other worlds. The white men form a minority of the little earth’s population and if the present melodrama took them back to the caves, to start again, that would be but another beginning. These proportions of the matter looked clearer than before, from a balcony over Durban, and in this spirit, not in that of any gloomy scribifax or chapfallen oracle, I watched the unfolding shape of the play.

CHAPTER 2

FULL FIFTY YEARS

Within our unimportant scheme of things, the year 1950 appears important. Like a ruled line, it closes a half-century of large events (by our standards) of which a sum may now be made. They crowded on time’s traveller like mountain peaks, too near and massive to be separately comprehended while he was among them. Now that he may look back on the great range, its form and proportions begin to assert themselves.

There were two great wars; they were the storms which obscured his vision as he went along but now he may turn and survey the landscape they have left. From it arise two shapes which were not visible at all when he set out in 1900: Communism and Zionism. All else has been laid low or reduced. These two beanstalks, though neither is Russian, sprang from a common root in Russia. Before the first war they germinated secretly in the cellars and ghettoes of Russia. They appeared above ground together in 1917, when the alien Communists were helped to usurp power in Russia and the Zionist ambition was espoused by a British Government. Through the second war, the Communist area was stretched by the mid-century to include half of Europe and nearly all of China, while the Zionist State was set up in Arabia and foreseeably would spread from there. These achievements were brought about through arms, money and political support given by American and British politicians, wielding wartime powers. They were not final, but marked the end of the second act, as the appearance of the two new forces in 1917 concluded the first.

In the further course of the comedy, I argued from my playgoer’s seat, the twain would press on together towards the culmination. That, I foresaw, would be (in Disraeli’s words) the triumph of ‘the destructive principle’ everywhere, the overthrow of ‘tradition and aristocracy, religion and property’, and the destruction of ‘ungrateful Christendom’. The dress-rehearsals of the play reached back to 1790 and to the unsuccessful productions of 1848, 1895 and 1905. In 1917 and 1945 came the two first acts of the successful one. The third act, I thought, if it were played out as written, would see the spread of ‘the destructive principle’ to what remained of Europe, to the British Commonwealth and to the American Republic; and the erection of the servile World State ruled from New York and Jerusalem. That, I opine, is the sum intended when a line is drawn beneath the mystic figure ‘2000 A.D.’. After it the significant initials ‘A.D.’ might be discarded. The symbolism of the play in its first two acts must not be ignored by the attentive playgoer, who aspires to foresee the denouement. The Nuremberg trial was given significance of a Communist and Zionist vengeance; at the trial of the Oberammergau Passion Players the only performer left uncondemned was Judas!

Against the background of Christian advancement which the little planet had reached by 1899 these two forces of the twentieth century look to me like dinosaurs, extinct monsters suddenly re-emerged. They seem also only as separate as two boughs of the one tree. Disraeli’s words were that the destructive design is promoted by ‘secret societies who form provisional governments, and men of Jewish race are found at the head of every one of them’. With the important qualification that they profess the Jewish faith but are not of Jewish race (as I hope I show later) this remains true, after a hundred years, of the two great new forces of today, which were secret societies in his time. It was true of the earlier Communist governments and proves true today whenever disclosure or study are made of subversive Communist work in America, Canada and other countries. The fiercest propagandists of Zionism, who come from the same place as those others, constantly instruct the Jewish masses that the Communist State is their truest friend.

Thus by the mid-century Soviet Communism and Political Zionism stand in the comedy’s central limelight, while other players, who only seemed to play leading parts, are gone or are humbly grouped in the background. These two forces have achieved their successes by a unique method: the conversion or subversion of others by persuasion or coercion, flattery or threats, enrichment or ruination. In this their rise appears different from all the petty planet’s other barnstormers. The methods by which they brought public men in all leading countries to support their ambitions, and to contrive the situation of the play at the beginning of its third act, seem to me only comprehensible by studying the approach of Svengali to Trilby. The capture of souls was successful. Possibly many who entered into such relationships saw no danger in them and may only realize this when the third act comes to its melodramatic denouement in the next fifty years.

