Center for Labor Education & Research, University of Hawaii - West Oahu: Honolulu Record Digitization Project

Honolulu Record, Volume 10 No. 43, Thursday, May 22, 1958 p. 2

back  

World Events

Compromise or Chaos in France

Washington is maintaining a pregnant silence on today's crisis in France because the Department of State knows that as Prance goes, so will go NATO, the strategic keystone in Europe of the U.S. nuclear race with the Soviet Union.

Cause of the crisis is the militarized French colonial rule of 10 million Arabs in Algeria (four times the size of France). The Arabs started their present struggle for independence on May 8, 1945—the day World War II ended in Europe. Since 1945, France has freed five of its colonies—Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Tunisia (east of Algeria), and Morocco, to the west.

There are one million French civilians in Algeria which buys 13 per cent of all French exports and provides France with 7 per cent of her imports. France is depending more on Algerian oil and the use of Algeria as sites for nuclear and missile tests. Algeria is strategic to France in maintaining her colonial power.

To hold Algeria, France, often using made-in-USA arms, has slaughtered Arabs by tens of thousands since 1945. The attrition by torture has increased. Her 400,000 troops cost France $2 million daily. The Algerian Arabs have federated with the Arabs of Morocco and Tunisia—a grand total of 24 million nationalists.
Two weeks ago, a French military junta seized control in Algeria in defiance of Paris. The French Assembly closed ranks and gave the Pflimlin cabinet emergency powers with a postwar record majority vote of 461 to 114.

The present government is shaky. Within France, the government has 300,000 armed men, plus 280,000 hard-bitten riot troopers. If the military junta in Algeria rebels against Paris, it would be cut from the financial and logistic means essential to its grip. If Paris orders a military showdown with the junta, the Arabs would likely turn to President Gamal Nasser of the Egypt-Syria bloc or even to the Soviets for material aid.

World Health for Peace

Medical experts of the 88-nation World Health Organization of the United Nations will meet for their 10th annual conference in Minneapolis, Minn., on Monday, May 28.

WHO is not a supergovernment. It has no power to compel. It has organized International cooperation for war on disease because the health of all peoples is fundamental to the achievement of peace and security.

Of the world's 2,700,000,000 inhabitants, two out of three persons are under-nourished and hundreds of millions are stricken with malaria, roundworm, tuberculosis, yaws, trachoma, etc.

Today, WHO has a budget of only $131/2 million — the cost of a SAC intercontinental bomber — and 1,000 employes. Ten years ago it was just an idea.

U.S. Latin American Ties Tangled

FDR created the "Good Neighbor" policy with Latin America (20 republics; 170 million people). In 1943 Vice President Henry Wallace toured the same countries as did Vice President Nixon recently. "Viva Wallace" throngs swamped him and, in shirt sleeves and suspenders, he told them:

"If great fortunes for the privileged and misery and poverty for the people in general continue after the war, this sacrifice will have been in, vain."

Nixon represents the paternalistic Big Business era of Eisenhower. He experienced extreme hostility in Latin America where the majority except for the chosen few in cahoots with their U.S. counterparts, are ridden with poverty and misery. Anti-U.S. grudges run deep.

The Wall Street Journal says "to have sent Nixon into that maelstrom out of ignorance is not readily, excusable." It says the anti-U.S. resentments can be "diminished only by altering the things that cause them."

John Foster Dulles is scheduled to tour Latin America this summer.
Growing Pains in Indonesia

The civil war in Indonesia appears to be nearing its end. The Christian Science Monitor has said, "Western observers tempted to cast a stone at the slowness of Indonesia's progress toward national maturity might perhaps do well to remember the painstaking, often tragic course of their own countries' long efforts at nation-building."

The 85,000,000 people of Indonesia, former subjects of Dutch imperialism for centuries, possess islands rich in strategic raw materials (oil, rubber, tin, etc.). U. S. private interests have a $350 million stake in them.

President Sukarno has charged that "a few of our people who want wealth and power" caused the revolt.

p /> I do not say that at odd hours a patient must be given the regular hot dinner or supper. Few people would expect this.
 
But what is so complicated about opening and heating a can of soup, making some toast, or preparing instant coffee or tea? Why cannot a night nurse do these simple things after the kitchen to closed? Is it just too much trouble?

It is only common humanity to feed the hungry. If our hospitals are too big, too complex, too impersonal to do these small kindnesses for the sick, something is very wrong.