RHETORIC AND PEACE
869
Europe 15 billion dollars worth of goods seems in some respects prefer–
able to a liberation which drains a like amount out of Europe's East.
The United States has perhaps not done alI that
it
should for Puerto
Rico and the Philippines. Should that motivate these islands to seek the
treatment of Latvia or Lithuania?
There is a rather ironic side to this habit of using American power
as a shelter from which to launch these unbalanced and-to telI the
truth-sometimes insincere attacks on alI things American. Would culture
and civilization be, then,
in
safer harbor
if
the neutralists had their way–
if American power were withdrawn, and alI Europe exposed to the full
Soviet onslaught?
And what is this Europe of which the neutralists speak? Sitting in
the neutral corner of their dreams, do they then toss Poland, Czechoslo–
vakia, Hungary, Rumania, East Germany, Bulgaria, Albania, the Baltic
States, yes, and the Ukraine, Ruthenia, and Western Russia itself, do they
toss alI these and their peoples so casually to one of the two competing
barbarisms? Does no Pole or BaIt or Serb or Rumanian or Hungarian
or East German or Ukrainian have the right to be heard on the problem
of Europe, or to express
his
views on the propriety of a Third Force
position of neutrality between American materialism and Russian total–
itarianism? How does the neutral defense of European cultural values
against the equal and joint attacks of Washington and Moscow look
from the inside of Warsaw, Kiev, Riga, Bucharest, Prague, Leipzig,
Budapest--or Leningrad, for that matter?
I have been accepting the neutralist premise that the present conflict
is a struggle between the United States and Russia. But this premise is
false, or, rather, the distortion of a partial truth. Russia and the United
States are at present the two predominant concentrations of power.
That is the partial truth. In the present conflict, these two must there–
fore, and necessarily, play the leading material roles. Nevertheless, it
does not folIow and it is not the case that the struggle is between the
United States and Russia, Moscow and Washington.
Even in the simplest terms this does not follow. Let us merely ask,
for example: which is more directly threatened by Soviet imperialist
advance, Saigon or San Francisco, New Delhi or Seattle, Berlin or
Detroit, Paris or Chicago, Milan or Philadelphia, London or Washing–
ton-Stockholm or Boston? The answer is not in doubt. The United
States, basing itself on the American hemisphere, might remain inde–
pendent and free even if alI of Eurasia fell. But
if
the United States
were overthrown or seriously weakened, alI the rest of Asia and of
Europe would, as an immediate consequence, be
certain
to falI. The
