BANKRUPTCY OF THE LIBERALS

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CIA-RDP75-00149R000400550039-9
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RIPPUB
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K
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7
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November 11, 2016
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March 8, 1999
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39
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Publication Date: 
January 7, 1966
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MAGAZINE
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C O M M O N W E A L ved ~rd anuai-yr~~1 i -RDP75-00149R000400550039-9? :~ AL% N _:~ 0 0 0 0 0 0 "They are all honorable men" Seven months ago at the April March on Washington, Paul Potter, then President of Students for a Demo- cratic Society, stood in approximately this spot and said that we must name the system that creates and sustains the war in Vietnam -name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it, and change it. 'Today I will try to name it - to suggest an analysis which, to be quite frank, may disturb many of you - and to suggest what changing it may require of us. We are here again to protest again a growing war. Since it is a very bad war, we acquire the habit of think- ing that it must be caused by very bad men. But we only conceal reality, I think, to denounce on such grounds the menacing coalition of industrial and mili- tary power, or the brutality of the blitzkrieg we are waging against Vietnam, or the ominous signs around us that heresy may soon no longer be permitted, We must simply observe, and quite plainly say, that this coalition, this blitzkrieg, and this demand for acquiesc- ence are creatures, all of them, of a government that since: 1932 has considered itself to be fundamentally liberal, The original commitment in Vietnam was President Truman's - a liberal and signer of the first civil rights act. That commitment was seconded by the moderate liberal, President Eisenhower - who mobilized the Na- tional Guard to integrate Central High School in Little CARL oCLBSDY is the president of the Students for a Democratic Society. The above address was delivered on November 27 as part of the March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam. Rock. And intensified by President Kennedy, a liberal who gave us the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Prog- ress, and the beginnings of the anti-poverty program. Think of the men, who now engineer that war - those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals. But so, I'm sure, are many of us who are here today. To understand the war, then, it seems necessary to take a closer look at this American liberalism. Maybe we are in for some surprises. Maybe we have here two quite different liberalisms: one authentically humanist, the other not so human at all. Not long ago, I considered myself a liberal. And if someone had asked me what I meant by that, I'd per- haps have quoted Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine, who first made plain our nation's unprovisional commit- ment to human rights. But what do you think would happen if these two heroes could sit down now for a chat with President, Johnson and McGeorge Bundy? They would surely talk of the Vietnam war. Our dead revolutionaries would soon wonder why their country was fighting against what appeared to be a revolution. The living liberals would hotly deny that it is one: there are troops coming in from outside, they get arms from other countries, most of the people are not on their side, and they practice terror against their own. Therefore, not a revolution. G~.. .. 717~...J A........... ....J C.. .. ~O.mr~lO.~i gal{ t/~7A X111-f7G AAA AA~AAA AAAGGAA9A A CPYRGHT Sanitized Approved 'For Release ? CIA_Rr11275-00149R000400550039_9 What would our dead revolutionaries answer? They might say: What fools and bandits, sirs, you make then of us. Outside help? Do you remember Lafayette? Or the 3,000 British freighters the French navy sank for our side? Or the arms and men we got from France and Spain? And what's this about terror? Did you never hear what we did to our own loyalists? Or about the thousands of rich American Tories who fled for their lives to Canada? And as for popular support do you not know that we had less than one-third of our people with us? That, in fact, the colony of New York recruited more troops for the British than for us? Revolutions don't take place in velvet boxes. They never have. It is only the poets who make them lovely. What the National Liberation Front is fighting in Viet- nam is a complex and vicious war. This war is also a revolution, as honest as they come. And. this is a fact which all our intricate official denials will never change. . No Just Revolutions for Us But it doesn't make any difference to our leaders any- way. Their aim there is really much simpler than this implies. It is to safeguard what they take to be Ameri- can