The Noticing (October 1948)
[Der Weg 1948-10] An original translation of "Die Rundschau"
Title: The Noticing [de: Die Rundschau]
Author: The Noticer
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 02, Issue 10 (October 1948)
Page(s): 743-751
Dan Rouse’s Note(s):
Der Weg - El Sendero is a German and Spanish language magazine published by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos-Aires, Argentina by Germans with connections to the defeated Third Reich.
Der Weg ran monthly issues from 1947 to 1957, with official sanction from Juan Perón’s Government until his overthrow in September 1955.
Source Document(s):
[LINK] Scans of 1948 Der Weg Issues (archive.org)
The Noticing
A delegate in the old German Reichstag once dubbed a government plan “a stillborn child lost in the sand.” That grotesque image springs to mind, unbidden, when you watch the negotiations over the Berlin Crisis unfold. With no real reason to hope for a solid outcome, the peacemakers’ talks trickled on—from Moscow to Berlin, Berlin back to Moscow—until their flourishing futility was drowned out, mercifully, by the UN’s loud roar. Here, in the General Assembly, heir to the League of Nations’ proud legacy, they thresh heaps of empty straw; problems get talked to death, left unsolved, piling up as a catch-basin for the world’s political rubble. In this desert, every fragile flower of hope that had bloomed along the way just seeps away. It’s the perfect place to dodge responsibility: after a parade of grand speeches, you can slip back into innocence. That’s the perk of this global show—phrases alone, tossed out for the audience, for world opinion, sidestep the issue entirely, while secret talks too often force the cards onto the table. The world may not hear more truth than what leaks from those hidden dealings, but it can still piece together, roughly, where its chosen leaders are nudging it.
The negotiators’ skill and patience couldn’t crack the Berlin problem, but they stretched it out long enough for growing numbness and apathy to barely notice it sinking into the stew of international politics. The row over Italy’s colonies met a similar end; the Palestine question, too, stepped through a gate that ought to read: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
Right from the start, the UN has had to stomach complaints and bitter jabs: nations line up at the front door begging to get in, while others rattle the back, itching to bolt at the first chance. The British press senses the Soviets might quit these sacred halls—where pleading prayers outshout reason—and South Africa’s already dropping hints, not of the UN’s growth, but its wilt. Sure, the organization’s got its die-hard fans: those it serves want it stronger; those scared of chaos can’t let it go. Yet this supranational outfit lacks the bedrock it needs—a mental platform solid enough to build a new world order on. The shadowboxing at international conferences, all that empty chatter about peace, freedom, democracy, and human rights, clashes too loudly with what’s really happening out there. The gap between words and facts is too wide for plain sense to span. You might think the UN’s assemblies are a bunch of preachers lost in the desert—except you know they’re just reading scripts, and the honest reformer’s pure heart isn’t their style. They’re not here for true goodwill; they’re envoys of power plays, kin to those who turn their backs on peace’s temple, jabbering about rearmament, atom bombs, threats, and counterthreats.
Take Truman, sealing the Moscow “Peace Conference”’s fate in March 1947 before a word was even said; or Moscow, that October, torpedoing the upcoming London Foreign Ministers’ Conference with the Cominform’s launch. You see the same double game now: in Paris, UN saints trumpet peace with mighty lungs, each flicking the ashes of dead hopes onto the next guy’s coat, while Britain’s Parliament thunders with a drumroll calling to arms. One of these feels off. If you want peace and swear good faith to the world, leave the war drums home—even if you can juggle preachers and drummers in separate rings. If war’s your aim (didn’t Nuremberg prove rearmament means planning aggression?), why sprinkle sand in the world’s eyes? Are they scared of the masses rebelling—hounded across battlefields a third time in one lifetime for the same unreachable “ideals,” only to sleep forever under a blanket of bombs?
What a mess of muddled ideas, what mental chaos swirls in the jumbled heap of international politics. You could sketch it all out with math-like precision, every clashing piece in the uproar, but expect more scowls than nods. Better to let those beyond good and evil—propped up by political might—do the talking.
