Letter from Singapore

...Asians may be encouraged to fight for themselves: no number of dollars will make them fight for the Americans...

...To Americans and Europeans it may seem absurd that such accusations should come from Russia, with its shady record of tyranny in Central Asia, or from China, with its blatant effort to destroy the independence of Tibet...

...One has the unhappy impression that, the more America tries to strengthen the SEATO front line in preparation for a possible hot war...

...America has poured in its millions to help Asia...

...One needs to remember how strongly Asians are attracted by temperament to the passive resistance by which Gandhi won Indian independence, and how deeply they resent the fact that the only victims of nuclear weapons, in both war and peace, have been their fellow-Asians...

...To which the reply, surely, is that France and Germany have crossed that verge on many occasions in the last thousand years without losing a sense of European solidarity...

...But one does not need to have been mixed up in the schoolboy riots in Singapore or to have gone on jungle patrols in the Federation in order to realize that even those Chinese who dislike Communism are impressed by a government which, after the lapse of several centuries, has restored to mainland China the status of a great power...

...What, then, about the SEATO and Baghdad Pacts, those counterparts of NATO, which probably saved Europe...

...Why neutrality and vigorous independence is the best we can hope for from Asians LETTER FROM SINGAPORE By Vernon Bartlett Singapore Things look so different when you see them from anywhere east of Suez and west of the Philippines...

...They appear to overlook two facts...

...They are dealing with peoples who...

...One is that the Chinese Communist revolution is likely to have an even greater effect in the second half of our century than the Russian Revolution has had in the first half...

...if India fails, as she is likely to do without massive help from outside, then the democratic liberties of all these peoples, who have had so little opportunity to learn the value of liberty in the past, may be swept away...

...I read speeches by John Foster Dulles or Selwyn Lloyd about the importance of checking Communism, and, having seen Communism from the inside in Russia, Poland and Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, I fully share their dislike of it...

...and much more to convincing the Asians that the real defenders of their independence are to be found in the West...

...other is that, ever since the Bandung Conference in April 1955, the Afro-Asian group of nations has developed a sense of unity which is one of the strongest, but also one of the least noticed, factors in international politics...

...But Russia is partly, and China is wholly, an Asian country...

...what does that matter as long as the awakening masse* in Asia think of him as a hero...

...In these circumstances, it seems to Westerners in Asia that policy should be aimed not at pushing Asians into a choice between democracy and Communism, but at enabling them to maintain a neutralism which would be absurd and dangerous in Europe or America...

...Visiting parliamentarians and newspapermen seldom realize the depth of feeling throughout Asia against anything with the slightest taint of "colonialism," or the extent to which the U.S...

...Up go cries of triumph from Washington...

...for reasons already outlined, are exceptionally anxious to keep out of war and exceptionally predisposed to Communism...

...Britain has granted independence to India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma and Malaya...

...All the states from Suez to the Philippines are agricultural states whose governments believe that they can raise the standard of living of their people only by most drastic measures to develop industry...

...What about India and Pakistan, always on the verge of war...

...is now regarded as the main exponent of "imperialism...

...NATO had the support of public opinion, of people with enough experience of democratic freedoms to appreciate them...

...Every time I drive from the one town to the other, I am reminded of this war by curfew restrictions, the ban on carrying any food, and a number of military roadblocks designed to check the movements of the terrorists...

...But I fear that Asia will accept Communism unless policy-makers in London and Washington realize the fundamental weakness of their policy...

...If India can succeed in her industrial program, without recourse to the terrible forms of compulsion adopted in Russia and China, then the Afro-Asian governments will be encouraged to fight Communism...

...There are more shiny automobiles and more frustrated unemployed...

...But that is just what they fail to do...

...Asia is a great reservoir of raw materials and a great potential market...

...This gives to Communism an advantage over democracy which cannot be canceled out by even the most generous aid in dollars and pounds...

...The Vernon Bartlett, author of Struggle for Africa, is a former member of the British Parliament and BBC and Manchester Guardian correspondent...

...the more it increases the number of fifth-columnists behind the front...

...Pandit, Indian Ambassador in London, said recently, the peoples of Asia "need to see and taste and feel on their bodies some of the benefits of democracy...

...The votes of the Afro-Asian group in the United Nations are only a first timid indication of a growing solidarity between these nations, nearly all of which have gained their independence only since the end of the war...

...The Asian members of SKATO and the Baghdad Pact are so much weaker than their Western allies that these treaties are widely, however unfairly, interpreted as attempts to embroil Asia in a future war in which she wants to have no part...

...You might therefore expect the policy-makers to concentrate on the cold war, which they could still win, rather than on a possible hot war which, in Asia, they would certainly lose...

...their own strong line has compelled him to retreat...

...They have developed a profound distrust of the while man—perhaps most of all when he is bearing gifts...

...But to us in Asia the methods they propose just don't make sense...

...Afro-Asian unity...

...First, this question of Chinese influence...

...Cold-war defeats of this kind are...

...One example: Khrushchev starts a war scare in Syria, shouts threats at the Americans, and then dismisses the whole business at a Moscow cocktail party...

...It leads one to conclude that, if the peoples of Asia are compelled to choose between democracy and Communism, they will choose Communism...

...The Peking Government, unlike that of Moscow, has millions of potential fifth-columnists overseas, and fifth-columnists who, in most cases, control the commerce of the countries in which they are established...

...The rich grow richer, and the poor grow more populous, making ever greater demands on land that is already overcrowded...

...one fears, inevitable until London and Washington pay much less attention to rivaling the Russians in weapons nobody dares use...

...As Mrs...

...Indeed, it has become painfully obvious in such countries as Vietnam and the Arab states of the Middle East that dollars, without more international control than any Asian government would now accept, may easily do more harm than good...

...The sophisticated delegates at the United Nations may dismiss him as a fool or a cynic...

...Possibly I see it larger than life, since I spend my time between Singapore, where four-fifths of the population is Chinese, and Kuala Lumpur, capital of the newly-independent Federation of Malaya, where a war has been in progress for the last nine years between forces from all over the British Commonwealth and a small army of Chinese Communists, aided by some of the least penetrable jungle in the world...

...But, as seen from Asia, Khrushchev has shown his love of peace by pledging Russian support for Syria against an imminent Turko-American attack...

...There is another more potent, though less obvious, link between China and Russia on the one hand and Southern Asia on the other...

...All this adds up to a most unpleasant result...

...Chou En-lai, at the Bandung Conference, was able to pose as "one of us" against the greedy white invaders...

...They have nothing in common with Pittsburgh or Manchester, but a great deal in common with Moscow and Peking, capitals of two agricultural countries that have become industrialized by their own efforts...

...That is why India, trying to make democratic government work on the largest scale in history, is so important a test case...