interests around the world against revolution or revolutionary change, which they always call Commu- nism - as if that were that. In the case of Vietnam, this interest is, first, the principle that revolution shall not be tolerated anywhere; and second, that South Vietnam shall never sell its Tice to China - or even to North Vietnam. There is simply no such thing now, for us, as a just revolution - never mind that for two-thirds of the world's people the 20th Century might as well be the Stone Age; never mind the melting poverty and hope- lessness that are the basic facts of life for most modern :men; and never mind that for these millions there is now an increasingly perceptible relationship between their sorrow and our contentment. Can we understand why the Negroes of Watts re- belled? Then why do we need a devil-theory for the rebellion of the South Vietnamese? Then why can't we see that our proper human struggle is not with Commu- nism or revolutionaries, but with the social desperation that drives good men to violence, both here and abroad? To be sure, we have been most generous with our aid, and in Western Europe, a mature industrial society, that aid worked. But we have never shown ourselves capable of allowing others to make those traumatic institutional changes that are often the prerequisites of progress in colonial societies. For all our official feel- ing for the millions who are enslaved to what we so self-righteously call the yoke of Communist tyranny, we make no real effort at all to crack through the much more vicious right-wing tyrannies that our businessmen traffic with and our nation profits from every day. And for all our cries about the International Red Conspiracy to take over the world, we take only pride in the fact of our 6,000 military bases on foreign soil. We gave Rhodesia a grave look just now -but we keep on buying her chromium, which is cheap because black slave labor mines it. We deplore the racism of Verwoerd's regime in South Africa -but our banks make big loans to that country and our private technology makes it a nuclear power. We are, saddened and puzzled by random back- page stories of revolt in this or that Latin American state -but are convinced by a few pretty photos in the Sunday supplement that things are getting better, that the world is coming our way, that change from disorder can be orderly, that our benevolence will pacify the distressed, that our might will intimidate the angry. Optimists, may I suggest that these are quite unlikely fantasies. They are fantasies because we have lost that mysterious'social desire that could make them real. We have become a. nation of young, bright-eyed, hard- hearted, slim-waisted, bullet-headed make-out artists. A nation - may I say it? - of beardless liberals. You say I am being hard? Only think. . This country, with its thirty-some years of liberalism, can send 200,000 young men to Vietnam to kill and die in the most dubious of wars, but it cannot get 100 voter registrars to go into Mississippi. What do you make of it? The financial burden of the war obliges us to cut millions from an already impoverished War on Poverty budget. But in almost the same breath, Congress ap- propriates $140 million for the Lockheed and Boeing companies to compete with each other on the super- sonic transport project - that Disneyland creation that will cost us all about $2 billion before it's done. We have been earnestly resisting for some years now the idea of putting atomic weapons into West German hands, thus perpetuating the division of Europe. Now just this week we find out that, with the meagerest of security systems, West Germany has had nuclear weap- ons in her hands for the past six years. What do you make of it? Some will make of it that I overdraw the matter. Many will ask: What about the other side? To be sure, there is the bitter ugliness of Czechoslovakia, Poland, those infamous tanks of Hungary. But my anger only rises to hear some say that sorrow cancels sorrow, or 7 January 1966: 397 CPYRGHTSanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149R000400550039-9 Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149R000400550039-9 shame deposits in that ones account the vicious right-winger, Ademar Barros, supported by a right to shamefulness. A Brief Stock of Facts And others will make of it that I sound mighty anti- American. To these I say: Don't blame me for that/ Blaine those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart. Just who might they be, by the way? Let's take a brief stock of some facts. In 1953 our Central Intelligence Agency managed to overthrow Mossadegh in Iran, the complaint being his neutralism in-the cold war and his plans to nationalize the country's oil resources to improve his people's lives. Most evil aims, most evil man. In his place we put in General Zahedi, a World War II Nazi collaborator. New arrangements on Iran's oil gave 25-year leases on 40 percent of it to three US firms, one of which was Gulf. The CIA's leader for this coup was Kermit Roosevelt. In 1960 Kermit Roosevelt