[State Department Press Release No. 1005, September 27, 1950] ADDRESS BY HON. PHILIP C. JESSUP, AMBASSADOR AT LARGE, AT THE SESQUICENTENNIAL CONVOCATION OF MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE, MIDDLEBURY, VT., SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1950 In current language, I must confess the title I selected for my address is corny. But I want to talk about something which is as familiar as My Country "Tis of Thee. The old saying that familiarity breeds contempt is perhaps less true than to say that familiarity numbs the mind so that it acts automatically and not rationally. There is often an emotional response to the sound of a familiar song or hymn or a prayer with whose tune or words we have been familiar since childhood. Yet, as we listen and repeat, we are barely conscious of the meaning of the words. Like most homely truths, this one is embodied in many jokes such as that about the little girl who named her toy bear Bravely because he was cross-eyed and she liked the hymn, Bravely my cross I'd bear. My plea is that we stop in our tracks and realize the meaning of the things we take for granted. I shall mention the thesis, which may at first seem exaggerated, that it is only through this process that we can escape from the mortal peril which confronts us. The peril which confronts us is that we may lose the accumulated values of our civilization and the faith which is the product of that civilization. The source of the peril is a new fanaticism called communism. It is not communism as an economic dogma developed, with vast historical inaccuracy, by Karl Marx which is a menace. Economic fallacies take care of themselves. But it is the perverted use of communism as a slogan for the police state which has made the term a label for the peril to free peoples everywhere. This fanaticism is devoid of moral values because moral values appertain to the individual and communism as a current political mechanism appertains to the state. Superficially one might think that such a deification of the state as the symbol of the community is a more unselfish philosophy than our insistence upon the dignity of the individual. In terms of communism as it is practiced in the Soviet Union and promulgated from the Kremlin this is not true. For in reality under this system the state is not the community but the ruling clique. And what is the ruling clique? It is a group of cruel and selfish men intent only upon the perpetuation of their own power. To achieve this end they use the mechanism of the police state. They use it as Hitler used it with savage cruelty, with cunning, and with contempt for the welfare of the people enslaved by their propaganda and their secret police. It serves their purpose to promote a favored elite who live in comfort or even in luxury but always in fear. There is no trust, there is only suspicion, reliance on power and again on fear. What inhabitant of the Soviet Union could sing "sweet land of liberty" without even a conscious sense of the falseness of the words? He may have drilled into his being the idea that it is well that he should subordinate himself to the all-powerful state but he could never think of himself as having liberty. Is he a scientist? His conclusions like his hypotheses must conform to the state dogma. Is he a musician? His symphonies must conform not to his concepts of harmony, beauty, or art, but to the decision of an oligarchy. Whatever his skill, his inspiration or his desire, he must conform under the shadow of a great and omnipresent terror. They say it is a revolutionary society, but they will not tolerate the revolutionary heresy, "let freedom ring." Revolution itself must, in the Communist concept, deny its meaning and become arid conformity. Revolution is only the stepping stone to slavery. Revolution is a theme for export from the Soviet Union. It is a practice to be encouraged in other countries as a part of the strategy for enslaving them. Its practice or advocacy in the homeland is punished with death, and bare nonconformity is considered revolutionary. The shades of Bukharin and his fellow defendants in the purge trials bear eloquent witness to that fact. It is a grotesque fantasy that the most reactionary ruling clique in the world, namely, the Politburo, is able by the cunning and deception of its propaganda to secure the momentary support of peoples inspired by the love of liberty. We who practice liberty have somehow failed to gain the victory which should come from standing on the vantage ground of truth. In part we are inhibited by a sophisticated reluctance to state the obvious, Yet there is no more potent weapon in the world than the statement of the obvious when the statements are true. We found during the war that the best propaganda was the truth proved by experience to be the truth. This was and is because the truth so overwhelmingly proves the advantage of our position. The Cominform pays tribute to this fact by denying their people access to the truth. Only the most deeply indoctrinated person is allowed contact with the outside world where truth is at large and even among this tested elite there are constant defections. Unconsciously many of our writers and speakers strengthen the Soviet cause by discussing their strength. Of course, they have elements of strength. Evil always has elements of strength because it is unhampered by respect for any of the decencies which separate good from evil. Actually, all of the familiar patterns of Soviet action clearly reveal their weakness. They know their society is too weak to bear comparison with the free world. The iron curtain is a badge of weakness. The armies they build up behind it are vulnerable to the truth. The greatest hazard in the victorious advance of their armies in Western Europe