Word: clem
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Last week Britain's Clem Attlee emerged from a month's wining and dining with the aggressors and pronounced them charming fellows. "The West has nothing to fear from Communist China," he declared. Furthermore, he assured an audience in Australia, when he stopped off for a little visit, that the Communists had given China the most honest government in its history (a matter of 5,000 years or more). His words came clearly, if a little oddly, over the sound of Communist artillery hammering Quemoy and the howls of Red Chinese leaders for the "liberation" of Formosa...
...been for Clement Attlee, the trip might have been just another junket. But 71-year-old Clem Attlee, who had been Prime Minister of Great Britain (1945-51) and might be again, decided to go himself. Britons never forget that Attlee was the man who, in 1947, ordered Britain to rearm against the threat of Communism, who with these words sent British troops into Korea in 1950 to repel Communist aggressors: "They talk of freedom while they murder it. They talk of peace while they support aggression. They are ruthless and unscrupulous hypocrites who pretend to virtues which their philosophy...
...Clem Attlee as gullible as he seems? It is hard to tell from his curious, deadpan way of writing and speaking. His sentences frequently end on a tentative note, as if the point will come in the next paragraph. He can be bafflingly bland. Sample (from his autobiographical account of his first trip to Moscow in 1936): "Unfortunately, my visit preceded by a few weeks the big purges, which removed a number of [the leading men] I had contacted, notably Marshal Tukhachevski." Attlee could walk with Dante through hell and emerge remarking that "different people had different tastes...
...good will of the peasant population." In Red China, said Attlee, "there is no pretense that everything is all right yet. That is an engaging contrast to Russia, where we were always assured that they are ahead of the world in everything." And of course, in Red China, said Clem, there were "no flies...
...tourists then flew on to Shanghai, Red China's biggest city, which Attlee said reminded him of London. At a great civic banquet, Clem Attlee toasted "the stabilization of world peace," and added, "Like you, we ardently desire to promote peace . . . The more you get to know people, the more you find things on which you agree." He was heartily in favor of more East-West trade. More skeptical newsmen, however, taking a look around Shanghai (where the British once had several hundred million dollars invested), found the few remaining British businessmen desperately consenting to all kinds of confiscatory...