became a vice president of Gulf. In 1954, the democratically elected Arbenz of Gua- temala wanted to nationalize a portion of United Fruit Company's plantations in that country, land he needed badly for a modest program of agrarian reform. His government was overthrown in a CIA-supported coup. The following year, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, director of the CIA when the Guatemala venture was being planned, joined the board of the United Fruit Company. Comes 1960 and Castro cries we are about to invade Cuba. The Administration sneers, "poppycock," and the Americans believe it. Comes the invasion. Comes with it the awful realization that the United States Govern- ment had lied. Comes 1962 and the missile crisis, and our Adminis- tration stands prepared to fight global atomic war on the curious principle that another state does not have the right to its own foreign policy. Comes 1963 and British Guiana, where Cheddi Jagan wants independence from England and a labor law modeled on the Wagner Act. And Jay Lovestone, the AFL-CIO foreign policy chief, acting as always quite independently of labor's rank and file, arranges with the government to finance an eleven-week dock strike that brings the Jagan government down, ensuring that the state will remain British Guiana, and that any work- ingman who wants a wage better than 50? a day is a dupe of Communism. Comes 1964. Two weeks after Thomas Mann announ- ces that we have abandoned the Alianza's principle of no aid to, tyrants, Brazil's Goulart is overthrown by the show of American gunboats at Rio de Janeiro. Within 24 hours, the new head of state, Mazzilli, receives a congratulatory wire from our President. Comes 1965. The Dominican Republic. Rebellion in the streets. We scurry to the spot with 20,000 neutral Marines and our neutral peacemakers - like Ellsworth' Bunker, Jr., Ambassador to the Organization of Ameri- can States. Most of us know that our neutral Marines fought openly on the side of the junta, a fact that the Administration still denies. But how many also know that what was at stake was our new Caribbean Sugar Bowl? That this same neutral peacemaking Bunker is a board member and stock owner of the National Sugar Refining Company, a firm his father founded in the good old days and one which has a major interest in maintaining the status quo in the Dominican Republic? Or that one of the President's closest personal advisors, our new Supreme Court Justice, Abe Fortas, has sat for the past 19 years on the board of the Sucrest Com- pany, which imports black strap molasses from the Do- minican Republic? Or that the rhetorician of corporate liberalism and the late President Kennedy's close friend, Adolf Berle, was chairman of that same board? Or that our roving ambassador Averill Harriman's brother, Ro- land, is on the board of National Sugar? Or that our former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Joseph Farland, is a board member of the South Puerto Rico Sugar Co., which owns 275,000 acres of rich land in the Dominican Republic and is the largest employer on the island - at one dollar a day? Neutralists) God save the hungry people of the world from such neutralists) We do not say these men are evil. We say rather that good men can be divided from their compassion by the institutional system that inherits us all. Generation in and out, we are put to use. People become instru- ments. Generals do not hear the screams of the bombed and sugar executives do not see the misery of the cane cutters: for to do so would be to be that much less the general/ Corporate Liberalism and Anti-Communism The foregoing facts of recent history describe one main aspect of the estate of Western liberalism. Where is our American humanism here? What went wrong? Let's stare our situation coldly in the face. All of us are born to the colossus of history, our American cor- porate system-in many ways, an awesome organism. There is one fact that describes it: with about 5% of the world's people, we consume half the world's goods. CPYRGHT Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149R000400550039-9 We take a richness that is in good part not our own, and put it in our pockets, our garages, our split-levels, our bellies, and our futures. On the face of it, it is a crime that so few should have so much at the expense of so many. Where is the moral imagination so abused as to call this just? Perhaps many of us feel uneasy in our sleep. We are not, after all, a cruel people and perhaps we don't really need this su- per-dominance that deforms others. But what can we do? The investments are made. The plants abroad are built. The system exists. One is swept up into it. How intolerable - to be born moral, but addicted to a stolen and maybe surplus luxury. Our goodness threatens to become counterfeit before our eyes - unless we change. But change threatens us with uncertainty, at least, Our problem, then, is to justify this.' system and give its theft another name - to make kind and moral what is neither, to perform some alchemy with language