Another Captive Nations Week

Near the end of the Eisenhower Presidency, on July 17, 1959, Congress passed—and Eisenhower signed —a resolution, PL 86-90, assailing the “idea of peaceful coexistence” with a “Communist imperialism” that is responsible for the “enslavement of a substantial part of the world’s population.” The bill empowered the President of the United States to issue a proclamation designating the third week in July as Captive Nations Week “until such a time as freedom and independence shall have been achieved for all the captive nations of the world.” That time has not yet come; and so, this past July, the U.S. observed the twentieth anniversary of the Captive Nations Week Resolution. The twentieth Captive Nations Week passed remarkably unnoticed.

Congress, it can fairly be said, did its part. In the days leading up to and following CNW, the Congressional Record teemed with addresses, proclamations, and reports of foreign observances of the week. (The largest observance of them all took place in Taiwan—where 100,000 people gathered to mark the occasion.) The governors of all the major states and the mayors of all the larger cities also did their part in proclaiming the week. There were parades in New York and Chicago and prayers in Texas churches. Yet all this activity provoked scant attention and aroused little enthusiasm in the country at large. Why didn’t it have more impact?

LD

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Lev E. Dobriansky

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Taiwan

Near the end of the Eisenhower Presidency, on July 17, 1959, Congress passed—and Eisenhower signed —a resolution, PL 86-90, assailing the “idea of peaceful coexistence” with a “Communist imperialism” that is responsible for the “enslavement of a substantial part of the world’s population.” The bill empowered the President of the United States to issue a proclamation designating the third week in July as Captive Nations Week “until such a time as freedom and independence shall have been achieved for all the captive nations of the world.” That time has not yet come; and so, this past July, the U.S. observed the twentieth anniversary of the Captive Nations Week Resolution. The twentieth Captive Nations Week passed remarkably unnoticed.

Congress, it can fairly be said, did its part. In the days leading up to and following CNW, the Congressional Record teemed with addresses, proclamations, and reports of foreign observances of the week. (The largest observance of them all took place in Taiwan—where 100,000 people gathered to mark the occasion.) The governors of all the major states and the mayors of all the larger cities also did their part in proclaiming the week. There were parades in New York and Chicago and prayers in Texas churches. Yet all this activity provoked scant attention and aroused little enthusiasm in the country at large. Why didn’t it have more impact?