RED-WHITE-AND-BLUE REDS
Mayer, Milton
Red-White-and-Blue Reds A Report from Yugoslavia By Milton Mayer Zagreb, Yugoslavia THE Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis converted Hitler, over night, into a lover of Mongolians, and Mussolini into a...
...Neither Tito nor Truman can make a Missourian out of a Slav, and...
...its house falls down, first at this corner, then at that...
...and its allies, 30 million from the Western Hemisphere, eight million from the Middle and Far East—and 27 million from Marshall-Plan Europe...
...It is ^either sharp nor sweet nor animal »lipr acid...
...but being ordered not to plant potatoes is another...
...The rumor here is that it was the State Department which dissuaded the AFL and the CIO from sending delegates, lest they return with embarrassing reports about Yugoslav trade union control...
...the best thing to say is, simply, 'Tito.' " And over the almost pitch-dark streets, where electric power is hoarded, shines the big neon slogan of the new liberty: Z/V70 TITO...
...A British amendment affirming that "all peoples and nations of the world desire peace" was defeated by the same vote...
...the whole land, the great, grim hotel you stay in, the restaurant you eat in, the bed you sleep in, the elegant plush Croatian Parliament building where the Congress is held—everything is alive with cockroaches...
...Between March and November, 1950, its Stockholm Peace Appeal, demanding only the outlawry of atomic weapons with international control, obtained almost 450 million signatures, 385 million from the U.S.S.R...
...II Yugo—"south"—slavia is, eth-nologically, culturally, linguistically, and economically, part and parcel (a small parcel of 16,000,000 people) of the world which we now call the East, the world whose center is Moscow...
...against this directed, and single-mindedly directed, Goliath, there was ranged here in Zagreb a puling David, and, if I may mix a few figures, a Janus-faced David at that— some 150 delegates, non-delegates, official observers, unofficial observers, and passersby from perhaps twenty countries and as many slave colonies opposed to those same twenty countries...
...Their world—you can learn this from books, but you can, see it, or at least sense it, in Zagreb —is as much a world of its own as the Orient...
...Exactly a week after that, Pravda said: "In making its demands to the United Nations, the WPC acts as a most representative organ of all nations . . The people of the world consider WPC as their battle headquarters in the great struggle for peace against the imperialist warmongers...
...the painful difference being that this one was in Zagreb...
...By force, and only by force, do men survive in a land where, only ten years ago, the daily wage was 25 cents, the life expectancy 29 years, and the illiteracy 45 per cent...
...f the Croats, of Zagreb and northern [Yugoslavia, are fetishists for cleanliness...
...Mayer attended the congress as special correspondent for The Progressive and for the University of Chicago Round Table, for which he led a broadcast carried over NBC Nov...
...Titoist Communism is trying' to do for the Yugoslav people exactly what Stalinist Communism tried to do for the Russian people, and in exactly the same way, and nobody else, before or since, has tried to do anything for these people in any way...
...The meeting of the World Peace Council in Vienna, immediately after the Zagreb Congress, was orobably the real reason for Zagreb...
...He understands force...
...That's part of it...
...Under the last Yugoslav King, Alexander—murdered in Marseilles in 1934—most of the press was in open opposition, and the "underground" Communist Party hollered its head off in all the cafes...
...Insecticide, perhaps, and Slav | cabbage...
...And this world has always been like this, unchanged and unchangeable for exactly one thousand twenty-six years—until now...
...Threatened, since it got itself kicked out of the Cominform in 1948, on four of its seven frontiers (as it would have been threatened on the other three, if it had stuck with Stalin), Yugoslavia has an immense proportion (nobody knows how big) of its working force in tattered uniforms patroling the hostile borders of Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, and Albania...
...Last Feb...
...I sit here in the tyranny of Zagreb, bringing, perhaps, my own ivory tower with me, and tell you, and Truman, and myself, that we can only love and do the work of love...
...You would never have known, as the oratory rolled and the resolutions passed, that either Marx or Jefferson had ever been born, that a world was in revolution and was dying of war and tyranny, or that there was any MILTON MAYER'S series of articles on Germany, begun in the November issue, is interrupted this month to permit publication of this timely eyewitness report on the Zagreb Congress...
...15, 1951, including, incidentally, ten million in Italy, seven million in Korea, and five and one half million in France...
...The more sensational line is the stupendous world peace movement directed from Moscow and scheduled to convene, in Vienna immediately after the Zagreb Congress...
...Like every tyranny, ancient or modern, Yugoslavia simply crawls with magnificently staged operas, ballets, choruses, "national" drama, and "national" art...
...There is no more hinhappiness on their faces than there is on any other faces you have seen...
...What little rotten, archaic, foreign-owned industry there was persisted only through slave-wages...
