Me and the Geneva Spirit

...West German Chancellor Adenauer apparently felt compelled to make the best of a bad bargain in Moscow...

...There were even those who turned a blind eve to the Nazi concentration camps, since, after all...

...The menace of the Geneva Spirit is that it may seduce us into thinking we can wipe out the past and start with a completely clean slate...

...Geneva has already shown signs of rotting the foundations of Western solidarity...

...But Soviet leaders have been known to smile before when it served their purposes...

...And one can imagine the effect on Asian neutralism if America emerges as the greatest neutral of them all vis-a-vis Communism...

...The free world has seriously miscalculated the realities and the intentions of world Communism twice in the past...

...Barely four months after Stalin's death, the well-mannered, well-groomed board of directors which succeeded him discovered that one of its members was an imperialist bandit and--in the best Stalinist tradition-- proceeded to have him shot...

...This post-Geneva atmosphere is beginning to remind me of something very similar back in the 1930s, known as the United Front...

...In the present thermonuclear age, it is too much to assume that we can survive another...

...The Stalin cult reached its climax during World War II, of course, when he was Uncle Joe and Ambassador Davies called him the sort of man a little child would like to snuggle up against...

...These people have already seen pictures of Eisenhower chatting gaily with Bulganin on the lawn of the Palais des Nations...

...That same summer of 1953, the workers of East Berlin and the inmates of the Vorkuta concentration camp made an attempt to regain their freedom...

...Perhaps equally important, there is nothing whatever to indicate that the Russian people are any nearer to freedom and democracy today than they were under the rule of the late, unlamented Father of Peoples...

...The fact is that, apart from honeyed words and a slight loosening of the facial muscles, the new Kremlin leaders have given us nothing solid on which to base hopes of a real shift in Soviet policy...

...They may be sincerely eager for a good long breathing spell in which to stamp out lingering sparks of resistance in their Eastern European satrapies, consolidate relations with the huge new Red colossus which they helped rear in China, and build up Soviet industry and agriculture in preparation for the next set-to with the imperialist beasts...

...When Stalin first took power three decades ago, he was widely acclaimed as a practical fellow who would put an end to all this wild talk of world revolution and concentrate on building Russia up at home???®socialism in one country" and all that sort of thing...

...Quite possibly, the present Kremlin denizens would like a couple of more Five-Year Plans' under their belts before rushing back into the fray...

...We will forget the Communist attempt to wreck Western Europe's economy through politically-inspired strikes, to turn Greece into a satellite through civil war, and to conquer Korea by brutal invasion...

...Bulganin & Co...

...First came the United Front, which laid the basis for the worldwide Communist espionage-propaganda apparatus and for wartime and postwar pro-Sovietism...

...And, after a decade of talking about "peaceful socialist construction," "collective security," and "non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations," the Soviet leaders promptly resumed their expansionist drive when the opportunity presented itself in 1945...

...We will forget--or refuse to remember--that Soviet Russia is a totalitarian tyranny, for everyone knows that tyrants don't grin and pick berries...

...Nor does this apply only to the rulers of the USSR...

...All our talk of freedom and democracy will have a hollow ring indeed...

...They positively overflowed with good will in the Thirties, when they were anxious to win allies in the West to ward off the rising Nazi threat...

...In fact, the recent news from Egypt and the UN General Assembly suggests that Khrushchev...

...Until the slave camps are closed up and freedom of speech, free elections and free trade unions exist in the Soviet Union, it will be the maddest folly to build our hopes and our policy on Kremlin promises...

...are looking for new troubled waters in which to cast their lines...

...Disarmament and German reunification, the two major issues dividing East and West, are no nearer solution than before...

...I remember raising a lot of hackles in "progressive" circles by declaring that Stalin ran as many concentration camps as Hitler, that the Moscow Trials were judicial murder, and that the Nazis and Communists might well come to an agreement based on their common haired of democracy...

...It was only a few years alter that, of course, that Henry Wallace discovered economic democracy in the USSR and Joseph E. Davies dressed Vishinsky up in wings and halo for the American reading and movie-going public...

...Then came Yalta, which opened the way to Soviet conquest of half of Europe and Asia...

...Unlimited despotic rule at home cannot coexist with honorable and trustworthy conduct abroad...

...We have had Soviet publicity pictures of grinning workers and laughing maidens long before this, and visitors came back from Moscow at the height of the purges to report that the man in the street was smiling broadly and therefore presumably contented...

...The incurable penchant of many Americans for taking tyrants at their word is truly amazing...

...True, Khrushchev and Bulganin cracked a few smiles, picked a few blackberries, and are now releasing some prisoners of war who should have been released years ago...

...We survived these two major blunders...

...Of course, it may very well be that the Russians are sincere in their current policy of sweetness and light...

...France seems almost prepared to scuttle her NATO commitments to concentrate on propping up her shaky African empire...

...And we will forget that 200 million people still live in colonial subjection in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania and the Baltic States...

...What will they think if we go completely overboard for Khrushchev's dimpled cheeks and shelve any thought of eventual liberation of Eastern Europe for fear of clouding the Geneva Spirit...

...I wouldn't be surprised if, before long, those of us who aren't optimistic about the current East-West honeymoon are haled before a Congressional committee as subversives...

...But, somehow, the Workers Fatherland has always managed to put the most potent whammy on multitudes of guileless Americans--particularly some of our heavy thinkers...

...Both risings were ruthlessly suppressed--the Berlin workers with the aid of Soviet tanks...

...There were Five Year Plans in the 1930s, too, but the corpses mounted up at a far faster rate than the industrial indices...

...But that is scarcely a reason for us to drop our guard, militarily, politically or morally...

...Nevertheless, I am a chronic pessimist about international politics, and Geneva has made me more pessimistic than ever...

...In the l920s, there was no lack of touring American journalists and businessmen who were prepared to say that Mussolini was making the trains run on time and disciplining the undisciplined Italians...

...Hitler had "solved" the unemployment problem and given Germany some beautiful roads...

...Back in those days, it was considered very bad taste to mention unpleasant truths about the Soviet Union, and those who did so could count on being denounced as enemies of peace and abettors of fascism...

...Yet, what was really accomplished at Geneva...

...There is no need to rehearse here the whole sorry story of Moscow-aided self-deception in the 1920s and 1930s: how the mass murder of millions of peasants during the collectivization drive became a great social experiment, the bloodbath of the purge trials was justified as a blow at the Nazi fifth column, and even the Stalin-Hitler Pact put only a temporary check-rein on pro-Soviet delusionism...

...Now the same thing is happening again, and those who doubt that Geneva ushered in the millennium are regarded as obstructionists and killjoys...

...By James T. Farrell ME AND THE GENEVA SPIRIT A noted novelist reminds us that the Russians have smiled before I want to make a confession right now: Hard as I try, I can't seem to get into the swing of what is commonly known as the "Geneva spirit...

...I know this is cantankerous and downright unnatural of me...

...Britain has announced a cut in her armed forces...