Unheroic Europe
ALAN, RAY
Euro Vista By Ray Alan Unheroic Europe Scared of the Soviet Union, afraid (although contemptuous) of the oil moguls, worried about inflation and unemployment, Western Europeans have rarely felt...
...in Montreal while paying an official visit to Canada, successive Canadian governments have given their French counterparts lesson after lesson in civilized manners...
...Disgusted police officers say they have been ordered to wear lead boots whenever investigating a crime that is believed to involve Libyans...
...They admitted later that the hostages had not been the "central theme" of their discussions...
...Now Canada has given France a magnificent lesson in democracy...
...A respectable conservative sentiment (conservative statesmen outside Spain used similar words to explain their unwillingness to press General Franco to release political prisoners and lessen the harshness of his regime), though not what might be expected from a Democratic Socialist...
...but the French government would earn greater respect by paying attention to its own minorities' grievances than by trying to make trouble for a great democracy, many of whose citizens gave their lives helping to liberate France...
...Cohn-Bendit, in his turn, was told a few years later by German students that he was outmoded and should go to bed...
...It seemed briefly that the May 1968 upsurge in French universities might produce his apotheosis...
...This is the very argument that would be invoked to justify the murder of the hostages in order to "liberate" their "36 million prisoners...
...There are days when one feels that if Jimmy Carter wished to be hailed as the statesman of the age-by Europeans, anyhow-he need only fly to Moscow (preferably during the Olympics razzledazzle) and return waving a sheet of paper and bleating about "peace in our time...
...Unheroic Socialists The Socialist International usually tries to be on the side of the angels, if not of the gods, and many people hoped that when three of its best-known figures took off for Teheran their top priority would be to press for better treatment and speedy release for the American hostages there...
...Most of these regions would probably vote against autonomy...
...In fact, they do not seem to have expressed either sympathy for or solidarity with these victims of injustice, although injustice used to be one of the things socialism was about...
...or Brittany or Roussillon or Languedoc or whatever...
...The French and Spanish governments have ordered their TV services not to show Death of a Princess, while in Sweden and other countries private funds have bought the TV rights of the film in order to prevent its screening...
...Ever since President Charles de Gaulle cried " Vive le Quebec libre...
...They discussed this at length with the president of the Iranian central bank, Reza Nubari, who was their official host and escort...
...Nubari was in Vienna, where he had contacts with Kreisky's officials, for a few days before the Socialists left for Teheran...
...Our sports teams are sprucing up for the Moscow Olympics...
...But when he tried to address a major student assembly he was hooted, whistled at and finally silenced with cries of: "Go to bed, Papa...
...The Italian authorities are, nevertheless, almost heroic by comparison with the Spanish government, whose abject fear of Arab economic reprisals is making it an international laughingstock...
...Whereas Canada has traditionally respected the culture and political rights of its French-speaking province, most French governments have suppressed minority cultures and autonomist movements...
...Khomeini was saved...
...Curiously, the problem of Iranian funds frozen in the West...
...The problem had to be approached with "extreme caution," Felipe Gonzalez said, so as to avoid provoking "negative reactions...
...Not only did the three Socialist leaders fail to exert themselves on the hostages' behalf, they apparently wished to avoid giving the impression that they felt any great concern for them...
...Some student leaders quoted him and scrawled a few of his slogans on walls...
...but only a little...
...A fairedodo...
...His demagogy and wooliness were encapsulated in his 1974 statement that "violence is necessary-it is the only way to achieve a new society, though I don't know what kind of society...
...In Italy, where several Libyan exiles have been tortured and killed by Colonel Muammar Qaddafi's murder squads, the authorities are muttering that something should be done...
...So what did concern Kreisky, Gonzalez and Palme during their stay in Teheran...
...West Germany and France are racing to increase their trade with Russia...
...There are indications that the visit of the delegation was mainly, in the eyes of the Iranian authorities, part of a PR campaign to persuade Labor and Socialist movements to oppose the financial and trade sanctions being taken by several Western governments against Iran...
...Libyan political murders continue...
...He was a demagogue rather than a teacher, less concerned to educate than to dazzle, and the people he liked to dazzle were the kind who were more impressed by sesquipedalian gob-bledygook than by clear argument, the kind who were apt to worship Mao and assure one that North Korea and Cuba were advanced democracies...
