MIA > Archive > Glass (Li Fu-jen)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 19, 12 May 1945, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
It is necessary to go behind the scenes of the so-called “United Nations” conference at San Francisco to understand what is really going on. The real business is being transacted, not in the public sessions where cynical statesmen deliver high-sounding discourses on the need to prevent future wars, but in the backstage negotiations and diplomatic horse-trading which goes on in committees and in closed meetings between the heads of the principal delegations.
Occasionally, the rivalries of the Big Powers break through to the surface of the open conference proceedings. But in the main, the public sessions are merely the theatrical staging needed to cover the political skullduggery of the imperialists who manage and dominate the conference.
It was to exterminate fascism, the imperialist statesmen told us, that the war was fought. Yet the San Francisco conference last week voted to admit the delegation of the reactionary Farrell-Peron regime in Argentina – a regime which was publicly denounced as “fascist” by the U.S. Department of State.
Actually, of course there was no valid reason for excluding Argentina as “fascist” in view of the fact that China – the China ruled over by the bloody Chiang Kai-shek regime – was already there, with no one questioning its “democratic” credentials.
What is more significant, however, is the demonstration of the workings of power politics which the wrangle over the admission of Argentina afforded. Stalin’s foreign commissar, Molotoff, head of the Soviet delegation, tried hard to block Argentina’s admission. The Kremlin was ostensibly taking a stand for “democracy.” But in reality, Stalin was attempting to secure admission for his reactionary puppet Polish government as a trade against the admission of Argentina, in order to gain, in effect, diplomatic recognition for the Warsaw clique which the Anglo-American imperialists have thus far refused to grant.
The Allied imperialists are not prepared to write off Poland to Stalin. They have plans of their own for Europe, including Poland. So Stettinius and Eden cracked the whip at San Francisco and a solid phalanx of delegates voted to admit Argentina over Molotoff’s protest. Only three satellite states – Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Greece, voted for Molotoff’s motion to investigate further Argentina’s claim to representation. The Warsaw government is still unrecognized and excluded.
All this was arranged backstage by the Allied imperialists who managed the show. The vote on Argentina was intended as a demonstration against and a warning to the Soviet Union, a plain hint to Stalin that mighty powers are arrayed against him and that he had better not go too far.
Much more of this type of power-politics maneuvering is going on. The delegations of the Big Powers (the small nations are nothing but observers, voting as their patrons tell them to vote) are not engaged in creating an organization to preserve peace. They are maneuvering for position and advantage, with an eye to World War III. This is attested by a newspaper columnist, Thomas L. Stokes of the N.Y. World-Telegram. Writing from San Francisco under date of May 3, he states:
“The outstanding impression of this observer after watching this United Nations conference for 10 days is that these men gathered here ... have looked too closely – almost with microscopic selfishness – at their own little national interests. They have followed too much the age-old pattern of what is known as diplomacy, which has come to be another name for sharp dealing and trickery ... We need less of the old ‘spheres of influence’ philosophy that is apparent in the orbits Great Britain and Russia and ourselves are building up, just as in the past, to be pitted again at each other in combination here and hereafter.”
A corner of the curtain hiding the real purposes of the political representatives of the Wall Street monopolist plutocrats who aim at nothing less than world domination was lifted by Arthur Krock, Washington correspondent of the N.Y. Times, on May 1. According to this writer one of President Truman’s first acts of foreign policy has been to jettison all of Roosevelt’s fine talk about international “trusteeships” for territories seized from Japan which the Army and Navy hold to be “strategic” – in other words, necessary to the imperialist purposes of the United States.
The President, says Krock, upheld the argument of the brass hats “that bases in these former mandates and enemy areas are an essential foundation of that security which is the aspiration of San Francisco because the United States cannot possibly be viewed as a future aggressor by any member of the United Nations; the total of the native population is inconsiderable; the ability of these peoples to govern themselves at any time in the near future is improbable” – Just what the British imperialists say with regard to India! – “and to apply the full formula (of trusteeships) to these areas and peoples is impractical as well as dangerous.”
Thus in the very midst of the San Francisco conference which is supposed to bring freedom and peace to all peoples, the American imperialists are planning to grab and convert into colonies a whole series of Pacific territories and to establish on them bases for future wars.
Nor is this all. The American imperialists view with misgivings the powerful position the Soviet Union will have attained with the defeat of both Germany and Japan. They fear Stalin’s domination of Europe and the Far East. According to Krock, an adviser of the Washington administration said “something like this” to, President Truman:
“Mr. President, the Red Army is wonderful. It is unbelievably brave ... But, conceding all that, conceding the indispensable part the Red Army has played in the collapse of the Nazis, the Red Army without us cannot give Europe, Asia or even Russia security.
“It has fought on one front. We have fought simultaneously on many. Our industrial machine is incomparably greater, more skillful and more resourceful, as the Russians themselves know through Lend-Lease and otherwise. And in the unthinkable event of hostilities in which our air forces and fleets would be on the other side, the plight of the Russians would be desperate ... It would be proper and most useful for you to make that brutally plain.”
From what he heard before leaving Washington for San Francisco, Krock concluded, “the President did not reject the substance of this advice.”
Such is the true political face of the “peace-makers.” Behind the facade at San Francisco they are working out plans of colonial brigandage and, while talking peace, preparing for new and more terrible wars.
Last updated on 7 November 2018