...This thousand-year-old Yugoslavian part of the Slav world was, only ten years ago, hopelessly primitive without being hopefully savage...
...Broken windows in houses, railroad cars, and unheated schools are irreplaceable...
...Greeks, Spaniards, Indians, and Congans talked on and on, while the Americans, listening to the Yugoslavs, learned that the Yugoslav Communist tyrants will shoot Russians with anybody's guns...
...Outside the door a whole nation was hungry, and at least a few of the delegates were uneasy to swine and swill...
...I'll bet," said this representative of the Christian Church, "they serve it here on flaming plowshares...
...There are crowds of people, but they look, at one moment, as if they are only scurrying solitaries and, at the next, as if they are great phalanxes ready to fight or sing orvdance the Kola...
...It was called the Zagreb Congress for Peace and International Cooperation...
...The same day as the Pravda editorial, F. N. Oleschuk, deputy chief of the agitation and propaganda department of the central committee of the Communist Party, said that the WPC had been formed on the initiative of the U.S.S.R., that its Stockholm Peace Appeal was its second warning to the UN (the first having been delivered at Warsaw in November, 1950, when the WPC demanded international control and inspection of all mass destruction weapons and progressive and simultaneous reduction of armaments by the Big Five), and Oleschuk added that if these warnings to the UN to carry out its peace-preserving function had no results, "the peace-loving countries would have to leave the UN...
...Bur no serious student of this phenomenon thinks that they were forged...
...Be it said, in splendid contrast to all these dismal tidings, that the Yugoslavs, whether on their own mspiration I do not know, invited the World Peace Council to send delegates and got no reply...
...4. Mayer is spending the year in Europe as correspondent for The Progressive, European director of the Great Books Foundation, and an exchange professor in social studies at the University of Frankfort...
...children, but you fal not remember having seen a Aild running, or a sidewalk game, ^fhere is a smell...
...And so it went...
...Shishkibab," I said...
...My churchly little woman, who found herself listed as "representative of the Christian Church," asked me, old boulevardier that I am, what it is that they serve on flaming swords in the boulevard restaurants at home...
...the Italians, their most bitter enemy, want the Slav-populated Julian March and Trieste back again...
...against this crusade comparable in mass faith and in mass power only to the Roman Catholic Church in its prime...
...The Committee's purpose was to avoid controversy...
...The less sensational, and more significant, line of fact that led to Zagreb is Yugoslavia itself...
...The best-informed man I know says that 90 per cent of the Yugoslavs are praying for war, on the supposition that the United States will win and will then drive Tito from power...
...London Times 431,000,000 names from April, 1951, to the latest date for which I have figures, Aug...
...sion...
...In both these struggles Communism, which it is the American business to combat by all means and with any willing allies, often appears a friend rather than the real enemy to independence...
...There are babies (Yugoslavia lost 1,700,000 people in the war and increased its population by 2,000,000 afterwards), but they look like little bundles...
...A genuine Slav city like Zagreb, untouched by the cosmopolitanism of a national capital like Belgrade, is incomprehensible to Truman and you and me...
...Stalin said, the day of the UN action, that the UN "is being turned into an instrument of war...
...and infinitely ; separated from all the other friendly, ; helpful, modest, quiet people you ?have ever known...
...today there is no press opposition and no open political discussion...
...Its current signature compaign, for a Big Five peace pact, obtained What Asia Seeks It cannot be said that American policy in Asia has worked out so well as her policy in Europe...
...Frenchmen, Norwegians, Mad-agascans, and Burmese talked on and on...
...i Truman doesn't...
...but on the other hand, why not...
...Where a man wants to work or live or what he wants to work at, or to buy or sell or wear or eat or say— all this must be irrevelant...
...Against the single, solid voice of 450 million crying peace and signing proposals for disarmament and international control and inspection, there was ranged here in Zagreb a little motley, some half of whom represented only themselves...
...On the Voyvodina plain, the Yugoslav bread basket north of Belgrade, the official press threatens the collectivized farmers right now, revealing that sowing is less than one-third of last year...
...It is dull, it is everywhere, and it is completely singular to Western nostrils...
...Since he can not understand— who can?—he must be forced...
...When common principles no longer hold men together, common fear and hate will—for the duration...
...The background of this performance is much more important than the performance itself, which came to nothing and was intended to come to nothing...
...To the majority of Asian peoples—underrating no doubt the Russian threat, which in Asia is not open or direct—it is not a simple question of Communism versus Freedom or even of Communism versus Capitalism...
...and northern Yugoslavia was taken from the country's seventh neighbor, Austria, at the end of the first World War...
...Anything, including Communism...
...The buildings are only big stone buildings, yet they look like great dark dungeons...
