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.