Coexistence With Whom?
MADARIAGA, SALVADOR DE
When we befriend totalitarians, we injure their victims COEXISTENCE WITH WHOM? By Salvador de Madariaga London At a recent reception in New Delhi for Madame Sun Yat-sen, Indian Prime Minister...
...The fact is that the "all" with whom Nehru wants to be friends are very much at war among themselves...
...There was a time when this sort of thing earned him the label of "neutralist...
...To begin with, there is the all-too-frequently encountered confusion between the Soviet regime and Russia...
...Khrushchev and Bulganin, he was "befriending Russia...
...The political world outside Italy has failed to recognize the courage of the Italian Liberal, Republican and Social Democratic leaders who...
...Nenni has consistently shown himself one of the world's most faithful and obedient servants of Moscow...
...We don't understand the game of international chess...
...We have no desire to dupe others and make them do somersaults...
...What is most shocking is his attempt to equate a potential enemy with the very nations which are preventing that enemy from earning out his designs...
...A great many important and undeniably anti-Communist people in Italy-professors, publishers, newspaper editors and others-favor the Nenni solution, and it is an open secret that President Giovanni Gronchi himself heartily supports it...
...Now the "Geneva Spirit" has given fresh impetus to the movement for an "opening to the left," which would bring the Nenni Socialists into the governing coalition...
...Take Italy, for example...
...it is forthright and sincere...
...When Nehru writes of "befriending Russia...
...He cannot be friends simultaneously with the Soviet Union and its intended victims in the West, or with the peoples of the Soviet Union and the regime which keeps them gagged and exploited...
...For the same reason that West German Chancellor Adenauer's mission to Moscow was so difficult...
...Or, if he insists on maintaining this pose, he obviously has no sympathy for these oppressed peoples and cannot expect them to return his "friendship...
...The Christian Democrats lost enough votes to make inapplicable the law which would have granted them a clear majority in Parliament had they won a sufficient surplus of the votes, and Italy's governments have consequently had to rely on an uneasy alliance of Christian Democrats, Liberals, Republicans and Social Democrats...
...bowing to the higher interests of the world balance of forces, agreed to enter a coalition with the clerical Christian Democratic party in the full knowledge that their anti-clerical supporters would be displeased...
...Why, then, is Nenni now in the running...
...This situation was made inevitable by Sir Winston Churchill's speech of May 11, 1953, in which he offered "Russia" the hand of peace...
...True, in adopting this attitude Nehru is less isolated than he used to be...
...For Nehru cannot be so blind to reality as not to see that, had it not been for the power of the West, the Soviet Union would already have liquidated his regime and turned India into a kind of semi-satellite intermediate in status between China and Poland...
...he is obviously referring to the visit to India by Messrs...
...There is much to be admired in this statement...
...We will not allow hostility to arise between ourselves and other countries...
...Nehru's statement began by saying: "We are the friends of all and the enemies of none.' In order for this to be so, however, one of two situations must exist: hither "all" must be at peace among themselves, or "we" must be utterly indifferent to questions of right and wrong, peace and war, good and bad intentions...
...Indeed, they do not even claim to do so, for the Soviet Union is not "Russia' but a so-called federation of which Russia is but a part, albeit the predominant one...
...Or that this success has been due less to Moscow's initiative than to the readiness of London and Washington to fall in with the new Soviet approach...
...Because men like Saragat, Pacciardi and Martino have been let down by Italy's allies...
...we want to keep our policy clear for all the world to see...
...By Salvador de Madariaga London At a recent reception in New Delhi for Madame Sun Yat-sen, Indian Prime Minister Nehru expressed his views on world affairs with commendable clarity: "We are the friends of all and the enemies of none...
...Who can deny now that this maneuver has achieved considerable success...
...If the fashion is now turning to coexistence in Washington and London, how could it help but turn from Saragat to Nenni in Rome...
...The leaders of the West seem unaware of the stresses their "coexistence" policy imposes on the frail structure of Italian liberal democracy, and of the risk they run by throwing to the wolves three parties which are small in size but great in courage and essential to the political stability of Italy, one of the chief outposts of freedom...
...Rather, he was befriending the enemies of Russia-and of Poland, and Hungary, and a score of other nations now" suffering Soviet oppression...
...The Parliamentary situation of that vital country is precarious...
...Khrushchev and Bulganin...
...Many of us have consistently maintained that Moscow's recent overtures to the West were designed particularly to promote the growth of popular-front movements in France and Italy...
...This is a very dangerous situation...
...But can we subscribe to everything he says...
...But these two men are not "Russia" and do not represent it...
...Only recently, he promised to vote for the Liberal candidate for the Italian Constitutional Court in exchange for the Government coalition's vote for his candidate, only to break his promise on orders from Communist leader Togliatti...
...Today, however, "befriending Russia" is in fashion even in the West, and the disastrous effects of this muddle-headed attitude are already beginning to show themselves...
...A far graver misrepresentation in Nehru's statement stems from the tyrannical character of the Kremlin's hold over the peoples it controls-Russian, Ukrainian and many others...
...He was doing nothing of the sort...
...And we would be less than just if we did not recognize in this and similar utterances by Nehru that human quality which makes him an outstanding and possibly unique international figure...
...The fact that the Soviet regime and the peoples it oppresses are in a permanent state of war with each other is clearly demonstrated by the electrified barbed-wire frontiers, the restrictions on foreign travel, the concentration camps, the secret police, the controlled press, the jamming of foreign broadcasts, and many other daily facts of Soviet life...
...The Communists with 6 million votes, the Nenni Socialists (Communists in all but name) with 4 million, and the neo-Fascists and other extreme rightists with 3 million make up nearly 50 per cent of the electorate, leaving only half of the Italian people in support of the liberal democratic regime...
...It is a strange argument to say that befriending Russia is making others India's enemies...
...These people claim that Nenni would break with the Communists as soon as he became a minister (presumably a Deputy Prime Minister), but there is not a shred of evidence for this belief...
...When Saragat courageously broke up the Italian Socialist party rather than let it become a satellite of the Communists, the least he could expect was that the West should give support to his rather than Nenni's approach...
...Nehru ignores all this when he claims that, by receiving Messrs...
...What is more, he was befriending the enemies of his own country...
Vol. 39 • February 1956 • No. 6
