Page 4 — PA. Features, November 11

Foibles,
Fancies
And Facts

ltchy-headed Bracken

“Uneasy lies the head that
wears the crown, but un-
easier is the head itching
to get wearing it, and Brac-
ken for all his fine talk is
proving no exception. He
is the pilot fish for the Tory
sharks who want to seize

political office and are en—

trenching themselves in the
Ontario rural ridings.’”? —
Alfred ©: Campbell, on
John Bracken, in the Ca-
nadian Tribune.)

High Adventure in
London’s Financial
Center

_ Sir George has described
the City as a place of ad-
venture but it has hardly
adventured anything in the
last 300 years except its
money—and the money was
usually somebody else’s.’7_
(DON, Bette, KC, WOS.,
the British House of Com-
mons. )

e

Same “Liberals’’ Who
Worry About the “Poor
Germans,” and shiver

At the Word Teheran

“But it is hard for a lib-
eral to feel very enthusiastic
about four years more of
Roosevelt in the White
House, except that this
saves the country from some-
thing worse.”——(From an
editorial “Roosevelt ys.
Dewey” in the CCF Canad-
ian Forum.)

Answer to the
Termites

“Critics of the Dumbar-
ton Oaks plan attack it as
equivalent to a ‘dictatorship
of the Great Powers.’ This
criticism is blind folly or de-
liberate mischief making.
Under modern world condi-
tions decisive: power rests
overwhelmingly with the
ptincipal Great Powers, and
especially the United States,
the Soviet Unien and Bri-
tain, which alone can fully.
sustain modern war. No
constitutional machinery
can change these realities of
power. The question is
whether these decisive Great
Powers shall use _ their
strength in combination to
maintain world peace or in
mutual opposition to pro-

mote world war. The form-
er is the interest of all na-
tions. This is the key to the
Dumbarton Oaks plan.’
(R. Palme Dutt in the Lon-
don Daily Worker.)

M=161

UNIG-—OVW!

= J

“DON'T TELL ME, ANOTHER VICTORIOUS RETREAT”

Continued from Page 1

Home by Way of Berlin

thur called at the house and
left with the potatoes—and
Maria. A few months later,
they were married. As Arthur
had no parents, and no home to
take Maria to, he went to live
with her in the country where
they live to this day.

It’s “~been a hard. time for
them and Maria is looking for-
ward to normal times when she
will be “able to buy a baby.”
But Arthur assures me that she
never complains or grouses.

Between the four of them,
somehow or other ,they man-
aged to get by. Arthur com-
muted to the city to work at
his trade and the father, for-
merly a factory worker toiled
in a patron’s field. Maria and
the mother did the housework
and looked after the small store
in the front room of the house.

Even when sickness came,
first to Maria and then to Ar-
thur, they never lost hope. ’De-
vout Catholics, they believed in
our arrival as implicitly as they
believed in the resurrection.
Secretly they mocked the de-
spised Germans, but the full
measure of their contempt was
reserved for the Belgians who
voluntarily took service with
the Germans, as members of
the Gestapo, S.S., Todt Organi-
zation, German Red Cross and
other such organizations.

It was a good lesson in na-

tional unity for me to listen
to Arthur as he told us how
the Germans sought to sow
dissention and turn one part
of Belgium against the other.
To begin with, all Flemish
priseners of war were re-
leased soon after the capitu-
lation, except for known anti-
fascists and political sus-
pects. In Flemish Belgium, a
vast propaganda’ machine
went to work en the “simple
Flemishmen” to win them
over to Germany as members
of the Aryan family of
Adolph Hitler, to be incor-
porated into the German
State, willingly or otherwise,
forever.

In Walloon Belgium, clever
German agents, seeking to sow
disruption and discredit the na-
tion wide resistance movement,
insinuated that all Walloons
were pro-Germans. To prove
this statement they would say
“Why were all Flemish prison-
ers released and the Walloons
kept in Germany?

The Walloons, French by
language, culture and proximi-
ty to France, did not love the
Germans any more for this
treachery, or cease their ef-
forts to undermine the German
control.

