THE NOW £ NUGGET
Published Monday, Wednesday and Friday by The
NOME PUBLISHING CO.
Nome, Alaska
Telephone: Main 125 P. O. Box 618
W. A. and EMILY BOUCHER .. Editors
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Entered as second class matter October 14. 1943. at the postoffice
at Nome, Alaska, under the Act of March 3. 1379
Wednesday, March 10, 1948
Eyes Open In China
w
(By Barnet Nover)
SINCE V-J DAY, the United States has in one way or
another spent over 2.000 million dollars for the relief
and rehabilitation of China.
By no stretch of the imagination can it be argued that
this generous aid has had constructive results. The most
that can be said for it is without it China and the Chinese
peonle would be even worse off than they are today.
The fact remains that China today is in an utterly de
plorable state.
The Chinese budget is fantastically out of balance.
Receipts amount to no more than a fourth and possibly
no more than a fifth of expenditures, the balance being
made up by a steadily increasing flood of paper money.
Fully 80 per cent of the national government’s ex
penditures are being devoted to military purposes. Yet
despite that vast outlay and despite the great quantities
of equipment and munitions sent from the United States
the government forces are unable to hold their own in
Manchuria. It begins to look as if they will soon lose
their last precarious foothold in that rich and vital area.
President Truman has now proposed that Congress
appropriate 570 million dollars for new aid to China.
The careful statement that accompanied this request
makes it clear that the administration does not expect
this relife to perform any miracles.
The best that is hoped for is that through it “we can
assist in retarding the current economic deterioration
and thus give the Chinese government a further oppor
tunity to initiate the measures necessary to the estab
lishment of more stable economic conditions.”
In other words, the job of getting China back on her
feet is, as it always has been, a job which the Chinese
must primarily do themselves.
We cannot do it for them and nobody else can. Even
under the best of circumstances, as the American-owned
and edited Shanghai Evening Post pointed out recently,
“helping China is just about the hardest, thorniest job
on earth today.”
The question arises whether, in view of all that has
happened, the more than 500 million dollars the admin
istration now asks Congress to appropriate on China’s
behalf will not simply go down the drain as the 2,000
million dollars that preceded it did in large part?
Many Americans feel inclined to answer that ques
tion in the affirmative. They feel that no good purpose
can be served in aiding China unless and until Chiang
cleans house thoroughly, which he has so far shown
himself incapable of doing or perhaps unwilling to do.
This understandable attitude ignores one very impor
tan point, however. It ignores the fact that we cannot
wash our hands of China, treat her as though she did not
exist or wait until, with the glacial slowness that char
acterizes China’s evolution, honest government, a dem
ocratic system, an incorruptible bureaucracy, an effi
cient army arise in that land.
Our present global commitments and the fact that the
most important battleground of the “cold war’- today in
Europe, make it impossible for us to do all that is neces
sary in China to prevent her collapse and with it the ex
tension of Soviet power over a vast new area of Asia.
On the other hand, regardless of the difficulties, re
gardless of the wastes inevitably involved in the effort,
we must do what we can to help China. Yet we cannot
for a moment relax our efforts to get the Chinese them
selves to help themselves.
It was thus no coincidence that almost simultaneously
with President Truman’s message to Congress on China
aid, Ambassador Leighton Stuart, at Nanking, spoke
with undiplomatic bluntness of the need for the elimina
tion of corrupt and incompetent elements in the Nation
^^^^WELL, WHAT D*YA KNOW t
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al government.
No amount of American material assistance or skilled
American technical advisers, he said, could bring politi
cal stability and economic recovery to China.
We are, this time, going into our latest venture in
China relief with our eyes wide open.
Stalin Turns The Screws
(By Jack Foster)
IN ALL EASTERN EUROPE, the only remnants of
democracy are in Finland and Czechoslovakia, and Sta
lin is now completing the police-state slavery of the
Czechs.
Only a political miracle can save the few forms of free
dom which President Benes has managed to maintain.
That miracle would have to come from the people
themselves. They have the spirit and the character. But
how can they register their will when the Communist
minority controls the army, the police, the trade unions,
the nationalized key industries and the radio? And the
Reds are now strangling the non-Communist press.
The only thing new about the Stalinist enslavement
of Czechoslovakia is the tempo. The step-by-step tech
nique of capturing first one and then another of the na
tion’s controlling agencies has been the same as in all
of the other Eastern European countries.