“It’s become tradition,” Soviet delegate Vyshinsky told his elite crew at this year’s UN General Assembly, “to sketch the global scene at each session’s start.” He didn’t mean a true picture, though. Maybe truth’s tyranny doesn’t fit a free society—or maybe it’s just habit now—but every UN power’s rep mixes their own colors to win favor. Everyone knows who the Kremlin calls the warmonger, and who Washington curses in return. No global debate will ever settle this noble duel, let alone soothe it; only Nuremberg-style justice can punish the loser as guilty. But those judges wait for a body on the ground—and war’s the road there. Until then, the world can rack its brains: how did conquest, expansion, war prep, oppression, and peace threats—plain as day in today’s politics—worm into the once-glowing ranks of the good and peaceful, the brotherhood of harmony-loving nations? Did they sneak into the Soviet people’s chest—those heroic foes of criminal invasion, saviors of civilization, free of greed—or, shudder to think, taint the heart of model democracies? If these rogue elements, unfit for the UN’s promised new order dreamed up in San Francisco, lurked as secret doubts in the crusaders’ souls as they waved the pure flag against evil, then the goal was a lie from day one, and humanity’s been lured into a swamp by a false light. If they crept in later, after the win, when the Grail’s blessings were meant for all, then the aim’s been sold out—and the duped world can hunt for culprits. Either way, it won’t dodge the bitter truth: in politics, stupidity’s the deadliest sin, repaid in blood.
A fooled humanity will look to the UN in vain. This year’s meeting proves it again: it’s a ring for powers scrapping over top spot, not a voice for justice’s cry, not a court to set truth, judge right, or punish wrong. History alone—judge and executioner, world history as world court—still holds its throne. It’ll speak, Nuremberg or not.
The Paris showcase of fancy speeches doesn’t carry the weight the UN’s supposed goals demand, and Vyshinsky’s big accusation doesn’t mirror the world straight. But you can’t say he’s lying about the war fever across the ocean. The twist is in the half-truth—a trick the Kremlin’s lawyer doesn’t own alone. It’s standard to spot the speck in your brother’s eye and skip the plank in yours; only here, it’s planks on both sides. Vyshinsky’s laundry list of gripes isn’t overblown—arms, bases worldwide, talk of a USA-Soviet war path. Read the U.S. press, steered tight in war or “peace,” and you can’t just wave his claims away. That the Soviet Union doesn’t air this stuff the same doesn’t mean the Kremlin’s blind to it—or slaving away in honest toil for a workers’ paradise and stable people’s democracies. To figure out Moscow’s lambs, black or white, we’d need Marshall’s lessons. Weigh his pleas like the Soviet prosecutor’s charges, and you’ll see the full global picture—not the calm of Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead, but a Medusa’s head staring back.
Soviet rule—hardly new since Marshall—can’t pass as dawn for a better tomorrow. Nor can Stalin’s mouthpiece’s loud “cult of the atom bomb,” a weapon meant, he said, for mass civilian slaughter and city ruin, win humanity as a new creed. The Anglo-Saxons’ cold, casual brutality in fight—shown in every English war—shone clear in Albion’s heirs in World War II, matching Asian callousness and scorn for life and values inch for inch.
Communism’s expansionist streak, locked in since Lenin, stayed fierce through isolation, League of Nations days, wartime pacts with capitalism’s archfoe, and UN stints—its world-religion aggression unchanged. Over in North America, a Dewey win brings a fresh twist: the Republicans’ Grand Old Party back in charge, their imperial glory days flagged by Fortune years back with eerie foresight. If capital’s backlash, after the New Deal’s long run, grabs the wheel, global politics will lurch a way we’ve been warned about—think of that general in the State Department.
Dewey’s itching to crush communism at home; Truman, who once vowed a world fight, now shrinks the red scare inside borders—though experts just flagged Soviet wartime spying as busy and slick, unlike the enemy’s near-nil underground work.
It’s easy to tie this shift to Vansittart in Britain’s House of Lords, where peace weighs as heavy on him as on Churchill, silent and tense. Vansittart’s pushing a propaganda mill against the Soviets now. Anyone who gets the press’s sway on nations quakes at official oil on these smoldering coals. We’ve no record of the world press ever rooting for peace; Vansittart, with his long haul, knows how to fan danger’s glow into war’s blaze. What else but traded barbs could this press buildup sell? Moscow’s nabbed democratic lingo with skill, and the West’s stuck fending off “fascism” jabs. A September 24 Moscow broadcast on the UN sounds like the other side’s playbook—swap the angle, and Washington could’ve said it; whole chunks of Vyshinsky’s General Assembly rant could’ve come from Marshall.
