MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IAM unaware whether it be true that Mr. Bernard Baruch advised Mr. Churchill to cancel his projected visit to the United States in view of the intense anti-British feeling aroused by the MacArthur episode. It would be strange indeed if the greatest Anglo-American of the century were precluded from revisitirfg his half-native land by what to us Lppears a Transatlantic nerve-storm. It seems that nothing. not even General Marshall's calm but weighty denials, will disabuse the American public of the impression that General MacArthur was sacrificed as a result of the rabbit subservience of the State Department to the Foreign Office in London. Every comment. every careless aside made over here, is relayed to the United States, and often in distorted or dislocated form, in order to strengthen this impression. Whether this be all part of cunning Republican propaganda I do not pretend to know ; it has always been a valuable plank in American platform politics to suggest that your opponents are bound hand and foot in grovelling servitude to British imperialism. But I do know, and have often experienced, that Americans possess a special brand of sensibility reserved for their dealings with the British. They can stand many things from other foreigners ; they will smile the smile of a hospital matron when insulted by their neighbours of Latin America ; but an Englishman has only got to make a mild remark for them to see projected upon the retina of their blood- shot eyes the whole weary procession of English wickedness lit by the flames of the White House in 1812. I understand some- thing of this curious illusion, of this strange obsession'. We in our rough island story have had so many different enemies that our sense of hereditary hostility has become a trifle blurred ; one cannot go on being angry about the Romans, or Hengist and Horsa, or the Bayeux Tapestry, or the loss of Calais, or. Medina Sidonia, or Admiral de Ruyter, or Junot or Tirpitz. But the American child starts his history with the Boston tea-party, and the red-coats seem to haunt him for ever afterwards.
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It is most natural that the Americans should at this moment be angry, with us over the Far Eastern situation. It is only human nature to feel that one is expected to carry the whole burden while one's partners and associates lie back and comment on one's mistakes. Mr. Churchill. in his great and valuable speech last week, was fully justified in warning us of the danger of " girding " at the United States or of creating the impression " that they were left to do all the work while we pulled at their coat-tails and read them moral lessons on statecraft and the love we ought to have for China." After all, we must remember that in this Korean campaign the Americans have lost something like 70,000 killed. wounded and missing. and that still there is. no clear evidence how we can put a stop to this preventive war. I think the Americans are perfectly right in reproaching us for having recognised Red China without previous agreement either with them or with our Dominions. I think they arc also right in resenting the fact that for selfish reasons we have allowed supplies, some of which are certainly Finews of war, to enter China via Hong Kong. The figures that they have been given for thesi erring exports may have been inaccurate or exaggerated figures ; but the fact remains that we were exchanging goods and services with the people who were killing the armed forces of United Nations. Is it so very astonishing, so very impulsive. of the Americans to feel that we have not been behaving with due consideration for others? The Americans are by tradition inclined to believe the worst of us: it is deplorable when we' provide them with grounds for this belief.
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I hope Mr. Churchill's speech, as well as the excellent state- ment made by Sir Hartley Shawcross. will be widely reproduced in the United States Press and on their multitudinous wireless. They should do some good. My American friends are always telling me that what the great white soul of America really loves and enjoys is what is called " plain speaking." It may be true that there exist some two or three hundred Americans, a tiny band of eccentrics, who really do enjoy being spoken to plainly by foreigners of nationality other than British ; but even then the experience is a form of masochism, producing exquisite sen- sations of flagellation. But the Americans who enjoy being plainly spoken to by Englishmen must be reduced to forty or fifty unhappy individuals now being treated in one or other of those excellent institutions where perversions are tended gently. and sometimes cured. There is something about the English that makes the ordinary healthy American feel lie is being talked down to. It is partly our accent, which is to them either incom- prehensible or patronising ; it is partly our natural reserve, we having been trained from boyhood not to show off and they having been trained from boyhood to show off all the time and it is partly our beastly shyness, a defect that they consider either simply silly, or else hypocritical, or else assumed to conceal the extent of our boredom with life in.general and American women in particular. All these things set the teeth of the Americans on edge and at the same time increase their blood pressure to a point where the flames of the White House start to dance.
• * Americans, I have found, do not enjoy being told that they are as sensitive as a schoolgirl in her second term at Roedean. Should these words of mine catch the eye of any good American, should he or she have been kind enough to read as far as this paragraph, I ask them to pause for an instant and consider whether they are not feeling irritated. If they have to admit that they can detect a certain flush under the collar, if they arc obliged to confess that this article appears to them ignorant and con- descending, then I beg them to pause again and to consider whether such sensitiveness is worthy of the great eagle whose giant wings arc stretched in love and protection of the weaker world. In the days when we were the puissant. if rather somno- lent, lion, we rather liked having our tail twisted : it produced in us an agreeable sensation of tittivation ; but brush with a brush of camel's hair the extreme tail-feather of the American eagle and the eyes will flash in noble defiance and the talons twitch. No people, again, that has ever acquired a position of great responsibility can combine, as the Americans can combine, constant suspiciousness with extreme gullibility. I have seen American statesmen of great intelligence and virility actually quail before the imagined machinations of European diplomacy ; and I have seen American business-men burst boyishly into the lowest circles of international finance, grinning with confidence in their ability to detect and rout all possible evil combinations. These experiences have filled me with a certain melancholy. I am never quite sure whether I like the Americans very much. but I am positive that I love them. I cannot even hear an American voice in the street without a warm heart-movement of affection. It is sad indeed that they should be so hyper-sensitive that one hardly dares to finger them at all.
* * * * What are we to do about it, pending the distant day when America has developed sufficient self-confidence to possess a sense of humour? They are a very witty people ; but they are quite unable to stand being laughed at, even affectionately. If plain-speaking makes them angry and even the mildest teasing wounds their Roedean hearts, how are we, without offence, to convey to them something of our accumulated tolerance and wisdom? Only, I feel, at the top level. Advice in such delicate conditions must be given privately, not publicly ; for the loud- speaker.diplomacy of Lake Success we must subglitioe the alcove diplomacy of Madame de Pompadour.
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