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the war, a pretty productive area compared with today. Their greatest
problem, aside from food, fuel, shelter, clothing, is the uncertainty of
where, how, on what level to start again from scratch. Scarcely one
million of the uprooted Easterners can be settled on farms made avail–
able through land reforms. For years to come Germany will have to buy
about 50 per cent of her food supply. For that she will have to produce;
and the very machinery that has been taken from her may have to be
re-imported.
All of this could have been foreseen by any American who did not
lose his sense of reality in spite of his justifiable horror at the atrocities
committed by Hitler's Germany. But as against any such common-sense
point of view there was Mr. Morgcnthau's Utopia. Hardly ever has a
panacea discredited itself in so short a time.
Mr. Morgenthau is still crusading for his plan; his book had already
become a historical document on the day of publication. It could per–
haps be called a catechism of steps which should have been avoided.
For generations to come it will serve as a text-book for the study of
the compromises and confusions of the liberal mind.
I do not blame Mr. Morgenthau for the failure. His plan is indeed
a collective Big Three product. It contains Ehrenburg's and Vansittart's
racial interpretation of German history, reflecting old Russian national–
ism and vindictiveness, and the Hun-hunting of the Church of England.
Morgenthau's special contribution is his assertion that it is based on
reason and justice, and not on hatred of the Germans. This rationaliza–
tion could simply be called hypocrisy.
It
is based on strategic ideas,
technical plans and statistics, provided by sections of the FEA, of the
Treasury and committees like the Kilgore Committee, which smell very
much like the Eastern mystique of statistical planning and practical
ruthlessness in achieving one's aims. In other words, it is a concept which
had its origin at Teheran and Yalta and Eastern market-minded big
business men, rather than in Mr. Henry Morgenthau's studies for the
Quebec memorandum. There is no need today to point out that its most
Utopian aim is the democratization of the Germans, who certainly need
a chance for a genuine democratization. And it is not difficult to discover
that during the time of the application of the plan more friction has
been created among the Big Three and more disappointment among the
smaller members of the United Nations than any pessimist could possibly
have predicted. And finally, it has helped American reactionaries, who
call the plan "insane" and vindictive, to appeal to a large number of
people who would otherwise have followed a genuinely liberal foreign
and domestic policy. The Utopia, in short, shows where American bour–
geois liberalism ends when it forgets its own background and traditions,
and its own potential strength.
PAUL HAGEN
