How to Help Moscow

"As usual," wrote sandy New Jersey's Charles Aubrey Eaton, "we are putting our heads in the sand." Then Mr. Eaton, in the August issue of the American Magazine, buried head & shoulders in one of the most blindly undiscriminating attacks on Russia that has yet appeared in print. Since Eaton is chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, his blast was a matter of some importance.

Eaton took this line: "Americans are such good people that they are slow to recognize wickedness. . . ." Russia is a "ruthless and brutal nation," full of "atheism and immorality," its inhabitants, "ranging from Mongol beggars to stuffed commissars," mostly unhappy. In a flash of etymological insight he concluded: "Neither the Russians nor their tyrants understand the meaning of democracy. They are Slavs, which means captives or slaves."

Pravda would make as much sense as Eaton if it concluded that Americans were wicked because their name was derived from Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian and, therefore, a Fascist beast. Not even Pravda would try that. Eaton's article drew an angry and effective answer from Alexander Kerensky, who has been fighting the Soviet Government since the Bolsheviks kicked him out of the presidency of Russia 30 years ago. Wrote Kerensky in last week's New Leader:

"[If the Russians are born slaves], what impelled the Russian peasants to cast their votes for democratic parties whenever elections were held in Russia? . . . The half-illiterate kolkhoz peasant, loathing Red serfdom, has a clearer notion of democracy than . . . Henry Wallace."

Eaton, in attacking U.S. friends of Moscow, goes overboard in criticism of those Americans who remember with gratitude Russia's wartime sacrifices. "The war is over," says Eaton, "we owe nothing to Russia today."

To the Communist Party the U.S. owed nothing because the only payment the Communists wanted was the weakness and eventual destruction of the U.S. To the Russian people, however, the U.S. would always owe far more than the courtesy of a distinction Eaton failed to make--the distinction between tyrants and their slaves.

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