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guilt was shifted, as one would expect, to perfidious Britain. "We
have become tools,"
I.
F. Stone wrote, "in the hands of the British
who are intent on maintaining a status quo that would deny Russia
additional oil and an outlet to the Mediterranean." What folly for
the United States to take Britain's side in this criminal struggle to
deny Russia the oil of Iran! From this hackneyed anti-British per–
spective, the facts that Russia had broken a treaty and that her troops
were in a foreign country against that country's will, disappeared
from the canvas beneath the deft coloring of
P
M's apologists.
History was making strange bedfellows when Nicholas Murray
Butler and
Henry
Wallace raised their voices together in support of
a new found common friend, Jqseph Stalin. Butler, old and ailing, had
reached the ripe, overripe, fruit of wisdom, to see that Russia had
a right to foreign oil. (In official publications Soviet scientists have
stated that Russia has some 58.7% of the world's oil resources-and
most as yet undeveloped!) The doddering capitalist was delighted to
think this might
be
just good oldfashioned "respectable" imperialism
after all. The fellow travelers, Wendell Wilkie style, would love to
believe that Russia is capitalist at heart, and so no worse, and there–
fore just as good- by God !-as anybody else. In a speech in the
Middle West
Henry
Wallace pleaded that even if Russia
were
wrong
on every point,
we
should give in for the sake of world peace. At last,
a frank and open appeal for appeasement! The hotheaded patriot
who screams "My country, right or wrong!" could hardly be more
partisan and unreasoning than Wallace in the interests of Russia.
This from a Secretary of Commerce-who, but for a manoeuvre
of party politics, might now be President of the United States.
Never
during the dic;astrous period of fellow traveling in the 'thirties were
the Russian zealots so highly placed in American life. On the floor
of the Senate itself, Claude Pepper, senator from Florida, made the
startling and impassioned accusation that in its foreign policy the
United States was pushing Britain's imperialist cart and "ganging
up" with Britain against Russia. The corruption of language could
scarcely go much beyond this. "Ganging up" had suddenly become
the expression for an inquiry (which would have had to remain at
most an inquiry, since the Russian veto would have prohibited any
action) into the illegal occupation of one country by another. Mean–
while the tireless Eleanor Roosevelt continued her tiresome pleas for
"cooperation" with Russia in order to insure Russian "security."
Yes
indeed, Russia must be secure
even
if we have to sacrifice the
security of all her neighbors. What about Iran's security? The