at the end of the war was the exposure of the soldiers to the realities of Western living. Long and vigorous reindoctrination or purging was necessary to readjust them to living in their world of whips and promises. From time to time we hear the voice of those in this country who are also afraid, afraid of the truth. They suggest that clamps be put on education so that students in colleges like Middlebury or in our large universities will be prevented from knowing about such doctrines as communism. Nothing could be more blind or so oblivious to the strength of our free system. It is only the Communists, not we, who need fear the comparison. If, from the tops of these Vermont mountains, we let freedom ring, we need never doubt that this will remain a land of liberty. Yet it is not enough to preach and practice liberty despite the great moral strength which that preachment and practice engenders. The struggle for men's minds is only part of the conflict. The Kremlin seeks to control men's minds so they can control also their bodies. We must have physical strength as well. I was talking a few months ago with that proverbial font of homely American wisdom, a taxi driver. He had served in a Negro regiment during the war. He had been reading some of the loose statements about the inevitability of war and the use of the atomic bomb. He was philosophical about it all, as Americans are wont to be. He reminisced about the past and wished that he might have lived in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century when one did not exist under the shadow of war. It does seem in retrospect that those were halcyon days. I recall the surprise of the news of the summer of 1914 when the Kaiser (it is always personified in our minds) invaded Belgium. I was just about to enter college and I had never had occasion to think much about war. It had an unreality for my generation until the Plattsburgh movement and the Mexican border incident combined with the headlines of the news from Europe to rouse us from our lethargy. 1917 and our entry into the war came soon enough and there has been no halcyon day since then. We did not fully realize as a Nation that this was so. There was the postwar period of prohibition and speak-easies; the fabulous twenties with their huge paper fortunes; then the crash, the New Deal, Hitler, and again war. Complacency has not returned since VJ-day, but the cause of our uneasiness has been inadequately appreciated. Slowly, as is our national wont, we have begun to absorb into our being the reality with which other peoples, the French for instance, have long been familiar. The reality is that the world is confronted with reckless and savage men who have the power to move millions into war and who do not hesitate to do so if their own personal power will be enhanced thereby. People who are permitted to know the truth and who think do not believe that the Kremlin is striving for peace. No irresponsible bombast about our initiating war reflects the thought of the American people or of the American Government. No responsible American believes that we stand to gain from war. The antiwar statements of great military figures like Eisenhower and Marshall do reflect our national spirit. We needed no proof that we would fight if necessary. If others needed it, they received it in June when wanton aggression was loosed by Communist imperialism against the Republic of Korea. There was a new note in our response to that aggression. It was as if through our subconscious the refrain, "let freedom ring," applied not only to the mountain tops of Vermont and Tennessee and Colorado but also to those of Korea. Moreover, we did not silence the refrain as we thought to ourselves that there are other mountain tops in many other parts of the world. In Korea we said The order is being "let it ring" with a note of authority. It was an order. carried out by the unified command for the United Nations because 53 nations also wish freedom and not slavery under Moscow. It is a pity that the United Nations is not universal in order that all free peoples might join in the chorus. For other mountain tops, whether in Asia, in South America, in Europe, in Africa, or in the islands of the sea we sang "let freedom ring" in notes of questioning, of warning, even, if you like, of pleading. It was not the pleading of weakness, on bended knee, of subservience to a power which could dispose at will of our future. It was the pleading of a people who can see reason and wish that others could see it too. It was the pleading which the strong address to the weak that they may be spared the suffering which would flow from their intransigence. There is a power in such pleading greater than the power of command, when it is backed as in our case by the greatest technological skill and productive It draws added capacity and moral stamina which the world has ever seen. strength from the truth that we seek no added power or dominion and that the world knows this to be true. It grows still stronger when, as now, it is coupled with the sound of bombs and guns used at great personal sacrifice on behalf of the United Nations and of a small gallant, freedom-loving nation established under the aegis of the United Nations. We will not barter the freedom which rings on mountain tops or in the valleys or on the plains of any free people. Nor will we impose our ideas upon any other people. As a matter of fact, we in America harbor the most revolutionary doctrine of all time, the doctrine of freedom or liberty. Only the stanchest and most · vigorous community can retain the slogan after the first fine frenzy of the fighting days when the yoke is thrown off. The Russians sank into the reactionary pattern at once, making freedom (of thought, of speech, of religion, of aspiration, of