...We shall know that France measures up to Canadian standards of democracy the day a French government announces referendums on administrative autonomy in Corsica, Brittany, French Catalonia, the French Basque country, Languedoc, and the rest...
...But the overall West European balance is still in favor of appeasing anyone capable of disrupting our tranquility and weekend driving...
...Euro Vista By Ray Alan Unheroic Europe Scared of the Soviet Union, afraid (although contemptuous) of the oil moguls, worried about inflation and unemployment, Western Europeans have rarely felt less heroic or, on average, more appeasement-minded...
...Even Lord Carrington was sufficiently invigorated by that example to ask Libya's rulers to stop murdering people in the British capital and to withdraw some of their dubious diplomats...
...There is an insatiable market for such intellectual fluff in the sectors of the French middle class that aspire to trendiness...
...A bourgeois, addressing bourgeois readers, his motto was an old one: "il faut ipater les bourgeois...
...Britain has retreated from effective sanctions against Iran...
...A few weeks ago the Iranian Embassy in Madrid was informed by Moslem students that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's effigy was among those that were to be burnt during the Valencia falias fiesta...
...In my column in the June 2 issue, I mentioned one or two instances of British grovelling in the Near East, notably Foreign Secretary Carrington's jitters following the screening of that famous TV film about a Saudi princess...
...Felipe, however, then abandoned caution to indulge in a startling flight of ayatollahish fancy: One could, he declared, say that "36 million Iranians are prisoners of the hostages, because the affair is having grave consequences for Iran...
...But Canada's leaders refused to descend to de Gaulle's demagogic level...
...Many bookstalls are displaying Soviet propaganda material, most of which, although set out under Olympics emblems, has not the remotest link with sport...
...With Simone de Beau-voir, he helped run a cretinous Maoist paper that even orthodox Communists and Trotskyists thought silly-And silliness is something that they are expert in...
...The embassy told Spanish officials firmly that the ayatollah was not for burning, and the civil governor of Valencia was ordered to rush to the rescue...
...Today Europeans feel threatened by quarrels in several far-away countries between people of whom they know little or nothing-Afghanistanis, Russians, Iranians, Americans, Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, Libyans, and others-And their instinct is to turn away from them and hope some super-Chamberlain will sweep them under a rug...
...It would have been easy for Canadians to tour France's many linguistic minorities and cry "Long Live Free Corsica...
...Although sufficiently intelligent to mistrust the French Communist Party, Sartre could not resist bidding for its members' applause, as when (in 1954) he declared that complete freedom of expression existed in Russia...
...No such effort was made on behalf of President Carter and other Western leaders (having a sense of humor, they would not, of course, have wanted one), and they were duly set ablaze...
...On the eve of the Munich Agreement, 42 years ago, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said: "How horrible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing...
...A new guru was now fashionable: Herbert Mar-cuse-And even he already had Daniel Cohn-Bendit snapping at his heels and insinuating that he was in the pay of the CIA...
...Unfortunately, they told the Iranian government no such thing...
...Like too many French intellectuals, he was more interested in propagating fads than ideas...
...The Spanish government is acutely afraid of Iranian displeasure, too...
...Since then, Britain's stock has improved as a result of its security forces' defeat of the Iraqi-supported terrorist attack on the Iranian Embassy in London...
...Sartre moved away from the student movement and took up what he imagined was proletarian chic: Maoism...
...Demagogues -Jean-Paul Sartre died not in April 1980 but in May 1968...
...Prime Minister Adolfo Suarez' Cabinet-moderate and occasionally courageous during the transition from dictatorship-has not only kept alive General Franco's policy of hostility to Israel and support of the PLO, it has persuaded the media to observe an anti-Israel bias, allowed Arab embassies to influence TV programing, and given minimal publicity to police reports that many Spanish terrorists (notably members of the Basque separatist group ETA) have been trained in Algeria and PLO camps in Lebanon, as well as helped financially and in other ways by Libyan special services...
...I exaggerate a little...
...But Italy needs both petroleum and investment capital from Libya, so its government is not pressing Tripoli at all forcefully on the issue...
...Indeed, it seemed a good idea for Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, Felipe Gonzalez of Spain and Sweden's Olaf Palme to contact the more rational sector of the Iranian administration and tell it clearly that the civilized world is appalled by the plight of the 50 American citizens...
Vol. 63 • July 1980 • No. 13