...an organization acting on behalf of the requirements of the American aggressors . . . The United Nations is taking the inglorious road of the League of Nations...
...In June of 1939, Molotov said to Ribbentrop: "Nazism is only a matter of taste...
...The ineducable, if they are of any great consequence, do not get the mild treatment or the short sentence...
...The day before it opened, the correspondent of the New York Times reported that "the Yugoslavs have let it be known in the corridors of the Congress that they believe that all the delegates would be well advised to avoid raising the concrete controversial national and international issues of the day...
...and you feel an urge to weep with them and to help them (and a hopelessness of knowing how to do it) that you never feel toward English-jmen, Germans, Swedes, Americans...
...It was an unconditional surrender of every American principle except war, which is not a peculiarly American principle...
...Ill The second line of historical fact that led to Zagreb was, and is, the World Peace Council, of which the Westerner who best knows says, in a private report: "History has never before known a movement of such authority, representing such broad masses and possessing such readiness to act...
...The resolutions of the Zagreb Congress ground in and out of a committee whose American member was President Joseph Johnson of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...
...Zagreb, except for the absence of overt, old-time fascists, was Lake Success or Paris or Geneva: the West, itself split among capitalism, Socialism, colonialism, anti-colonialism, aggression, neutralism, and pacifism, the West pretending to be coherent and offering cannon to as ' much of the Communist totalitarian East as would carry it...
...Force has always been its law...
...A cheap insecticide...
...they all drink Turkish coffee, and they all eat French pastry...
...The concentration camps—there is one twenty miles from Zagreb)—specialize in mild treatment and a succession of short terms for the re-educable, who are then permitted to attend night school...
...A British amendment from the floor, to the effect that the Congress believed that "agreement between great powers is possible, was defeated, 24 to 52, the Americans voting with the majority...
...No serious student of this phenomenon doubts that a few million, or a few score million of these signatures, were forced...
...The regime is nowhere near as corrupt as Truman's (or Harding's), and the people respect its integrity...
...You were offered a second cup of coffee, and a third, in a land where a cup of coffee costs 100 dinar a ($2 at the official rate), if a man had 100 dinara...
...The streets are only streets, yet they look like terrible wide wastes...
...And it is always something else...
...Candy—a piece of candy, inedible by Truman, you, and me—is for feast days...
...but not Irish cabbage or German cabbage...
...And an ambiguous version of the American Bill of Rights— originally sent to the solutions committee in more explicit form—was included in the committee's draft report which, with the amendments, was adopted, 86 to 0, with 9 abstentions—all of them Swiss, British, and American Quakers and Quaker sympathizers...
...The Greeks hate the Yugoslavs because of their postwar raids and atrocities in behalf of the Stalinist struggle for Greece...
...stale" is too Western...
...In order to give the Americans their usual fare, and the austere British a treat, the starving Yugoslavs piled high the board...
...And yet only a fool of a tourist would leave a Slav country saying that Slavs are dirty...
...But the very fact of tyranny, apart from what it does, is part of it, too...
...war (or defense) against Russia...
...The Slav's idea of liberty is not Truman's, yours, or mine, or Rousseau's, or Locke's, or Jefferson's...
...The Congress was not cut and dried...
...16, the UN designated China as the aggressor in Korea...
...It builds on sand...
...f They say that the smell is even ¦•Stronger in Russia than it is in the IJalkans...
...Perhaps...
...An American world-government amendment, to delete the repeated resolutions in behalf of the sovereign rights of states, was defeated, the Americans voting with the minority, 28 to 62...
...From one end of the land to the other, mostly rocky plateaus and the size of New York and Pennsylvania put together, there was no agricultural machinery, and the wonderfully terraced farming on the slopes meant lifetime labor for peonage-statused tenants—every member of every family from before dawn until after dark every day...
...It is cooking, of course, and cabbage, of course...
...I We will never know anything M>out this whole Slav world, because we cannot live and die in it, or change it by force or by the Voice of America...
...the Yugoslavs, listening to the Americans, learned that the American capitalist democrats will give guns to anybody who will shoot Russians...
...Since then, intimations have steadily increased that the World Peace Council may be made a counter-organization to the United Nations...
...Zagreb was, quite likely, a ridiculously optimistic effort to undercut Vienna in advance...
...As in America, the churches are open and half empty...
...i The people are infinitely friendly, [helpful, modest, quiet...
...They all wear occidental clothes, 'and they all smoke oriental tobacco...
...but his idea of liberty is real...
...They are not...
...The West, if it wants blood to drink, will drink its own blood by and by...
...it was dried first, and then cut...
...A British amendment recognizing the right of conscience was defeated, the Americans voting with the majority, 25 to 45...
