THE NATIONS: Three Quotes

Last week three quotations neatly ticked off the three most important facts in the political world: 1) Europe's state of mind, 2) Russia's aggressive truculence and 3) the U.S. opportunity.

"The Spaghetti He Eats." In Rome the dissident Socialist newspaper L'Umanitá, which dislikes about equally Russian Communism and U.S. capitalism, summed up the effect of the recent Red slander blitz against the U.S. Said L'Umanitá:

"The Italian worker, even the unlettered peasant, replies [to Communist cries] by thinking of his son held as a war prisoner in Russia . . . and he automatically thinks the spaghetti he eats is due to the Americans."

"Extraordinary & Infamous." The Kremlin feels that it must change the minds of Italian (and other) workers even if that means taking away the spaghetti. Moscow's Pravda made that point clear when it devoted two pages to an explanation of the Little Comintern by Andrei Zhdanov.

Pravda had previously tried to play down the Little Comintern, brushing it off as a mere information bureau. Zhdanov, however, is one of the five top men of Russia and the prime mover in the Little Comintern reorganization, and should know more about it than Pravda. He said that the group was brought into being because the "open expansionist program of the U.S. is reminiscent of the extraordinary and infamous defeated program of Fascist aggressors." General Zhdanov clearly connected the Little Comintern with the main line of Soviet policy. The line itself he expressed with great clarity:

"The U.S.S.R. will put all effort in seeing that the Marshall Plan is not realized."

"To Make Our Cause So Just." From Socialist testimony and Communist ranting it was clear that the initiative lay with the U.S. How should the U.S. use its opportunity? Theologian Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr had the best answer. In a Manhattan speech he said:

"The defense of a civilization requires military strategy, but it also requires political and moral strategy. . . .

"To win the ideological battle against Communism it is not enough to point to the crass corruptions of the original dream of justice which we see in the police states of Eastern Europe. It is more important to make our cause so just that it will win the allegiance not of the comfortable but of the insecure and the impoverished. It is particularly important that America, as the most powerful and wealthiest of the nations in the western world, should acquire a higher degree of humility. Without it we will insist upon political creeds and political reforms which Europe regards not as the creed of democracy but as the characteristic prejudice of a very wealthy nation. . . . Without humility and the imagination to think beyond the characteristic prejudices of American life we cannot win the ideological battle against Communism. . . ."

In other words, it would take more than spaghetti to thwart Zhdanov.