THE VOICE OF AMERICA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 632, 10 August 1951, Page 5

THE VOICE OF AMERICA

Sir,-To me, 4 veteran observer of the international scene, your fulsome praise of the United States’ ,conception of freedom appears to-be' about fifty years too late to be convincing or to portray. any approaching actuality. In my. youth, having been taught to revere every thing American as the epitome of liberty and equality, I should probably have actepted all you have written as a_ wellearned eulogy; but my reading, observation and thinking over the past two decades have caused me to revise my opinions. To begin with the much-lauded Declaration of Independence, how far from the noble ideals entinciated therein is the general. operation of the law jin America! One is led to the comment"Yes, liberty and equality for all except those. outside the racial and. political pale." A notable exclusion from the names of great founders of America in ‘all references to events leading up to the famous declaration is that of Thomas Paine, the Englishman who poured out talents and courage and risked his life and liberty to give the infant democracy a foundation of freedom and human justice. To come nearer our own, day with its fear and fury would you, for instance, expect Jane Adams, once acclaimed as America’s greatest citizen and retipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, who: in her efforts against racial and political wrongs was often obstructed and frustrated in the land of her distinguished forbears, to agree with you? Or Paul Robeson, grandson of a slave, who has risen to international esteem, and yet-even before he tasted the full bitterness of political discrimination had sent his son to live in the U.S.S.R., the only country, as he pointed out, where a coloured child could grow free from indignities and deprivation -of human rights? . Recent manipulations of the United Nations Organisation in the interests of merican foreign policy have so lowered le prestige of that institution as to make its name a by-word among the peoples of the world. Is this to be dismissed as a mere "symptom of extravagance- or folly’-just a minor délinquency on the part of the "country committed to leadership in the western

world?"

M. B.

SOLJAK

(Auckland)

(Abridged. Ed. )