How do you explain this oddity? Only by admitting the ideological clash has run dry: one imperialism butts against another, power claims lock horns, and empty talk hides real aims. We’re heading for clarity—not the good kind.
The democratic world can’t wield the same wordy weapons anymore; the Soviet Union’s swiped them clean. In war years, democracies handed Moscow planes, tanks, raw goods, and food via Lend-Lease—then the Kremlin raided their idea stash too, unasked. No turning back. Echoing Moscow’s airwaves now is a dud for the robbed; echoes don’t beat punchy slogans. Democracy’s old take suits bookish professors more than crowds—Moscow’s fanfare blasts those tunes sharper, straight to the masses no propaganda can skip today. Logic stirs scholars; fanatic faith moves people. Philosophers chase pure truth; the folk chase raw, pulsing life.
Moscow’s old, wild expansion—Siberia and Central Asia swallowed in mere decades—leans hard on communism’s political zeal, while the other side bends, lacking that steel core. See how the “fight fascism” cry (Ingrim, Foreign Policy under False Concepts) armed communism? England never flinched at Greece’s dictator-kings; Turkey’s held up, though shy of democracy’s gold standard. The U.S. woke up late in China, learning mass-made politics don’t fit every oddball or make them glad. Green as they were, they made Chiang Kai-shek—meant to fend off red bites—nurse that viper for democracy’s sake, though he’d booted communist Borodin in ’27 and fought communism 21 years, a war tied to China’s stand against Soviet sprawl in Asia, now flooding China (Jinan’s fall) and reaching Indochina, Burma, Siam, Indonesia (East Java’s revolt and rule).
That same folly had Eastern Europe’s leaders, drunk on “liberation,” clasp communism—and risk their necks. The sweet naive—Petkov, Nagy, more—took the road of exile, deportation, jail, firing squad; all dead, body or career, with Washington’s nod. Insight cost dear. Some “heads” fled abroad, but who aids the collectivized peasant now? Rootless, broken masses are communism’s soil—why a wrecked, poor, bullied Germany’s a red seedbed!—but the rooted farmer’s a wall against it, powerless in this factory world, even in the East, where Moscow shrewdly pushes industry.
Banning communism now, even its “national” party masks, is a late shield from past blunders. Did they miss its nature, or have to? That’s on guilt and duty—but a shift’s here, prelude to rethinking plenty. Truth can’t be bent forever; like spring water, it bursts to light. A system’s self-defense banning upheaval finds cause in state need, but it jars with pure democratic freedom—why the U.S. dawdled facing communism at home and in its wards. A cornered system borrowing the foe’s weapons risks an avalanche it can’t stop.
A Republican win in the U.S. proves we haven’t grasped moving with time. Doubling down on stiff pushback to the new doesn’t steel defense; it nears violent clash, spotlighting the power scrum of states, bearers of clashing creeds spanning lands and seas. These fights, sparked by World War I, carry this split soul, unresolved still.
Political-economic edge with a shaky creed—maybe the U.S. versus the Soviets today—can smash a foe in battle, topple its state, but not win the mind war. The rift lingers, pushing for answers; every reaction’s victory fades fast, little gain for mankind, rung in by storm, not peace bells. Life’s law says old falls, new rises—and don’t miss this: communism’s capitalism’s kid, born with the spark of workers’ revolt against ruling cash. Marxism gave it brains, Leninism sharpened it; in the Soviet Union, tsarist empire’s heir, it got a state to fight for its win. Creed war and power war differ, but they’re tangled—till chaos snaps every bond.
Both powers rush with raw force into Europe’s void—wrecked stuff and bled-out spirit. The U.S. tries filling it, but only with dollar loans for big business and warplanes. The mind’s field, left bare trusting the atom bomb, risks enemy takeover. Don’t be fooled by “votes”: for cozy ease, full guts, and fat wallets, the ballot props up an unthreatened order. History doesn’t vote in Sunday best; it screams through starving crowds, inks its choice in blood.
To the world’s woe, truths alive in Soviet communism don’t even spark in the other camp. Germany’s weight—tough to cut from progress without ruin all round, impossible in spirit—goes unseen by the U.S., suicidally denied by Europe’s rest, but Russia’s grasped it from the jump (Lenin said it). Hence its dogged fight for Berlin, for all Germany—whose people hold communism’s world win or loss, the only folk to once match it, yet able to make it unbeatable if folly and a devilish Morgenthau plan tie their fate to it.
The Noticer