Detroit evening times. (Detroit, Mich) 1921-1958, 1944-05-18

Sudetenland was IN the balance! Or DanZlg!
You liberals were not especially concerned
with the historical and chronological claims in the
matter. You knew only that you did not wish
few million more human beings SWALLOWED
UP BY THE HE'LL OF HITLERISM.
WHEN Germany and Austria were still democ-
w racies, you may remember, you saw the justice
of tariff union or even "anschluss" between
them But when the Nazis took over, you opposed
any such union.
The LOCALITIES were no different the economic
facts were no different, but now you were anxious
to spare the Austrian people the ordeal of totali-
tartan oppression.
But curiously, you CEASE TO THINK OR
TO FEEL in these fundamental human terms
when Russia and Russian policies are under con-
sderation. You have recourse to every manner of
forensic SOphisty
You suddenly blossom out as ethnoogists, his
tOrianS, international lawyers.
Most amazing of all, you suddenly become
mysticaly enamored of power as such in the
fumblings and uncertainties of the democraces
you discover perverse excuse for the ''dynamics"
of dictatorship,
There are those who believe that the confusion
OF France somehow justifies the streamlined
horror of Hitersm-but they do not call them
selves liberals"
l
does happen to be in the very center Of human
affairs. 1t is focal in our thinking.
For great many years that country has been
the tombstone of the sincerity of your liberal views
mean that If you shorUed yourself .villing to
countenonce and eUen applaud in Russia the Uery
crimes you denounced elsewhere, you re-
Uedled yourself just totalitarion of another
stripe who used Liberal lingo by woy of co"ouflage
mean that if you denounced the 'imperalist"
war before Russia was in it and approved it there
after you showed yourself up as the dupe Of
foreign dictatorship, whatever your liberal
naturalization.
Russia is still the test.
DERHAPS hundred million human beings in
L eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic,
nurture the hope that liberation from the Naz
yoke will give them chance to obtain some
measure of DEMOCRATIC FREEDOM.
They are Poles, Let's, Firms, White Russians,
Balkan Slavs, Ukrainians, Lithuanians.
They have no more desire for subsection to
the RUSSIAN VARIANT of the TOTALITARIAN
POLICE-STATE than the Austrians or Czechs or
Sudeten Germans had for the GERMAN VARI-
ANT
Among them no doubt there are some who
banker for the Soviet brand of tyranny, just as
there were some in Austria who yearned for Nazi
chains.
But the great mass of these peoples want the
right to determine their own political future within
some framework that makes freedom AT LEAST
A POSSIBILITY.
Especially those among them who did not
approve or support their own prewar government
want that chance for freedom and reform as
reward for suffering and sacriice-a chance which
would be stamped out under domination of die
tatorship of any political color.
ONE would suppose that you liberals would un-
" derstand and sympathize with these millions.
Even if their hope is romantic in it's optimism,
even if their chance Of escaping Soviet domination
is slight, you might be expected to give them the
benefit of your moral support
But instead you seem more eager than all the
rest to push those hundred million human beings
into the Soviet stockade.
From what the Soviet regime has done to its