Truth Behind the Curtain

THERE are some signs that one of the New Year resolutions of the United States Government has been to step up its propaganda to the Iron Curtain countries. What President Truman some time ago called a campaign of truth will soon be hitting a longer and steadier stride. It may be that some of the more hard-bitten observers on this side of the Iron Curtain have been inclined to regard " campaign of truth " as a rather grandilo- quent euphemism for a propaganda campaign ; and perhaps it is. But the State Department's Voice of America, in whose hands the waging of the campaign will principally be, is entitled to retort that, even though it may not have world rights to the comprehensive answer to Pilate's question, the material it will be beaming eastward over Europe and westward over Asia will have a high content of what is ascertainably true.

And it is aware a good deal better than most of its critics are of just what room there now is for the propagation behind the Curtain of what is ascertainably true. It has in its files a very large accumulation of evidence-of the extent to which the millions who Inc and labour in the Soviet Union and the satellite countries have been obliged to rely on what is ascertainably untrue for such ideas as they have of the West in general and of America in particular.

From time to time some of the more striking stories that are printed and broadcast beyond the Curtain about the United States, its government, institutions and people, are reproduced in para- graphs or inside-page articles in this country ; and sometimes an official drops some of the latest examples into a speech he is making. It is rather unlikely that these revelations get much circulation any- where else in the West, and that may be a pity. There may be something to be learned from them.

For Americans,_ who have a fair idea of -what is going on in their own country, a good many of the extracts from Communist

writings have an element of pure burlesque. Dr. William C. John- stone, Jr., director of the State Department's Office of Educational Exchange, produced a memorable one last month when he was addressing an association of colleges and secondary schools in Virginia. He read a bit from the transcript of a recent Slovakian broadcast which was undertaking to describe a meeting of President Truman's Cabinet.

" When the U.S. Minister of Education was called upon (the broadcast said) to furnish the text of a proposed article, it was found that he had stopped attending Cabinet meetings because his salary had not been paid for several years. The Secretary of the Treasury explained that there were no funds for such purposes, for they had to be used for armaments. The pro- posal to reduce the quantity of hydrogen in the hydrogen bomb in order to get money for the Ministry of Education was re. jetted because the bomb industry might complain and a crisis on the Wall Street market might result."

The State Department had plainly been cherishing this one as a classic. The translated and monitored stories are• not always as funny as this. Yet even the funny ones toe the line.

The line behind the iron Curtain requires that America shall be projected as a country where the oppressions and excesses, the deficiencies and fears of life under Soviet Communism occur in a much worse form. The Soviet rulers have introduced a tolerance at home of their own sins by imputing the same sins, magnified and in glorious Technicolor, to their most dangerous adversary. Thus the Moscow Government, which has created 170 divisions, has hammered into the minds of its people the conviction that the Washington Government, which during most of 1950 could call on no more than ten divisions, is a body of mad, imperialist-minded, greedy, conscienceless warmongers. Thus the Moscow Government, which has remorselessly manipulated the minds of its own and its satellites' youth, has accused the Washington Government of pre- siding over (as the Journal of Soviet Pedagogy said) a system designed "to educate obedient, non-thinking, non-resisting slaves of capital just as the medimval school educated obedient slaves of feudal barons."

And thus the Moscow Press, which is employed solely as a tool of Soviet Communism, describes the American Press as the tool of "millionaire warmongers," and declares it to be dedicated to "lies, slanders and the shameless advertising of the American way of life." In the country where there is no news except that which can be made to conform to Communist requirement, a critic in the Literary Gazette some time ago declared that the American Press evaluates its news " from only one point of view—how useful this bit of news is to those who are sitting in the fortresses and towers of Wall Street."

The pattern is so clear that when two correspondents of Pravda report back that New York is " a dirty, neglected city, its sidewalks and pavements littered with decaying garbage, its streets unwashed for many months," the instinct of anyone who has noted the trends is to wonder whether there can have been recent complaints about the condition of the streets and pavements of Moscow. And if the Americans feel some scepticism about the degree of contentment among Soviet workers and their ability to buy what they see in the Moscow shops, the Russians have themselves encouraged such doubts. For Pravda has raid: "The stories of seamen who have been to America paint

the plight of the workers in that country. This is what I. A. Zadorozhny, an electrical machinist, saw in New York: 'There are no buyers in the stores. The stores are deserted ; and it is not because people do not need clothing, footwear and goods, but • because people have nothing to buy all this with.' Zadorozhny told of the terrible unemployment in America. Some people work no more than ten to twelve hours a week ; others have no employment ; others don't work at jobs for

which they're qualified. In Brooklyn decently dressed Americans came up to our sailors and begged a penny for food."

Or, again, from a broadcast of the Soviet radio in Hungarian: "Children are perishing by the tens of thousands, killed by exposure, famine and various diseases All this is happening in rich America, and it is dreadful to think what is going on in the satellite States."

Or, again, from the New Times: "Out of an aggregate (college) graduating class of 750,000

only one-fifth have managed to find jobs—as waiters, street- cleaners, cemetery employes. The rest arc doomed to a life of semi-starvation unless their parents can support them."

The leaders are villainous profiteers obsessed with war ; the people are miserable, exploited, starving—this is the picture of America behind the Iron Curtain. And there recurs the theme of the American children whose minds the Wall Street imperialists are poisoning. " A text-book now used in American schools," /zvestia reported, "declares: 'Always remember that your pupils are material being trained and prepared for combat. The instructor must note and encourage the natural desire to fight and kill.' " Perhaps the line tends to remove some qualms of Russian parents about the brand of Communism that is being taught in Soviet schools. But it cannot be expected to exert any such soothing effect in Washington ; and among those wha know what is going on there is no disposition to question either the phraseology or the urgency of =Mr. Truman's call for a campaign of truth.