activity) a capital crime once the old regime was overthrown. They were too weak to tolerate freedom. The glory of the American Revolution and indeed of the whole western revolution which celebrated the rights of man, as contrasted with the rights of the state-which means the ruling clique-is its ability to retain the revolutionary slogan of freedom throughout a century and a half. It is commonplace with us to groan over the petty trials and tribulations which result from freedom. Fortunately, we have so far generally secured the necessary delicate balance between license and liberty. Our measure of success is the product of a quality which is a national characteristic despite numerous individual deviations. That quality is a sense of responsibility-of proud responsibility. There is in the American spirit a realization that we are the inheritors of great traditions. Something priceless has been passed on through generations into our hands and must be passed on by us, unblemished and intact. Whenever we exercise our freedoms without a sense of responsibility, damage is done to our great cause. The sometimes irresponsible exercise of the freedom of the press causes great damage to our hard-won friendship with other peoples. Not all editors scan their columns with the question in their minds, "Will this contribute to our friendship with the people of X country?" In terms of our international relations, our Government has dealt with this problem for many decades. We have pointed out, and properly, that because we have freedom of the press, no foreign government should impute to ours the frequently irresponsible statements of criticism or reproach. What is leveled at the heads of foreign governments is equally leveled at our own. Let the state which similarly permits free criticism of itself cavil at our newspapers or magazines. Wherever there is also a free press, governments understand even though private reactions are extreme. We must always be alert to appreciate the reciprocal aspect of a free press. Far different is the situation where the press is allowed to print only what the government permits. When Pravda or Isvestia or Red Star speaks in their columns from Moscow, we know that Government has spoken. The Kremlin seeks to defend itself by quoting the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune, but neither it nor any informed source believes for a minute that those, or any other American editorial columns, parrot the dictates of the White House as all Soviet papers parrot the dictates of the Kremlin. Anyone who has sat through endless sessions of the United Nations General Assembly and its committees has seen the contrast. The bloc of five-the U. S. S. R. and its four satellites-speak with the single voice of the Cominform. Repeti tion is for them a virtue and repetition covers not only ideas but even the verbiage. On the other side is the free world-53 or 54 nations speaking on disparate notes which are at the same time not discordant because they compose a symphony of truth and of conviction that they believe what is called in the law "the truth of the matter asserted." The freedom of the modern democratic society as an enduring phenomenon is new in history. There are the prototypes of the Greek city states and of Rome and even of some primitive societies, but in historical retrospect these examples stand out as islands in a great stormy ocean of dictatorship and imperial rule. The free democratic English spirit ploughed its way through the ancient bulwarks of the royal prerogative and privileged nobility for centuries, but the English democracy we know was not apparent to our forbears in 1776. It was the spirit of the latter eighteenth century which drew on the deep wells of human aspiration and created an enduring free democratic society. The Russian Revolution of 1917 seemed for a brief historical moment to be in this great tradition. But the revolutionary principle of freedom was soon betrayed. It was replaced by a reactionary movement which has kept the various peoples of the Soviet Union in its grip for 30 years. The course of free democracy has gone on elsewhere and has grown in strength and in human appeal. In the Soviet Union it has been beaten into submission. Czarist Russia was symbolized by the whip which kept the serfs in subjection and by the bear which kept stretching out greedy arms with claws for more territory to satiate the imperialist urge. Soviet Russia has in reality the same symbols. The whip, the symbol of fear and the police state is identical. The claws of the bear are now the sickle which circles the hammer but there is the same imperialist drive. Poland was a victim to Czarist imperialism and is again a victim to Soviet imperialism. Czarist Russia stretched its greedy claws out to Port Arthur and Manchuria and rivaled Japan for control of Korea. Port Arthur is again a Russian base wrested from China. Manchuria, Mongolia, Sinkiang are being hacked away from China by the Communist imperialist sickle. And now again Korea. But in Korea the true revolutionary spirit of freedom, which has been kept alive all these decades in the free democratic world, has responded. In all Asia the yearning for relief from misery and oppression can best be met by the spirit of freedom. While the free spirit of Balts and Czeshs and Poles and Hungarians and others has been beaten into temporary bloody subjection by the hammer and sickle, the national freedom of the Filipinos, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Ceylonese, he Burmese, the Indonesians, the Indochinese, and at least some of the Koreans, has been realized. It has been realized because the free world has set those peoples free. Freedom is budding too in Africa where under the aegis of the United Nations and against Soviet