that will make this injustice seem to ~e a most magnanimous gift. A hard problem. But the Western democracies, in the heyday of their colonial expansionism, produced a hero worthy of the task. Its name was free enterprise and its partner was an illiberal liberalism that said to the poor and the dis- possessed: What we acquire of your resources we re- pay in civilization. The white man's burden. But this was too poetic. So a much more hard-headed theory was produced. This theory said that colonial status is in fact a boon to the colonized. We give them technol- ogy and bring them into modern times. But this deceived no one but ourselves. We were de- lighted with this new theory. The poor saw in it merely an admission that their claims were irrefutable. They stood up to us, without gratitude. We were shocked - but also confused, for the poor seemed again to be right. How long is it going to be the case, we wondered, that the poor will be right and the rich will be wrong? Liberalism faced a crisis. In the face of the collapse of the European empires, how could it continue to hold together our twin need for richness and righteousness? How can we continue to sack the ports of Asia and still dream of Jesus? The challenge was met with a most ingenious solu- tion: the ideology of anti-Communism. This was the hind: we cannot call revolution bad, because we started that way ourselves and because it is all too easy to see why the dispossessed should rebel. So we will call revolution Communism. And we will reserve for our- selves the right to say what Communism means. We take note of Communist enormities and say: Behold Communism is a bloodbath. We take note of Commu- nist reactionaries, and say: Behold, Communism is a betrayal of the people. We take note of the -revolution's need to consolidate itself, and say: Behold, Communism is a tyranny. It. has been all these things, and it will be these again, and we will never be at loss for those tales of atrocity that comfort us so in our self-righteousness. Nuns will be raped and bureaucrats will be disemboweled. In- deed, revolution is a fury., For it is a letting loose of out- rages pent up sometimes over centuries. But the more brutal and longer-lasting the suppression of this energy, all the more ferocious will be its explosive release. Far from helping Americans deal with this truth, the anti-Communist ideology merely tries to disguise it so that things may stay the way they are. Thus, it depicts our presence in other lands not as a coercion, but a protection. It allows us even to say that the napalm in Vietnam is only another aspect of our humanitarian love - like those exorcisms in the Middle Ages that so often killed the patient. So we say to the Vietnamese peasant, the Cuban intellectual, the Peruvian worker: "You are better dead than red. If it hurts - sorry about that." This is the action of corporate liberalism. It performs for the corporate state a function quite like what the Church once performed for the feudal state. It seeks to justify its burdens and protect it from change. As the Church exaggerated this office in the inquisition, so with liberalism in the McCarthy time - which, if it was a reactionary phenomenon, was still made possible by our anti-Communist liberalism. Corporatism or Humanism? Let me then speak directly to humanist liberals. If my facts are wrong, I will soon be corrected. But if they are right, then you may face a crisis of conscience. Corporatism or humanism: which? For it has come to that. Will you let your dreams be used? Will you be a grudging apologist for the' corporate state? Or will you try to change it - not in the name of this or that blue- print or ism, but in the name of simple human decency and democracy and the vision that wise and brave men saw in the time of our own Revolution? And if your commitment to human value is uncondi- tional, then disabuse yourselves of the notion that state- ments will bring change if only the mighty can be reached, or that marches will bring change if only we can make them massive enough, or that policy proposals will bring change if only we can make them responsible enough. 7 Ja'gta r 1966: 899 ganitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149R000400550039-9 CPYRGHT CPYRGHT "We are dealing now with a colossus that does not want to be changed. It will not change itself. It will not cooperate with those who want to change it. Those al- lies of ours in the government -are they really our al- lies? If they are, then they don't need advice, they need consiiituencies; they don't need study groups, they need a movement. And if they are not, then all the more reason for building that movement with a most relent- less conviction. There are people in this country today who are trying to build that movement, nothing less than a humanist reformation. And the humanist liberals must under- stand that it is this movement with which their own best hopes are most in tune. We know the same history that you know, and we can understand your occasional cynicism, exasperation and even