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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 17, 27 April 1941, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Stories and the screen have made familiar to us the manner in which vultures begin to swoop and circle over a man lost in a wilderness waste, waiting to pounce down upon him for the feast as soon as life leaves him.
We’re witnessing now a similar sort of scene, with the Great Powers hovering hungrily over the Dutch East Indies, waiting their opportunity to sink their claws into it as soon as Holland is laid prostrate by war in Europe.
Chief of the waiting vultures are, of course, the U.S. and Japan, both of which have now served notice upon each other and upon the world that they intend to have the final say about the fate of the Indies.
That the great archipelago stretching 3,000 miles across the South Seas is lost to Holland seems a foregone conclusion. The Dutch have extracted its wealth for nearly three centuries and now, with the world being re-divided by the greater, more powerful plunderers, the time has come for them to be displaced. The Dutch capitalists realize this well enough.
After both Japan and the U.S. had issued statements about the “status quo” of the islands – (neither one, of course, means a Dutch status quo) – the Netherlands government announced that it has “neither demanded nor would accept protection for the islands whatever its source” and asserted their ability to defend themselves against any attack, likewise whatever its source.
Both Foreign Minister Arita and Secretary of State Cordell Hull issued statements declaring in almost identical terms that neither country wanted to see the status quo of the rich East Indies changed as a result of the developments in Europe.
In the press of both countries this immediately unloosed a flood of accusations and counter-accusations that both governments contemplated seizing the islands at the first favorable opportunity. Both, of course, were right. The word “protection” has taken on a new meaning, especially since the Allies and Germany both set out at about the same time to “protect” Norway.
Just how far U.S. imperialism will go to prevent the wealth of the Indies from falling into Japan’s hands will be determined, of course, by how the war in general develops. That they do not mean to do so out of any altruistic motives was stated quite bluntly in a Washington dispatch to the Journal of Commerce on April 17 which stated:
“There is some doubt that the United States would attempt to protect [there’s that word protect again!] the Dutch possessions unless Holland ceded them under a protectorate. This would give the United States an exclusive right which no government could contest except at risk of war.”
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