opposition, independence is already being prepared for Libya and Somaliland. We are still the revolutionaries, we of the free world in the Americas, in Europe, in Africa, Asia, and the islands of the sea. With and among us there still burgeon the concepts of social justice and of tolerance. Meanwhile, the modern technological version of ancient tyranny still flourishes in the vast Russian domain. The revolutionary spirit of democracy first won its liberties by force of arms. It has had to turn from the plow and the machine time and again to keep its freedom from tyranny. But its greatest strength has been the universal appeal of its spirit. The revolutionary slogan of freedom still has the greatest power. The reactionaries, whether in the Kremlin or elsewhere, try to ride the tide of freedom by pretending to accept it. Like prior tyrants, the Politburo "struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more." His propaganda "is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." There are many parts of the Charter of the United Nations which the Soviet Union ignores. It cannot ignore the opening words of the Charter's preamble which begins, "We the peoples of the United Nations ** * *." The peoples of the Soviet Union and of the states now satellites still have the longing for freedom and that longing will some day be satisfied. It will be satisfied because the revolution of freedom still has the vitality of youth and is still on the march. [State Department Press Release No. 730, July 8, 1950] THE UNITED NATIONS AND KOREA HIGHLIGHTS OF ADDRESS BY HON. PHILIP C. JESSUP, AMBASSADOR AT LARGE, AT THE SEVENTEENTH SESSION OF THE INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA., JULY 10, 1950 The Communist-inspired attack on the Republic of Korea is the most bare-faced attack on the United Nations itself. An assault upon the United Nations headquarters at Lake Success could hardly have been more direct or more revealing. Of all the countries in the world none is more closely identified with the United Nations than the Republic of Korea. Despite the actions of the Soviet Union from March 20, 1946, to September 23, 1947, to prevent the establishment of Korea as a free and independent nation, the U. N. helped to set it up when the United States laid the case of Korea before the world organization. As could be expected world-wide Communist propaganda has tried to hide its aggression under a flood of lies. As Al Smith used to say, "let's look at the record." Fortunately, the record is crystal clear. There have been times in history when serious and conscientious scholars have debated the question, "Who started the war?" No serious or conscientious scholar can have any question here. The North Korean Communist forces attacked the Republic of Korea without warning, without provocation, without any justification whatsoever. It has never been more true than in this case that actions speak louder than words. Communist peace propaganda has sought to lull the peoples of the free world at the very moment when Communist imperialism was preparing and launching this war of aggression. Knowledge of the facts of the situation does not depend upon statements by the Korean Government nor upon statements by the Americans on the spot. The United Nations has a Commission in Korea. At the last meeting of the General Assembly this Commission was specifically authorized to have teams of observers to watch the thirty-eighth parallel, north of which the Communist forces were entrenched. This U. N. Commission is composed of representatives of the following countries: Australia, China, India, El Salvador, Turkey, the Philippines, and France. The Commission's team of observers had concluded an on-the-spot survey on June 24, barely 24 hours before the Communist forces attacked. Here is what these impartial U. N. representatives reported: "The principal impression left with observers after their field tour is that the South Korean Army is organized for defense and is in no condition to carry out an attack on a large scale against forces of the north * This impression was based on eight observations including the facts that "there is no concentration of (South Korean) troops and no massing for attack visible at any point." "At several points, North Korean forces are in effective possession of salients on south side parallel, occupation in at least one case being of fairly recent date. There is no evidence that South Korean forces have taken any steps for or making any preparation to eject North Korean forces from any of these salients * * * "So far as equipment of South Korean forces concerned, in absence of armour, air support, and heavy artillery, any action with object of invasion would, by any military standards, be impossible "In general, attitude of South Korean commander is one of vigilant defense. Their instructions do not go beyond retirement in case of attack upon previously prepared positions * * Immediately after the Communist forces of the north attacked and began their invasion of the Republic of Korea the United Nations Commission reported to the Security Council. The Commission reported as follows to Secretary-General Lie: "Commission met this morning 1000 hours and considered latest reports on hostilities and results direct observation along parallel by United Nations Commission on Korea military observers over period ending 48 hours before hostilities began. Commmission's present view on basis this evidence is first that judging from actual progress of operations northern regime is carrying out wellplanned concerted and full-scale invasion of South Korea, second that South Korean forces were deployed on wholly defensive basis in all sectors of the parallel, and, third, that they were taken completely by surprise as they had no |