THE REAL CRIME OF THE AMERICANS

INDRO MONTANELLI, Italian political analyst and author, writing in Milan's respected Corriere della Sera:

WHY is America so unpopular even in those countries which she has liberated and subsequently helped to rebuild and rescue from starvation? It is a legitimate question which I myself would ask if I were an American and, as such, had lost, let us say, one son in Normandy to save France. The only country which might have some reason for ingratitude is Germany. Yet Germany is the only country which looks amicably at the ex-enemy.

Of all the objective causes with which we justify our feeling of rancor against an enemy, guilty of having beaten us in a war which we declared, there's not one that holds good. They have taken from us neither ships, nor cannons, nor a foot of land; they treated our prisoners with great humanity; they have given us 40 billion lire [$65 million]. Unfortunately all these claims on our gratitude are obscured by one defect of which there isn't the slightest hope that Americans can be cured because it's in their blood, it's constitutional. It is the craze for improving us, for making us try to be in every way kinder to each other, juster, richer, happier.

The real trouble--the great inexplicable crime of the Americans--is that they really are better than us Europeans. I don't say more intelligent. Neither would I say that the Americans are more cultured, capable, refined or courageous. I only say that they are better intentioned, ready to sacrifice the individual for the common good, more candid, more trustful of others and more ready than we are to see the good rather than the bad side of things.

It upsets all our criteria which for centuries have trained us to look for evil behind the mask of innocence, and to oppose it with malice even more subtle and perverse. The whole of Europe is envious of America, envious of her power, her wellbeing.

BRITAIN HAS ABANDONED ITS ISOLATIONISM

WOODROW WYATT, anti-Bevan Laborite M.P., in the New York Times Magazine:

[Britons] have always felt themselves to be set a little apart from the rest of the world. They have a distrust, which is not the same as dislike, of foreigners which would be incomprehensible to Americans accustomed through many years of immigration to accepting racial differences without surprise. But the post-war world has provided much evidence of a relaxation of the old British attitude. Self-sufficiency was obviously impossible to Britain and the Commonwealth in 1945. The minimum involvement in Europe consistent with European stability and British defense was Britain's aim. That minimum was a substantial effort in terms of rearmament programs and the stationing of the major part of Britain's armored divisions in Germany. It entailed an official abandonment of the belief that the Channel could be a defense. That has been the starting point of the post-war move away from isolationism.

Britain has always had her continental and world-wide alliances, but it has never stopped her from dreaming of a life in community with the Commonwealth and apart from everyone else. In this new European army she will be almost on the same footing as everyone else. Geography is closing in on the reluctant British. They will fight to make Europe a "second force" which will contain their old isolationism in a new and larger form. They will intertwine it with the age-old instinct which always leads Britain to attempt to maintain the status quo at an equilibrium and with the longing which all Britons have--but know now that they can never fulfill--to be "a right little, tight little island."

BRITAIN SHOULD TURN TO FRANCE NOT THE U.S.

Britain's anti-American NEW STATES MAN AND NATION, which is ever alert for alternatives to Anglo-American unity:

There is a feeling abroad in France that the era when French interests could be flouted and French governments bullied into acquiescence is now over. For the first time since 1940, France has become a subject, not an object, of world politics. The strength of this feeling is the real measure of Mendes-France's political realism, which was demonstrated yet again by last Tuesday's vote of confidence in the Assembly. The politicians and the parties would have liked to drag him down. They dared not do so. We welcome this French revival.

Without it, Britain would certainly have been in a very few years part of a Western alliance committed to a war policy of rolling back the Russians out of Eastern Germany and Eastern Europe.

If, in defiance of French national will, London and Washington are infatuated enough to insist on German rearmament, then the French are entitled to obtain what security they can against the evil consequences of their allies' blindness. Yet this does not mean that the issue is settled. The French Prime Minister still has a chance of preventing the Treaty ever coming into force. Having appeased his allies and thereby restored Western unity, Mendes-France must surely use the position of strength thus created in order to seek negotiations with the Russians for a German peace treaty. When that French initiative comes, what will the British attitude be? Shall we continue to maintain that German rearmament is something desirable on its own merits, and join with Mr. Dulles in stifling French diplomacy? Or shall we join the French in trying to reach a realistic understanding with the Soviet Union in the vital months which will elapse between ratification of the Treaty and its implementation in terms of actual German divisions?

THE WORM ALWAYS TURNS

HISTORIAN ARNOLD TOYNBEE, in the British monthly Encounter:

Is there anything truly permanent in the universe with which we human beings can have any kind of communion? This is a question with which the elusiveness of history is bound to confront us; but it is a question that points beyond time and therefore beyond history too. We have seen that "objective" history is always elusive. The historian's most sincere attempts to grasp it are always partly baffled by the inescapable subjectiveness of his own point of view. Might not an omnipotent dictator, armed with new weapons of psychological technique, be able to cut his subjects off completely from all contact with the objective past? Might not he be able to impose on them a view of history that was wholly subjective, and in which the subjective point of view was, not theirs, but his? Could this dictator's paradise ever become practical politics?

Happily, there are at least two obstacles in real life to the achievement of any such diabolical design. [One] obstacle lies in the impossibility of keeping every living human soul psychologically conditioned simultaneously. In history up to date, there has been no schooling that has been able to guarantee to tyrants that their subjects will not revolt at last at some intolerable turn of the screw. The revolting-point may be reached sooner in Irishmen than in Germans, and sooner in Germans than in Russians or in Chinese; but in all human beings, hitherto, there has always been a point at which the worm has turned. Even when we have made all allowance for the application of new psychological techniques in the service of tyranny, past experience seems to make it unlikely that human tyrants will ever succeed in taking mankind right out of history, so long as human life--and, with it, Man's mulish nature--continues to survive on Earth.

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