CHAPTER 3

THE SECOND ACT

The plan that gestated in Russian cellars, though its seeds went back to 1790 and 1848, first broke into open and obvious blossom at the end of the second war, which was mysterious during its course. Now that a few more years have rolled, its place in the great design is clear. Time’s traveller, looking back, may see shapes which the mists of war concealed, for in America great disclosures have been made about twists and turns in the course of the war which seemed inexplicable at the time. In England, only Mr. Winston Churchill could illuminate the larger mysteries, and his narrative is still incomplete. In America the numerous books of revelation are remarkably alike in what they divulge and in the calm public reception of it. A grand indifference apparently prevails about those deeds of yesterday which prepared today’s disappointments and tomorrow’s third act.

In From Smoke to Smother (1946-48) I recalled the strange change which came over the second war in its mid-journey. Until 1941 England was nearly alone, outnumbered and outpowered, but the battle still seemed clearly to be for a Christian cause and for liberty. Then, after the Soviet State was attacked, after America came in, after the war was enlarged, came the subtle transformation. All who fought with us or under our wing were, by a sudden shift of propagandist emphasis, turned into suspects or enemies. The Polish government was disowned, Poland was thrown to the wolves which had already devoured the Baltic States, without much audible protest. Mihailovitich was deserted and later killed with the weapons of his allies, his king was discarded, a Communist dictator set up. The King of Greece was vilified and only kept his throne because his own people obstinately recalled him. De Gaulle was derided and arms were lavished on the French Communists; the Germans who wanted to kill Hitler found neither hearing nor aid and were themselves killed in thousands by him before he vanished. His chief adversary, Otto Strasser, was held a virtual prisoner in Canada. Those who thought to swim with this new tide were just as cruelly drowned when they later became hindrances to the great design: Jan Masaryk fell mysteriously from a window and Benes died mysteriously not far away.

This abandonment of half Europe to the Communist order on which Hitler’s own order was modelled (as he truly told Rauschning) was preconcerted between three men, one sometimes reluctant, who appeared to wield imperial power. The plain effect was to promote the expansion of the Communist Empire, which protruded Political Zionism before it like a serpent’s tongue. The war was lost while it was being fought, and when American soldiers were most heavily engaged became the ‘phoney’ one they wrongly thought it before they joined in, when it was genuine. Not four freedoms, or any freedom, were restored, but the pagan area was spread far, through secret conferences of three men. The American general who eventually commanded the great invasion called his book about it Crusade in Europe; by no conceivable standard did the second war re-establish the Christian purpose or area.

Whose was the purpose behind these transactions? President Roosevelt was chiefly concerned in them. Like President Wilson, who in the first war began the course he followed, he was ill. His statue in London shows an erect and challenging figure; in life he could not stand unaided. This statue is much larger than George Washington’s, but he was spiritually of lesser stature and poorer clay. He was first elected President in 1932 and remained so until his death in 1945; Washington declined a second re-election, while Roosevelt, dying, sought even a third. His first major act of policy, in 1933, was to recognize the Soviet State, against a pledge that it would not seek to spread Communism in the United States or otherwise interfere in his country’s household affairs. During his thirteen years, especially the wartime ones, the highest doors were opened to its infiltration so that in 1949 (when I visited America) public scandals were rife.

He seemed the most powerful man in the world. In reality power was apparently wielded through him by others who, if they may be fairly judged by the result of his actions, sought to promote Soviet Communism or Political Zionism, or both. Many of these he put in high places. His most secret documents, before the war, were betrayed to the Soviet State, and during the war men involved in those transactions accompanied him to the momentous, secret conferences. He admitted ulterior prompting in the paramount transaction (the bisection of Europe) which made the third act of the century’s melodrama certain; and it may be plainly traced to his whole activity. The corrupting effect of ‘absolute power’, observed by Lord Acton, is visible in this President, and also the other thing discerned by that great student of the process of this age: the presence of ‘managers’ who served the grand design through him.

