On the Brink of Disaster

1958 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — SENATE 16319 decades prided itself on Its revolutionary tradition, on lis willingness to experiment, to abandon the outworn traditions of a bygone age and move on to new horizons. We Americans conceived of our civilization as a movement not as a condition, as it voyage not as a harbor, as one noted historian put it. But today, ibis dynamic Nation is shrinking in the eyes of the world from the spectre of revolution. Here is this Nation appearing before the world as an obstacle to change at the very time when the world is in a ferment of cataclysmic change. I do not ascribe this particular weakness in our position to the present administration I suspect the roots of this fearful clinging to the status quo go back at least to the time of the collapse of Nationalist China. There is a popular concept in this country, Mr. president, that the chief trouble with our policies with respect to China was that we failed to give sufficient military and oilier aid in sufficient time; in effect, that we did not become sufficiently Involved with the Nationalist Government to sustain it. I am afraid that the opposite may be the case that in an urge to maintain the status quo in China we gave too much find became too deeply involved with a government which bad failed to meet the demands of its people for change. Those tragic events in China seem to have set a rigid pattern which has been followed (almost un brokenly ever since. Too often when peoples elsewhere have sought to assert their God-given rights against an intolerable status quo, we have appeared to be on the side of those who opposed the assertion of these rights. Too often, we have found ourselves aligned against those who would strike at tyranny or corruption. We have found ourselves aligned with landlords who have exploited tillers of the soil and with militarists who have kept the people in line. Look through the sorry record of the past 10 years. What does it show? It shows aid extended indiscriminately to governments which .serve the ...