...a motley compromised by the great secret that neither Communism nor tyranny might be mentioned, and demoralized by the consequent fact that their one common denominator was not peace at all but war (or defense, or collective security) against Russia...
...Tito knows it...
...For this there are several reasons...
...and how to meet it...
...Decent fabrics and metal goods are not to be had, not so much as a frame for eyeglasses...
...but a French amendment to include the UN Declaration of Human Rights in every nation's constitution was voted up, 65 to 0 with thirteen abstentions—all of them Yugoslav delegates...
...What can we understand by seeing, in a two-hour walk in the center of Zagreb, a city of 350,000* people, a total of seven automobiles, every one of them an official's...
...The regime runs to pattern, right down to all the empty constitutional guaranties of human rights and the streamlined "people's committees" for rubber-stamping...
...The Catholic Church is, since Tito's break with the Kremlin, given the cold (in contrast with the hot) treatment...
...For the West, for the Americans—anything...
...whatever common ground exists, and it does, among American democrats, French humanists, Spanish anarchists, British and Italian socialists, and colonial slaves the world over, no common ground exists between all of them, on the one hand, and the world they came to Zagreb to woo, the world of Communist tyranny...
...Now 450 million people is, I think it may be said, a lot of people...
...Although their alphabet (like the Russian) is not Roman, their language (very much like the Russian) is no closer to Greek than it is to latin...
...They are Russians...
...The WPC, whose 225-man directorate, representing 60 nations, is 85 per cent Communist or Communist sympathizer (data on the other 15 per cent unavailable), has a 27-man secretariat, all but two of whose members are members of the Communist Party...
...Exactly one week later, in the Cominform headquarters, city of Bucharest, the newspaper Scanteia said: "Turning the United Nations into an instrument of American aggression has disappointed people, and this disappointment has led to setting up a World Peace Council...
...It is easier to put your finger through your throat...
...This is the world that even Marx only imagined, and Jefferson never even imagined...
...The Zagreb performance must be" understood along two converging lines of historical fact...
...To industrialize and mechanize such a world means absolute tyranny, total control of everything...
...Potatoes may be bad both for him and the national economy, and that is one thing...
...The Americans, as they arrived, let it be known that they were no more eager for concrete controversy than the Yugoslavs...
...The bitterness of economic controls is part of it...
...Into this Slav world, into Russia, into Yugoslavia, into what we call the East just now, came Communism, its tyranny infinitely more frightful than the monarchy...
...Be it said, too, of the Yugoslav East, that speech at the Congress was untram-meled and the proceedings fully reported in the Yugoslav press...
...At least," said the most daring Yugoslav I met, "the generals are thinner than they were in the old days...
...They seek, first, freedom from what they regard as Western imperialism and equality with the Western nations and, secondly, a new social order within their own communities...
...other cause of war than "aggres...
...We can never understand...
...Trg" is the word for "square" or "place," and in case you have an irresistible impulse to say to a Slav, "Put your finger through your throat," you have to say, "Strc prst Skrz Krk...
...Against this culminating machinery of all the Communist "peace" machinery since the League against War and Fascism...
...Here in Zagreb, a thoroughly grim and dismal city in the heart of a thoroughly grim and dismal Communist tyranny, the principles of American capitalist democracy have gone out the window after a week of American (and Allied) oratory in which neither Communism nor tyranny was mentioned, much less condemned...
...Who except Pastor Niemoller of Germany and a few British and American pacifist fools had anything in the least embarrassing to say...
...Red-White-and-Blue Reds A Report from Yugoslavia By Milton Mayer Zagreb, Yugoslavia THE Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis converted Hitler, over night, into a lover of Mongolians, and Mussolini into a ravening anti-Semite...
...I suppose," I said, "that the only safe thing to say, if anyone asks me a question, is, 'Da,'—'yes.' "You might be saying 'Da' to the wrong question," said the daring Yugoslav...
...War, or defense, if you will, was the common ground, and the only possible common ground, of the Zagreb Congress...
...The Zagreb Congress, like every congress before it, was gluttonous...
...In the modern world you seem to lose your vowels with your liberties...
...and the principles of Nazism and Fascism (bad principles, but principles nevertheless) went out the window...
...Believe me...
...The reason the performance came to nothing is already indicated...
...The closest we smelly Westerners can come to it with a word is "sickly...
...but the same smell...
...In November of 1951, Truman says to Tito: "Communism is only a matter of taste," and to Franco, "Fascism is only a matter of taste...
...Neither do I. The reason that Tru-: man and you and I are in trouble today is that we think the Russians are bad Americans...
...Neither do you...
...the Orthodox Church is nationalist and subservient...
Vol. 15 • December 1951 • No. 12