All four members of the
family seemed out of patience
with the Belgian government
on three scores:

1. For not taking effective
action against the black mar-
ket.

2. For being too’ tolerant
with certain fair-weather pa-
triots.

3. For not decreeing a gen-
eral mobilization, so that Bel-
gian men could help in the free-
ing of their own country, and
in delivering the K.Q. to Ger-
many.

There in this peasant home,

where my picture and those of

my wife and two children have
a place of honor, I am a mem-
ber of the family.

As we sat and talked I real-
ized that the word “Ganada”
on my shoulder badges spelt
“liberation to these people as
it has done and will for, mil-
lions of other Europeans.

Its been a long, lonely road
these last three years, but when
I sit down in peace and quiet
with such a family, all linger-
ing regrets vanish -with the
wind.

The greatest commodity in
the world is freedom. It can
be had for«the taking, but
never for the buying. Let one
man lose or sell his share of
freedom and all other men
are in danger. Let Belgium
be over-run again, and Cana-
dian blood will be shed in
Europe.

. written somewhat in the “Middle-town”’

Book Review |
I See a New China :
by George Hogg, Little Brown and Compa;

China Enters the Machine Age
by Kuo-Heng Shih, Haryard University Press, $2.1

Reviewed by DAVID RICHARDSON in the-New York Worker

(poms of these books are sturdily optimistic about Ghing
future.

George Hoge is a young Englishman who went out to China ;

a journalist and stayed to become an ardent worker for Induse

the Chinese Industrial Co-operatives, with its slogan of “@ur

Ho” (“Work Together”) that has found its way around the worl
Hogg relates his personal experiences as a worker for Induco: #
feats of guerrilla cooperatives behind Japanese lines; the: dey,
tion of men like the New Zealander, Rewi Alley, to China’s caus:
the bureaucratic attempts by Chungking officials to stifle the c
op movement and frighten the people from it by labelling it ‘Red,

His book gives one an intimate picture of conditions among th
common people of China in the North and Northwest—in suc
provinces as Shansi, Shensi, Honan, and little-known Kansu. si
is not a great book, but one told simply, replete with heart-warm
ing incidents, and permeated with a deep faith in China’s ordinar:
people “who would remain and rebuild whatever complicate:
muddle the round-cheeked shiny-eyelidded bureaucracy got itsel
into.” Hogg gives vivid pictures of life im co-op centers Hk
Paochi, Lanchow, and Sian, as -well as in unnamed villages fa
behind the Japanese lines where Indusco stoutly continues to fune
tion and where the guerrilla forces fight. Indeed, he asserts in -
revealing phrase that “the people of the~‘Qccupied’ North seeme,
im many ways more patriotic than those of the free Southwest.
And this patriotism above all characterizes those regions when
the 8th Route Army is educating the masses as well as mobilizing
them in the strugele against Japan. d

Perhaps Hoge is over-optimistic as to the role of the co-opera
tive in post-war China, in view of the relatively “low efficienc:
and high cost of production in small-scale production.”- But hi
enthusisam for Indusco is understandable. And the really majo:
theme of his volume is his belief in the “basic unity’ of all Chi
nese who place “comradeship and equality” in the national caus:
above everything else.

The second-named book, by contrast, is a sober study by <
Chinese social scientist. Based on sociological field work an
tradition, it is addressec
more to the specialist than the general reader. _ Taking a factory
in Kunming (Yunnan Provinee) as his object of analysis, the au
thor makes a detailed study of wages, working conditions, atti
tudes, regional characteristics, and aspirations of the workers in
volved. To arrive at his conclusions, the author lived and worke:
shoulder-to-shoulder with these factory workers. ;

The title is something of a misnomer, not only because it doe:
not accurately reflect the subject-matter of the book, but mon
important still, because it implies a China much further along thi
road to industrialization than is unfortunately at present the case.
Vast potentialities for an industrialized China do indeed lie ahead:
but so long as China’s land problem—her semi-feudal agrariai
base—remains unsolved, just so long will all plans for Chinese in-
dustrialization, however elaborate or well-intentioned, be based or
shifting sands.

SS
REY,

sretetetetetes

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