He was repeatedly warned, from first to last, of ‘hidden pressure’. At the start Mr. Lewis E. Douglas (who resigned as Director of the Budget in 1934 in protest against the New Deal policy of deficit-spending for welfare purposes) said to him: ‘Mr. President, I do urge you to open your mind to the possibility that among the men surrounding you there is a kind of purpose you are not aware of.’ The President scoffed, and persisted in that obduracy for thirteen years. At the beginning of the war Mr. Isaac Don Levine, a prominent Jewish writer, strove through ten public men to open his eyes to the fact (proved true in 1948) that high officials were passing secret papers to the Soviet (then Hitler’s ally); the men concerned remained in their places or rose higher. Mr. Levine also informed the British Ambassador in Washington at that time that there was a Soviet spy in the code-room of the British Cabinet, and another in the Committee of Imperial Defence; he knew this from General Krivitsky, former Chief of the Soviet Secret Service in Western Europe, who in 1939 was a fugitive in America. Lord Lothian was at first dubious but later urgently asked Mr. Levine to persuade General Krivisky to go to London. One of the spies was detected, convicted of treason and shot in the Tower of London (I do not know what happened about the other); General Krivisky returned to America and in February 1941 was found shot dead in a Washington hotel. None of all this could impress President Roosevelt. From 1939, at the latest, until his death he was repeatedly warned of the dangers to which he exposed the American Republic, yet he could not be brought to scrutinize the persons with whom he surrounded himself, or their purposes. After his death his successor constantly opposed the exposure of this hidden mechanism, which has been revealed, not in its entirety, but has been dug up piecemeal by parliamentary and other investigators working against great odds.

This President was to rule for thirteen years, and despotically in the last four, something the makers of the American Constitution never foresaw. In October 1940, seeking a second re-election, he said: ‘While I am talking to you mothers and fathers I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.’ He reserved, however, the natural human right ‘to fight in case of attack’. In November of 1941 he presided over a Cabinet meeting of which one of his ministers, Mr. Stimson, recorded, ‘The question facing the Cabinet was how we should manoeuvre the Japanese into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition’ (from President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, by Charles Beard, Yale University press, 1941).

Therewith the great empowerment began and the war, enlarged, took another course. The story is most plainly told in a series of articles by Mr. William C. Bullitt, who was American Ambassador to the Soviet after President Roosevelt recognized it in 1933, and later Ambassador in France, during the German invasion. Mr. Bullitt, returned to America, found himself among those whom the President would not heed. He says the President was informed long in advance about the Soviet-German alliance which in 1939 was to begin the second war; he reported in 1934 that Hitler could have this pact whenever he wanted it. When it came about his counsel was ignored. President Roosevelt (he says) ‘had often said that President Wilson’s failure to achieve solid settlements in Europe after the first war was due to the fact that he did not insist on specific acceptance of his specific programme while the opponents of the Kaiser were dependent on the United States for victory. President Roosevelt was warned that if he should help Stalin to victory without previously obtaining from the Soviet dictator definite, written, public pledges with regard to the future of Europe and Asia, he would find himself in a far worse situation at the end of the second war than that in which Woodrow Wilson found himself at the close of the first – the weight of power in both Europe and Asia would have passed from the United States to the Soviet Union.’

Nothing availed. ‘When the President was urged in the summer of 1941, by myself and others, to give lend-lease aid to Stalin only after the Soviet dictator had given formal, written public pledges to respect the eastern boundary of Europe as it existed in August 1939, and to raise no objection to the formation of a confederation of European States, and to make no demands on China, it seemed reasonable to believe that he would act favourably on the suggestion. But he rejected it on the ground that, although there was no doubt that Stalin would make such promises, there was equally little doubt that he would break the promises as soon as it might suit him.’ The immediate result, says Mr. Bullitt, was that in December 1941 Stalin demanded British recognition of the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, portions of Finland and Rumania, and half of Poland, and that the President, being informed, ‘took the cringing position that the test of our good faith should not be our willingness to agree to the recognition of extended Soviet frontiers at this time, but rather the degree of determination which we showed loyally to carry out our promises to aid the Soviet Government with equipment and supplies’. Stalin got more than 250,000,000 pounds worth of lend-lease aid in the end, but gave no pledges.

The President’s duty, continues Mr. Bullitt, since he was under the Constitution also Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, was to make certain that the means employed by the military commanders to achieve victory would not make it impossible to achieve peace after victory. Instead, he consciously took the risk that, after the defeat of Germany, the Soviet Union ‘would occupy and dominate Eastern and Central Europe, and, after the defeat of Japan, would threaten the independence and territorial integrity of China’. Mr. Churchill uttered warnings and periodically suggested a secondary attack through the Balkans or Trieste, so that the Danube valley should not be in Soviet hands at the war’s end. Adoption of this project ‘might have saved a large portion of Central and Eastern Europe to the free world, but General Marshall opposed such an expedition and President Roosevelt supported him’.

