CANADA: Parallel Lines

Readers of Montreal’s French-language daily Le Devoir, an ultra-nationalist newspaper closely associated with the Roman Catholic Church, have been getting some odd slants on the Korean war in the last two weeks. Samples:

¶ “Here [in Korea], as in Formosa, Indo-China and elsewhere in Asia, the West is defending a lost cause.”

¶”MacArthur hoists the blue flag of the United Nations … so that we can feel we are engaged in a new holy war. [But] we are not bound by the errors, the foolishness and the criminal blunders of the [U.S.] State Department.”

¶”The appetites of the Western powers are as dangerous as Russia to world peace.”

¶U.S. war correspondents in Korea “drink too much [and] for the most part are incapable of a serious thought even when sober. These likable but stupid Americans send their articles to the newspapers which pay them. Their opinions on the Korean situation will form the opinions of millions. It is disgusting.”

Le Devoir’s strange opinions were supplied by a young (26) French Canadian writer named Jacques Hebert who set out on a round-the-world junket last June with an arrangement to send Le Devoir some travelogue pieces from faraway places. He reached Japan soon after the Korean fighting began, managed to get himself accredited as a war correspondent, and launched gaily into political punditry. Hebert is a Catholic and an antiCommunist; apparently his French Canadian isolationist-pacifist sentiments led him into echoing the Communist appeasement line on Korea almost as faithfully as though he were writing for Pravda.

From Korea Hebert returned to Japan, where he wrote a piece on the atomic bomb damage at Nagasaki. This week he was in Manila, awaiting permission to enter Indo-China. Le Devoir intended to go right on front-paging his reports.