Only the process has been slower here, because this
was the most democratic of all states in the Soviet
sphere and had in Benes the ablest leader.
Geography doomed Czech democracy.
Just as it could not stand in isolation against its
mighty totalitarian German neighbor, so after Hitler’s
i defeat it could not escape its even mightier totalitarian
Russian neighbor. But the insidious Soviet conquest is
harder to take because the Russians are Slavic brothers,
who posed as liberators.
Stalin has decided to complete the nine-tenths dic
| tatorship, which hitherto has served his purpose under
I a nominal all-party coalition in which Reds held the
I premiership and other key posts, because of both local
i and international conditions. i
Czechs, with their Western civilization and trade ties,
;are restive under the Stalin division of Europe, which
| completes their dependence on Russia in peace or war.
j And that restiveness is likely to show in the spring elec
tions, reducing the Red minority, unless Stalin can rig
the results by his usual terrorist police-state methods.
Theoretically, Benes could eliminate the Red minor
ity from the government and reorganize a coalition ma
jority cabinet of the non-Communist parties.
That would make Stalin take over by open military
; coup. But Benes, unwilling to precipitate civil war and
possibly armed invasion, insists on continuing an all
! party cabinet headed by the Reds.
However dark the immediate future for that country,
| we have faith that the democratic Czech people some
, day will find ways to reassert their freedom. Hitler could
; not kill their spirit, and we do not think Stalin can.
Thales That
By BRUCE GUSTIN
A “Zeal for American Democ
racy” campaign has been launched
by the U. S. office of education.
That is the government’s answ r
to the drive started by Commun
ists to recruit children in this
country to their ideology. If the
schools and colleges of this coun
try hadn’t fallen down on the .iob
of teaching the Declaration of In
dependence, the Constitution and 4
the Bill of Rights, the Communists
wouldn’t have a chance of gett’nr*
converts among American ■••m h.
Recently, Father James Keller,
founder of the Christophers, an
nounced that a nationwide survey
shows only eight states—Califor
nia, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jer
sey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania,
Virginia and Wisconsin — have
laws requiring their schools to
teach the Declaration of Independ
ence. This is a shocking situation.
The Declaration of Independence,
the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights should be required teach
ing in every American school.
The government crisis in Czecho
s’ovakia is another example of the
curse of too many political parties.
It was precipitated by Communist
attempts to dominate the coalition
government in which seven parties
were represented. Under a two
party system, such as we have in
the United States, there wouldn’t
have been a coalition government.
But when the anti-Communists
are solit among a half dozen oar
ties, that gives a minority Com
munist party which happens to be
the strongest party a chance to
hog more power than it is entitled
to have.
It may be, as Congressman
Chenoweth of Colorado says that
many who favor compulsory mili
tary training are opposed to the
bill which the house rules commit
tee has bottled up. But that does
not excuse the committee policy ^
of sitting on the bill. If the mea
sure were reported out, the House
could go to work on it, do what
ever revising is necessary or de
sirable, and adopt or reject the 4
amended bill. Then the people,
when they go to the polls next No
vember could say whether they
approve the action taken by their
representatives. Bottling up this
universal military training bill in
committee is political cowardice.
Public school expenditures per ^
pupil in the United States increas
ed 66 per cent—from $60 to $99—
from 1940 to 1947 but, according
to a study by the Institute of Ad
ministrative Research of Teachers
College, Columbia University they
should have gone up 86 per cent to
hold their own in the economic
market. Tax spenders don’t worry
about what has happened to the
ability-to-pay of taxpayers who
foot the school bills.
A sub-committee of the House
un-American activities committee
is wrestling with the problem of
how to cope with Communist ac
tivities in the United States. As n
practical matter, communism can
not be outlawed. But two specific
proposals have been made for
dealing with this menace and both
merit serious consideration. One is
to deny Communists political
party status and the other is to re
quire them to register as agents of
a foreign principal.
The so-called Communist party
in the United States is not a po
litical party in the American
sense. As Congressman Nixon of
California, chairman of the House
sub-committee has declared, “it is
indeed a revolutionary conspiracy, «
Moscow-inspired and Moscow-di
rected. It is conspiring with Com
munist parties of every country in