Mr. Bullitt says the President was much under the influence of Mr. Harry Hopkins, his ‘chief adviser’, who was of ‘infinite ignorance’ in foreign affairs (these had never engaged his attention; he was a New York welfare official!). Counselled by Mr. Hopkins, who in turn was much under the influence of other persons, President Roosevelt hoped to achieve ‘the conversion of Stalin’ by giving him everything he asked for to prosecute the war without asking anything in return; persuading him to adhere to vague professions of benevolence like the Atlantic Charter; telling him that ‘the influence of the White House was being used to encourage American public opinion to take a favourable view of the Soviet Government’; and inducing him to accept democratic ways and Christian principles at the famous ‘face to face’ meetings.

Mr. Roosevelt, then, if he was not conscious of the purposes for which he was being used, suffered from the same infantilist delusions as Mr. Chamberlain. A final conversation between him and Mr. Bullitt ended, after a three-hour discussion of a memorandum which the Ambassador was asked to submit, with these words: ‘Bill, I don’t dispute your facts, they are accurate. I don’t dispute the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. Harry says he’s not, and that he doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.’ Mr. Bullitt said dependence on the rule of noblesse oblige was unwise, since the President was dealing with a Caucasian bandit, not with a belted earl, and Mr. Roosevelt rejoined: ‘I am going to play my hunch.’

Thus was the great twist given to the declared purposes of the war. In this atmosphere of ‘Harry says’ and hunch-playing the fate of millions was regulated and the the path laid which led to Yalta and to the third act of this century’s melodrama. The President ‘began to be swept away by the waves of propaganda he and Hopkins had started. Able and patriotic officers of the Department of State and the Foreign Service, who knew the truth about the Soviet Union and refused to lie in favour of the Communist dictatorship, were moved to unimportant posts. Clever young men who knew the truth but cared more about their careers than their country, and were ready to testify that “Stalin had changed”, were promoted rapidly… A network of Soviet sympathizers was created in Washington and apologists for Soviet policies were sent as American advisers to the Chinese Government and to Latin America… While our fighting-men were winning the war, our government went blithely on losing the peace’.

Such were the things that happened behind the curtain in 1942 and 1943. At the Teheran Conference in November 1943, says Mr. Bullitt, President Roosevelt ‘on the plea of an attack of indigestion absented himself from the crucial discussion of the future of Poland between Stalin and Mr. Churchill’, but agreed to the bisection of Poland, which meant in fact, foreseeably, the bisection of Europe and the continuance of the twentieth-century war. He also agreed to the desertion of Mihailovitch and the setting-up of Stalin’s agent, Tito. At that time, Mr. Bullitt recalls, the President could still have stood up to Stalin’s demands, for ‘Hitler’s armies were yet on Soviet soil and Stalin needed the full flood of lend-lease supplies even to regain the frontiers of his alliance with Hitler in 1939’. Mr. Bullitt records that the President was by then ‘more than tired. He was ill. Little was left of the physical and mental vigour that had been his when he entered the White House in 1933. Frequently he had difficulty in formulating his thoughts and greater difficulty in expressing them consecutively’. Other American colleagues of the President at that time wrote that he ‘looked horrible’, that they ‘couldn’t stand it’, that they were ‘profoundly depressed’ and ‘frightened’.

Thus the all-powerful man, infirm in body, beclouded in mind, surrounded by mysterious advisers, encircled even by treason. Outside, the waiting multitudes of mankind, were confident that the war was being waged for justice and liberty. Just enough strength and time remained to this unhappy man to go to Yalta and do the last deed.

At Cairo in November 1943 he, with Mr. Churchill, publicly declared to the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, that ‘all the territories Japan has stolen from China, such as Manchuria, Formosa and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China’. At Yalta in 1945 he made a secret agreement (also signed by Mr. Churchill) ‘giving’ to Stalin the Manchurian port of Dairen and naval base of Port Arthur, as well ‘pre-eminent interests’ in the railway which traverses Manchuria from the Soviet Union to Dairen. This was a secret breach of the public pledge and was given because Stalin demanded these things in return for a promise to enter the war against Japan ‘two or three months after Germany has surrendered’. Two years before Stalin had already given that promise, without any conditions. Before the President went to Yalta the American military commander in the Far East, General MacArthur, informed him that Japan was in a mood to surrender and appealed to him ‘not to let the Soviet into the war against Japan’, urging that the later results would be disastrous. The dying President brushed the telegram aside with the words: ‘Our most brilliant general and our poorest diplomat.’ For the sake of a nominal participation of a few hours in the war against Japan the Soviet dictator was ‘given’ China and the Chinese ally was betrayed, a stroke of diplomacy hardly brilliant.

