The Lion & the Dollar Kings

Do they sing Rule, Britannia in Moscow? Not quite. But they are no longer being really beastly to the British. Russia's serpentine propaganda currently presents the U.S. as the total villain, while Britain is rapidly becoming the lesser of two evildoers. The maneuver, as transparent as a jigger of vodka, is simply designed to split Britain from the U.S.

Last week, using India (see below) as as object lesson, Radio Moscow demonstrated how it's done. Said one aerial pundit: "American monopolists . . . conceal . . . far-reaching plans for ousting British capital [and] opening the way to India's enslavement. . . ." Said Evgeny Zhukov: Indian leaders feared U.S. "encroachment" and chose continuing ties with Britain as "the lesser of two evils."

"More in Sorrow." In a recent lecture on "The British Empire Today," Soviet Historian I. M. Lemin was even more lucid about the White Man's Burden (Yankee-style): "The Soviet Union does not constitute a threat to the British Empire. . . . We do not want to intervene in Britain's overseas relations. ... All the screaming, especially by the Americans, about the Soviet threat to the Empire is merely an excuse for the Americans to penetrate into the Empire. . . . The Americans have consistently opposed imperial preference, and it is not the Soviet Union but the U.S. which is threatening to destroy the British Empire's political coherence and economic welfare."

To the British public, the Manchester Guardian's Russophile Correspondent Alexander Werth reported the Lemin lecture with warm overtones of "You see--they may still get to like us." Any criticisms of the Empire the professor may have made were offered "more in sorrow than in anger," explained Werth. "Without explicitly saying that the British Empire was a good thing, Dr. Lemin suggested [that] it was a complicated political organism which was evolving in the right direction. . . ."

The Yanks Are Coming! In other articles, Werth elaborated the mellow motif: "There are today perceptible signs of a desire for rapprochement with Britain. . . . The phrase 'the Anglo-Americans' is no longer favored. ... An ignorant old wife will tell you she knows for certain that Hitler is in America plotting. . . . In comparison, Britain is quite harmless."

Varied echoes of the Lemin line bounced back from all over the world. In France the Communist weekly, France Nouvelle, shrieked dutifully: "French independence seriously threatened by the dollar kings!" In the U.S., meanwhile, Henry Wallace and his political siblings continued to tell Americans about how wicked the British and French imperialists are. From Canada came a sharp, short snort of laughter. During its eager emanations of anti-Americana, Radio Moscow had recently quoted the Montreal Times as writing that U.S.-Canadian military ties were merely part of Canada's "final subservience to the U.S.A." It was true--the Montreal Times had indeed published suggestions as to how the city could defend itself against a possible attack from south of the border.

That was just about one century ago, at a time when His Majesty's subjects still well remembered the War of 1812. The Montreal Times folded in the early 1850s. Commented the more contemporary Montreal Gazette last week: "The Times was a good paper. . . . But it may hardly be quoted as typically representative of the opinion in the city at the present day."

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