distrust. But we ask you to put these aside and help us risk a leap. Help us find enough time for the enormous work that needs doing here. Help us build. Help us shake the future in the name of plain human hope, Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-001498000400550039-9 Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149R000400550039-9 oved For Release : CIA-ROP75-00149R00040055003979 'SAN 2 1966 tuloor's Cold Warrior-IV Loveston~'s Aid Program. olsters U.S. E'oreign Polic 'RGH Last in a series By Dan Kurzman Washington Post Staff Writer director of AFL-CIO oversees operations, Is helping to }. Ing for the organization, in- formed sources said, have such critic: Vaughn said U.S. ambassa-! ate a trade union aid program been asked to cooperate with dors and mission directors he in Latin America and - else- the Central Intelligence Agen- had met on a recent trip to where to fight communism and win support from international cy. They are told, as one in- Latin America, indicated that ' labor for United States foreign formant put It, that "Latin ' the social projects program policy. s social revolution America was in trouble in a number of This program is consistent must be diverted into proper countries because of over- with his double-edged effort channels." p r o in otion, administrative to push for a tougher U.S. Some time, ago, the AIFLD weaknesses, and failure to co- cold war policy on the one .r` communicated with a certain th b t ordinate activities with the hand, and for conformity with e ou , Michigan Fund a U.S. Embassy. U.S. policy by foreign., par- a a ?;eft availability of funds. Iowever, AFL-CIO President George ticularly Latin, labor on the the connection was, severed Meany himself said at the other. who at one time Lovestone WILLIAM C. DOHERTY JR. after Rep. Wright Patman (D- Tex.) charged that this Fund same meeting that he, too, was troubled by the AIFLD's per- , headed the American Corn- complains _ of red tape supplied the J. ? M. Kaplan which he f New York d F formance. ' munist Party, wields substan- tial control over the staunchly l , o un said was .?a.:igan, with has Meanwhile, criticism poured in from Latin America. anti - communist Inter - Amer nancing social projects for .early $1 million from 1961 to Leaders of four Argentine can Regional Organization workers-mainly housing and 1963. Some Institute employes unions, who were promised, f f `$10 (ORIT). But this control is di- community centers. concern that AIFLD express are, a an - amidst great million housing project in luted by the voices of labor leaders from other nations Defenders of the Institute engrossment in intelligence April, 1964 are still waitingi . This limitation of power, point out that its educational matters at the expense of social h i for the first house to be built. however, has been offset in program has so far reached as es development activit than i Doherty has replied that the part by the establishment of some 30,000 people, including es made more enem friends among Latin American roblem of inflationary costs I a strictly U.S.-operated Ameri- almost 400 graduates from a workers had held up the program, not can. Institute for Free Labor Washington training school in V6 . ' Lovestone s chief AIFLD a very satisfactory answer to Development (AIFLD). and about 2000`. graduates of lieutenant, bluff, - energetic either the workers or to some Americans close to the pro, U.S. Backed 13 regional schools. Director William C.' Doherty, gram. The AIFLD is a nonprofit Institute backed by the AFL- The AIFLD has completed a $10-million, 3100-unit work- Jr., says that delays in his so- clal development program are , Costa Rica Row CIO, almost 60 U.S. business ers' housing project in Mexi- due mainly to the red tape In Costa Rica, where a $1.2- firms, and the U.S. govern- co, and a few hundred houses Involved in obtaining U.S. I million housing program is ment. The Government in Honduras. It has set up a government housing loans. being contemplated, the press through the Agency for Inter- Workers' Housing Bank in Blasts From Up High has been strongly critical of national Development (AID), Lima, Peru, and spent some " " Criticism nevertheless has the AIFLD for trying to lm- l " " finances or guarantees about impact $60 million on come from some high souse. s? pose conditions. The unjust ' 80 per cent of the program. projects such as food distribu- in September ti AIFLD says that it, and not The Institute has two main official function tion and laundry cooperatives. F 1 ng At a mee th~ b r i the Costa Ricans, must decide 0" ~5~ 9s91t is tin American la or leaders in to thhAIly L say a i s an s r mittee o n ' h embraces top U.S. gov hi also requiring an interest rate democratic unionism and ii- nounced program is suffering c w from a preoccupation wi i unannounced activity - intel- ligence gathering. Jack H. Vaughn, Assistants Secretary of State for Inter- Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149R000400550039-9 STATINTL Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149R000400550039-9