AMERICAN BUSINESS
51
More directly ominous is the mounting, though still partly hid–
den, pressure from the businessmen for "trade with the enemy." They
are irked by the State Department's restrictions on exports to the
Communist Empire. What does world policy matter when there are a
few easy dollars to be made? As the signs of partial economic recession
appeared in 1949, the longing for those dollars grew in intensity.
Shabby schemes for evading the restrictions, by indirect sales through
Holland, Belgium and other intermediary nations, were worked out
with the usual ingenuity. As the communists swept south in China, the
businessmen in the China trade bowed to the ground before them,
and asked only for the privilege of supplying them with what they
need to consolidate their conquest: but Mao Tze-tung is proving
a rude host, even to suppliant busine&<>men.
In this instance, the greed (provoked, it is true, by economic
compulsions) is manifest enough, but the ignorance is even more
devastating. Though the British aid to German rearmament and the
American sales of iron and oil to Japan are the freshest and most
painful of examples, history, experience and common sense are fatu–
ously disregarded. It would not, of course, be sensible to stop all trade
with the Communist Empire. A small flow facilitates a certain desir–
able contact, permits some importation of needed supplies, and exer–
cises a certain political leverage. But to trade on a big and unrestricted
scale is to prepare suicide--or, rather, to build the guillotine for one's
own executioner. The inability of the communists to solve their eco–
nomic problem is probably their greatest weakness, and our greatest
protection. Are we, then, going to solve it for them?
Businessmen are ignorant, abysmally ignorant, about what com–
munism is, what communists are. Of course the businessmen are, al–
most all of them, in their own minds the staunchest of "anti-commu–
nists." But because they do not understand communism (and because
they are greedy and short-sighted), they act frequently in ways that
help communism. They really cannot believe that the communists
mean what they say-just as they could not bring themselves to be–
lieve Hitler. They do not believe that the communists are serious when
they declare that they are going to conquer the world. They cannot
comprehend the certainty that, if the communists conquer, they
themselves-these same businessmen flanked in their splendid offices
by their corps of secretaries, relaxed in the expensive furnishings of