President Roosevelt further agreed that the Communist State which had been set up in he Chinese province of outer Mongolia should be permanently detached from Allied China, and that the southern part of Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, helpful places in aggressive designs, should be annexed by the Soviet Union. This agreement was kept secret from the public, even from the President’s companion at Yalta, Mr. James F. Byrnes, who a little later was to become Foreign Minister.

Then President Roosevelt returned to America, having defeated all allies and his own country, and died. He bequeathed the strange policy and the secret undertakings to his successor, who adopted both. The Anglo-American armies, at that moment, were advancing into Germany on a broad front. Field-Marshall Montgomery, much earlier, had proposed a spear-like thrust on a narrow one, being confident he could thus quickly reach Berlin and end the European war. The American Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, demurred; he was bound by orders from the failing President. When the new one succeeded time still remained for the American and British armies to take Berlin, Vienna, Prague and a great part of Germany, Czechoslovakia and all Austria; in fact, to reduce if not to thwart the bisection of Europe which meant the continuance of the twentieth-century war. President Truman (Mr. Bullitt relates) was ‘advised’ to let the Red Army capture Berlin ‘and it was so ordered’. The design which Mr. Roosevelt’s acts had furthered was carried further still. The fighting ended, the American armies and the great equipment of war were precipitately dispersed.

Thus the Soviet Union was put in possession of half of Europe, not by its own strength but by American and British political support, armed aid and the retarding of the American and British onslaught. The dividing line ran through Berlin and the middle of Germany. The Germans in the eastern half, which contained the German food-lands, were delivered to the Soviet. The western half contained their only means of earning money to buy food (since the Germans there were deprived of their own supplies): the industrial Ruhr. The British, in their share of the western half, undertook to make this impossible by dismantling German industry. This meant, if the plan were carried out, the destruction of the most numerous people in Europe by division, enforced idleness and starvation. It was like depriving a market gardener of his plot and forbidding him to work for any other living.

This ‘plan for Germany’ the western counterpart of the eastern transaction about China, ensured the spread of Soviet power from Berlin to Vladivostock. Its author was supposed to be a Mr. Henry Morgenthau, Junior, an American Treasury official; at all events, it was called ‘the Morgenthau Plan’. It was strongly opposed by two senior American Ministers of great experience, Messrs. Cordell Hull and Stimson. President Roosevelt prepared the enforcement of it before he died but in his last days admitted (according to one of his intimates, Mr. Robert E. Sherwood) ‘that he had yielded to the importunities of an old and loyal friend when he affixed his initials to the document’. The name is not given and the disastrous thing was done, or at all events begun. The hand of the unknown third party is seen again in this decisive transaction. It enables the Soviet, in the shaping of the third act, constantly to play the eastern Germans against the western ones, and all Germans against the Western world, by depicting the Americans and British as the destroyers of German unity and German industry, and by dangling before all the Germans the bait, of the restoration of their eastern lands, now under Soviet-Polish rule.

These things were done in war. If they were not moves in the furtherance of a secret design, but merely mistakes honestly made by men unversed in great affairs, this would have shown when the war ended. The war did end. President Truman succeeded President Roosevelt. In a short while the ill-faith and dark intentions of the Soviet Empire became too clear to be denied and were supposed to have been recognized by all, so that loud accusations became common and as a sign of changed heart and clearer purpose the ‘great air-lift to Berlin’ was begun. In truth, however, the great design was woven further, in peace as in war. Though there was much talk now of inevitable war between East and West, Capitalism and Communism, free America and slave Russia, democracy and dictatorship, the master process went on, and the switch of suggestive-information from Appease Stalin to Oppose Stalin did not stand scrutiny at any point.

