The Press: The Voice of Hope

"My aim here," wrote the Times's Dale, in the current issue of the scholarly Yale Review, "is, unabashedly, to argue that God is after all in His heaven —as much as He ever is—and that all's right with the world." Dale recognized that there are indeed real and serious world problems. But he suggested that "things are not nearly as bad as they are commonly painted in the deeper and continuing struggle, which is invariably, if somewhat uncritically, described as the most serious in which this nation has ever been engaged."

In his article, titled The Case for Optimism, Dale listed several international developments which give cause for believing that the U.S. is winning, not losing, the cold war:

¶ "The government of India—partly be cause of the events in Tibet, partly because of border troubles with the Chinese, and partly because of enlightened American and Western policy—has undergone a perceptible shift in its neutralism, a shift toward the West."

¶ "The one Communist state in India, Kerala, has ceased to be Communist."

¶ "Iraq, whose classic and convulsive revolution, to say nothing of her geography, offered a made-in-heaven target for the new Soviet tactics, has moved progressively away from Communist influence."

¶ "Egypt, the supposedly classic case of the possibilities of the Soviet economic offensive, has outlawed her Communists, has found President Nasser making sharply anti-Communist speeches."

¶ "Indonesia, a land with chaos in its very bones and with a large Communist Party, has dealt a severe setback to the domestic Communists."

¶ "Burma and Malaya have wiped out practically all the Communist revolutionaries that had disrupted orderly society."

¶ "The French and Italian Communist Parties are at new postwar lows."

¶ "With the sole exception of Guinea, not a single new African state has shown the slightest sign of wishing to be counted part of the Communist bloc."

¶ "Despite the unwillingness of those who are not blind to see, the effort of the industrial non-Communist world to supply capital to the underdeveloped countries has expanded astonishingly. Britain has doubled her aid in less than three years, Germany has more than doubled hers. The United States has been giving more purely development aid, as distinct from balance-of-payment-bailout aid, than at any time before, including the era of the Marshall Plan. The Cow of public capital to the poorer part of the world is immensely greater than at any other time in history."

Said Dale of his list: "I shall not add at this point, as the alarmist school customarily does, that this is 'only a partial list,' because it is all I can think of. I have a hunch that their 'partial' lists are all they can think of too, but let that go."