THE BIG TRUTH
ANGLO-AMERICAN relations are getting into a danger- ous state, from which they can only be extracted by hard, clear thinking on both sides of the Atlantic. The worst dangers lie in mutual misunderstanding and even antagonism between the ordinary people of the two countries rather than in official relations. Sir Winston Churchill and President Eisenhower are going to Bermuda to meet in friend- ship, in surroundings which are far removed from the atmos- phere of irritation which has invaded the fields of popular gossip and the Press in both their countries. But they cannot be too far ahead of their own peoples in this matter. The minds of those peoples at this moment are bedeviled by a series of irritants of which the case of the late Harry Dexter White is only one.
The list of troubles is a long one. Many of them arise from that centre of infection, McCarthyism, from which evil spreads not only throughout the United States but occasionally across its borders. That has happened in the case of the McCarran Act governing immigration into the United States, and is hap- pening in attempts to implicate the Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs, Mr. Lester Pearson, in a hearing before a congressional security committee in Washington. Even deeper-rooted than McCarthyism itself are the troubles arising from the fact that the United States has not yet found any regular and dispassionate way of dealing with Communist treason and espionage. Here lies the very origin of such ugly political brawls as the White case.
These are the sources of poison. They must be recognised. But, once they have been recognised, the immediate task is to seal and destroy them. The worst service anyone in this country can do to the cause of Anglo-American relations is to exaggerate the present difficulties, or to represent them as being incurable. In the first place, Americans themselves are acutely aware of them. In the second place, there is a slow stirring of American public' opinion against hysterical measures which, while being represented as defences of freedom, in fact tend to destroy freedom itself. And in the third place, ill-informed or • half-informed criticism from this side of the Atlantic can only irritate, and distract from the task in hand, those Americans who are the most likely to effect the cure. These are precisely the Americans who value liberty the most, the.
ones who love McCarthyism the least, who are most keenly aware of the shortcomings of Congress, and who even suspect that the difficulty of dealing quietly, effectively and justly with spies and traitors may lie very deep in the legal and judicial system of the United States. .
The practice of pin-pricking the Americans on account of troubles of which they are well aware has gone far enough.
In fact, it has gone much too far: What the British Press and public complain of is a series of small uncomfortable truths and half-truths about the way in which Americans conduct their affairs. We may even claim that we have some small right to complain, since we are ourselves sometimes incon- venienced and alarmed by these same truths. What we have no right to do is to add them all up and reach, for an answer, the thumping lie that the United States is a bad risk as an ally. Yet that lie is being brought out once again, along with its concomitant arguments that the Russians are more reason- able than the Americans and that a Russian alliance would be preferable to an American alliance. What rubbish it all is!
No sane observer of the international scene believes it. Even those who propagate it, not being insane, don't believe it. Yet it must be paid the attention that can always be commanded, as Dr. Goebbels well knew, by the Big Lie—which, by its sheer monstrous incredibility, attracts the attention of the ill- informed, who hesitate; and, if they are not careful, are lost. And no better answer to it has been devised than a steady insistence on the Big Truth, which any reasonable man can observe for himself.
The United States is a much better and a much surer friend to Britain than the Soviet Union. We are quite sure that the Americans have no aggressive intentions and we are not so sure of the-Russians. We agree with the American policy of resisting any extension of Russian-Communist power and even of pushing it back, if the opportunity occurs, in those territories such as East Germany and Czechoslovakia, where it has been imposed by force or guile against the wishes of the great majority of the population. We recognise, and rely upon, the maintenance of American determination and strength in the pursuit of this policy. We also recognise that determination and strength have paid, in the years since the Russians first showed that they had no desire for cordial co-operation with the Western world in peace time. These are the big truths. Beside them all the niggling criticisms of the Americans and all the pestilent half-truths about their alleged indifference to freedom for their own people and for their allies become insignificant.
It is nevertheless necessary to insist on the simple truth at this time. And one reason to insist results—paradoxically- from the fact that American foreign policy, with which we have been associated for years, has been so successful. In the past it has not mattered very much that a small but noisy minority in this country has returned again and again, like a dog to its vomit, to the fantastic argument that the Russians are supplicants for our friendship and have been repulsed by us. It has not mattered because. Moscow itself has brushed aside their attentions, and, as often as the sycophants have come back, has kicked them away again. But it may matter now as never before, for the Soviet Government has suffered a whole series of reverses in foreign policy, from France to Korea, and may be more willing now to take allies where it can find them, however much it may despise them. For that reason, which arises from the very success of a firm Western policy, it would be unwise to ignore the advocates of the Big Lie at this moment.
But just as McCarthyism in the United States is primarily an American problem, which will not be solved any sooner with the aid of officiousness on our part, so the problem of dealing with Communists and pro-Communist's in our midst is a British problem, which will not be solved more easily if Americans interfere in it. The American magazine Time recently printed a carefully publicised and deeply pessimistic article on Anglo-American relations in which it apparently assumed that the British carping about American policy repre- sented the policy of the Government. It ignored the simple facts that most of the carping comes from left wing sources, that the Socialists are not in power, and that British people know more about themselves than Time magazine can possibly tell them. It was, in fact, on its analytical side a curiously twisted and ill-informed article. It might in itself be added to the list of items in Ainerican behaviour that British people have a right to complain about. And yet this same article reached some massively simple and overwhelmingly true conclusions which nobody here can afford to ignore. The Americans may be late starters in the field of foreign affairs but they are learning rapidly and surely. In some parts of the world—and notably in China—they have probably already outstripped the British in knowledge and understanding. In all the welter of qualifications and reservations they have never loosened their grip on a few simple moral truths about Com- munism and Communist expansion. They recognise that there can be no return to the facile optimism about Russia which reigned just after the end of the war until the Russians them- selves give tangible proofs of good will and a peaceful spirit. They are willing still to accept the argument that Britain and the United States stand together. But they now want a few more tangible proofs to that too. And they are right in that. The Big Truth still stands. The United States is our sure ally; the Soviet Union is not. But it needs to be demonstrated every day.
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