That was most clearly shown in China, where President Roosevelt’s undertakings of Yalta were in fact more than fulfilled, long after he was dead. There, effective opposition could have been offered and was not. President Roosevelt was not long dead when (in 1945) his Ambassador to China, General Patrick J. Hurley, returned to Washington and resigned after saying publicly that his work had been nullified by the Communist infiltrators who, during the Roosevelt era, crowded into the American Foreign Office and Foreign Service. In the following excitement General Marshall was sent to China. He did not know that country and was briefed by similar councellors, who said the Chinese Communists were ‘mere agrarian reformers who had no connection with Moscow’. Chian Kai-shek was by this time rare among the wartime allies in that he was not quite deserted. General Marshall persuaded him to sign an armistice with the Communists on January 10th, 1946. On April 14th, 1946, they broke it by attacking Changchun. They were well armed, having received American supplies through the Soviet. Thereon General Marshall forbade any further military aid to Chiang Kai-shek’s government! He stated, later, that ‘it was in effect an embargo on military supplies’, and it continued until, in 1949, Communist success was sure and nearly complete.

Thus the story of the war-behind-the-war in Europe repeated itself in China, after the end of that war. The embargo on arms for the non-Communists was even declared because Chiang Kai-shek resisted the demand that he open his government to them! As soon as the great design was completed in China, it showed signs of further extension in Europe. The Communist dictator in Yugoslavia, ‘Tito’, a man of origins as mysterious as Hitler’s, was found to be a different kind of Communist from Stalin, and in 1949 American support began to be given to him, in various forms. As he was the enemy of Greece, shadows now begin to form around one of the last of the wartime allies. The prospect also opened that, if the ‘war against Communism’ came about, it would find the anti-Communists leagued with a Communist dictator, so that no man would know what cause it really served. If by chance the Stalin-Tito quarrel were not genuine, American supplies would continue t find their way by that route to the central stronghold of Communism; the Communists and the anti-Communists would fight each other with arms and money from the same source. This possibility, despite the lessons of these years, either entered into no minds in high places or its public discussion was discouraged.

Mr. William Bullitt’s narrative of the second act in this century’s thriller is supported by several American books. One, is Roosevelt and Hopkins, by Mr. Robert E. Sherwood, Harper, New York, 1948. In it the strange emissary who flew above the din of war to discuss uncomprehended things with unknown men in unfamiliar places leaves his opinion of the calamitous Yalta Conference:

“We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for and talking about for so many years. We were absolutely certain that we had won the first great victory of the peace. . . The Russians had proved that they could be reasonable and far-seeing and there wasn’t any doubt in the minds of the President or any of us that we could live with them and get along with them peacefully for as far into the future as any of us could imagine. But. . . we all had in our minds the reservation that we could not foretell what the results would be if anything should happen to Stalin. We felt sure that we could count on him to be reasonable and sensible and understanding – but we never could be sure who or what might be in back of him there in the Kremlin.’

President Roosevelt it was who died, however, and Mr. Hopkins, and nothing yet has happened to Stalin. These books, and current happenings, have cast some light on those who were in back of President Roosevelt in the White House. Who is in back of Stalin seems less important. His happiness when the Yalta Conference ended is on record. The picture of the second act, now taking ever clearer shape, is that of a few men, freed from all restraints, privately handling the affairs of millions and concerting arrangements which were bound to defeat the professed purposes of the war.

Mr. Churchill’s part in the melodrama of the Three Men is a somewhat different, and curious one. His own narrative has not reached the later stages as I write, but these American books show him protesting at this an striving to avert that. He had his own aberrations, particularly in the matter of Tito and of Political Zionism, which he strove from the start to further, but at other times perceived that Europe was being handed to a darker tyranny, and was apparently helpless to prevent this in a trio of which the central figure was resolved ‘to give Stalin everything he asked for’.

The moral of the second act, if playgoers ever bothered about morals, is that in wartime political leaders need to be under increased public restraints, and not freed from all restraint. The dogma, now commonly accepted, that in war they must be given divine powers, and left unhindered in the use of them, has now twice proved false. It places real power in the hands of ‘old and loyal friends’, that is of Lord Acton’s ‘managers’, who continue ‘the design’. From Lord Balfour’s Declaration of November 1917 to President Roosevelt’s undertakings of 1945, the full fruits of which in both cases will in my belief appear in the third act of the twentieth century’s play, runs in a straight line.

However, these things have a humorous aspect and the spectacle of the President of the American Republic imperially presenting Sakhalin to the Soviet Emperor is one for some mirth.

———-