EUROPE: Anti-Auto-Anti

Sean O’Faolain, famed Irish short-story writer, novelist (A Nest of Simple Folk) and biographer (A Life of Daniel O’Connell), loosed a blistering attack on Autoantiamericanism, a word of his own construction. Writing in the Irish monthly The Bell, he was addressing himself chiefly to his own countrymen, but his message would make interesting reading for a lot of other “auto-antis.” Excerpts:

“What are the sources, motives or unconscious origins of Anti-Americanism? First I would put British influences . . . [like] The New Statesman. [It is] the British Bible of every washed-up Liberal, soured Conservative, lapsed Catholic, half-baked grammar school intellectual, the new technical school boys whose knowing twang you hear on every bus, every manic-depressive Orwellite, fissurated Koestlerite, prehistoric Fabian, antique Keir Hardyite, flaming anti-Roman Catholic, like . . . the editor himself, Mr. Kingsley Martin, and every other unhappy misfit, pink and pacifist, whose sole prophylactic against despair, if not suicide, is a weekly injection of Kingsley Martin’s Bottled Bellyache . . .”

About ECA. “Unbelief has been creeping slowly over us all for a hundred and fifty years . .. Marxist rationalist dialectic . . . has further infected every one of us.

“There are many who, if they saw a rich man giving sixpence to a blind man, would at once explain it in terms of economic self-interest . . . Some sceptic [may ask], ‘Ha, ha! but what is the U.S.A. getting out of it? … He would look for the catch rather than for the faith. I will tell you what the U.S.A. is putting into it . . . Marshall Aid to the end of 1950 has cost every crude, rude, grasping, vulgar, selfish, racketeering American fifteen shillings ($2.10) a week out of his back pocket.

“[But] the auto-anti cries, ‘The Yanks cannot be doing all this for nothing. [They] organized the Marshall Plan to sell their own goods over here . . .’ Perhaps we had better have a few cold figures. The gross National Productivity of the U.S. in 1948 [at the start of ECA] . . . was about $262 billions. [The world] took from her 5% of her total products . . . Last year she produced $278 billions. The world took only 3.6% of her total products … If the Marshall Plan was invented to sell America’s goods abroad, it has been a total wash-out.”*

Decision or Dither. “[Some] people fear that their country may be ‘Americanised,’ and ‘entangled in America’s international policy, and perhaps used for her particular purpose in the event of another war.’ … I, for one, do not want to see Ireland Americanised, or Anglicised, or Gallicised . . . least of all Russianised.

“I think our auto-anti is by this time digging himself madly into a foxhole, over the edge of which he screams, ‘I don’t want to be pushed about by America. I don’t want to be dragged by America into a line-up against Communism!’ The answer to that is simple. ‘Why not do it of your own free will? Because you do want to take that position anyway, do you? Or don’t you? … In a global war between Communism and democracy (or, again, call it Capitalism, if you will), any country that could usefully take sides and does not, will thereby, in fact, take sides. Nobody is free to dither indefinitely .. .”

* ECA suspended aid to Ireland last week because the country no longer needs “outside dollar assistance.” Ireland’s share of ECA assistance: $146.2 million (most of it repayable).