Editorial

EDITORIAL Shifting the Scenes SINCE STALIN'S DEATH, a new and defter hand has been clearly evident in Soviet political stagecraft. Gone is the Georgian villain of yesteryear, twirling his fearsome...

...For, in the final analysis, no lasting protection for Southeast Asia is possible on the basis of a peripheral defense, buttressed by the military power of the West...
...Gone is the Georgian villain of yesteryear, twirling his fearsome moustache as he skulks across the proscenium...
...Today, the European Defense Community is dead and the apostles of European unity are in flight...
...As a new era begins in which the atomic stand-off has largely immobilized our principal military deterrent, America will need all the courage, ingenuity and moral purpose she can muster to check the spread of Communist power...
...Yet, three of the participating countries—the United States, Britain and France—are non-Asian, and only five Southeast Asian nations in all—the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, Australia and New Zealand—have representatives at the conference table...
...Yet, weary of the cold war and fearful of a hot war, millions of Western Europeans are only too willing to snatch at any sign that Stalin's death ushered in the millennium...
...Henceforth, the Soviet regime will be thoroughly "European" in the best tradition of the Quai d 'Orsay and Whitehall—governing from oak-paneled offices and represented abroad by men with whom international "differences" can be discussed in civilized fashion over a glass of brandy...
...As one of the so-called "Colombo powers," which also include India, Indonesia, Burma and Ceylon, Pakistan constitutes a link between a prospective Southeast Asian Defense Pact and this great uncommitted heart of the Asian Continent...
...Instead of a Berlin Blockade, it offers an "all-European security system," while its Polish satellite proposes a military alliance with France...
...And, all the while, the slow mobilization of "liberation armies" goes forward in Asia...
...The process actually started almost two years ago, during Stalin's lifetime, when the word "Bolshevik" departed from the name of the ruling party and the sinister Politburo made way for a brisk, businesslike new "Presidium...
...And, if the new policy of sweet reasonableness is to succeed, Moscow must wipe out the mental image of Bolshevism that has formed in Western minds over the past three-and-a-half decades...
...And now the Kremlin is to be a museum...
...In these circumstances, the Manila conferees are making what appears to be a realistic attempt to reconcile the desirable and the possible...
...Now, with the announcement that the ancient Kremlin fortress is no longer to house Soviet leaders, the old familiar props are apparently to follow the old familiar lines into the dust-bin...
...In the long run, the presence of Pakistan at Manila may well prove decisive to the success or failure of the new undertaking...
...With Chinese armed might the dominant factor in East Asia and India neutral, any Western attempt to create a Southeast Asian NATO, complete with Supreme Headquarters and large military forces-in-being, could only end in humiliating failure...
...tomorrow, perhaps, "Popular Front" governments will rule in Paris and Rome...
...It is clearly no freakish whim that is making Malenkov, Khrushchev et al...
...It thus represents our chief hope of ultimately convincing the Asian fence-sitters of the desirability of concerted action in defense of free institutions instead of an illusory policy of "coexistence" with predatory Communism...
...instead of sending MIGs into the air corridors over Germany, it sends People's Artists to the concert halls of Paris and Rome...
...Gone, too, are the fustian declamations against mad-dog imperialist warmongers, to be replaced by soft asides, aimed straight at the hearts of susceptible Western Europeans...
...No longer is Russia to be a nation ruled by Oriental despots brooding behind the turreted battlements of the Kremlin...
...Elsewhere in the area, Geneva has only strengthened neutralist tendencies and fear of the growing military and political power radiating from Peking...
...When one recalls the monocled scoundrels who fronted for Nazism, it is hard to believe that a change of costume and decor in Moscow could fool anyone...
...The Soviet Union is today trying to crash back into the polite diplomatic society of Western Europe, in the hope that the adroit maneuver and the courteous phrase will achieve what the mailed fist and the heavy-handed insult could not...
...In the shadow of bitter defeat at Geneva, they are seeking to create a defense structure, resting largely on the resources of the region itself, which can stem the tide of Communist expansion...
...drop the words and symbols that for so long have made life simpler for anti-Communist propagandists and caricaturists...
...Meeting in Manila THE DELEGATES now assembling at the Southeast Asian defense conference in Manila are approaching a vital task under the most difficult of conditions...
...Since the old dictator's death, the pace of change has accelerated: A few weeks ago, Soviet diplomats stepped out of their gaudy uniforms and into Western-style business suits...
...Instead, the emphasis is to be placed for the time being on regular consultation on the problems of Communist aggression, interchange of information on internal Communist subversion, and—perhaps most important—cooperative efforts to raise living standards and create healthy economies throughout the region...
...Instead, we have dapper Georgi Malenkov, vaulting a balcony to pluck a nosegay for a visiting lady MP from England...

Vol. 37 • September 1954 • No. 36


 
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