FIXED FLOP IN GENEVA
Mayer, Milton
Fixed Flop in Geneva by MILTON MAYER Geneva The seventeen-nation—formerly the eighteen-nation—Disarmament Conference opened here March 14 with five hundred hopeless delegates and a vacant chair...
...Kennedy, when he announced resumption, said the Americans feel...
...Is it all "lip service," that is, deceit of the jerks at home and the "uncommitted" jerks abroad who want to believe that some government somewhere cares whether they live or die...
...The city is nothing special—it doesn't compare with Zurich—nor do the lake and the mountains compare with Lucerne's...
...Thus the heart of the matter is that, for reasons of military secrecy, neither side will disclose the facts upon which rest any prospect at all of a test ban...
...Their agenda also included a Canadian proposal to prohibit nuclear tests in outer space (in heaven, if not on earth...
...Rusk, the Herald Tribune said, had to appear not to be "too rigid...
...a vestigial air which represents the elegant malar-key that constituted peacemaking until they broke in...
...In addition, the Americans took pains to impress some of the neutrals (if not the Swedes and the Indians, whose proposal for another unpoliced moratorium was swept quickly under the carpet), while the Russians, besides treating the neutrals (and, indeed, the English, the Italians, and the Canadians) as impotent (as, indeed, they are), added injury to insult by rejecting even neutral inspection...
...We" want peace—if we can get what we want under cover of peace...
...The Americans dressed the way the English used to...
...The English (who at least knew how to dress) grew tweedier and seedier...
...You can wander the hollow corridors of the Palais for days, with signs directing you to the Permanent Central Committee for Opium...
...The battle for the propaganda highground left Geneva with no hits, no runs, and no critical errors...
...Italics mine...
...But they have to be invited to all the little dinners and the little luncheons, where the real business is transacted, because they dominate the world in the decisive sense that if only they weren't there everything could be arranged in gentlemanly fashion...
...Sometimes their king-emperors were cousins...
...It's dull, but, man, it's better than the old American rat-race...
...They had all gone to the same kind of school—they all spoke French— and wore the same kind of clothes...
...Isn't it, rather, that the ruling people in and out of government in the "West" do not want the world changed, do not think it needs changing, can not see how it could be changed, while the ruling people in the East want the world changed, think it needs changing, and are fanatically sure that they know how to do it...
...In 1942 my darling Little Julie got into a rumble with Little Barbara in kindergarten, and Miss Adams pulled them apart and said, "Dear me, there must be a better way to settle our differences," and Little Julie said, "Grown-ups haven't found a better way...
...Like all Swiss, they grow a little richer all the time and, like all Frenchmen, they do not (except for the hotel-keepers) affect an amiability for the foreigners they despise...
...And if we suddenly accepted general and complete disarmament without inspection, would the Russians, without the right to inspect the Germans, whom they hate and dread...
...There is even some doubt among cynics in the United States that this country, with its economy dependent to so great an extent upon arms expenditures, would welcome any such goal . • • despite our lip service to it...
...Then, after 1945, they were there, bringing with them the undissemblable vulgarity of the arriviste...
...the two parties are, and must be, at war...
...They set up the Maison for the convenience of the correspondents at great international conferences...
...to world war...
...The next day the United States successfully tested its biggest missile yet, the Titan II, at Cape Canaveral...
...The Ami have moved in—Dupont, Chrysler, Procter 8c Gamble, Union Carbide, Caterpillar Tractor, with their frozen orange juice, their electric can-openers, and their colored crepe-de-cabinet to match the decor of the cabinet...
...The Americans came to find out if their threat to resume testing would interest the Russians...
...It rents the space by the month and, when it closed the Maison after three weeks, refunded no rent...
...Dante's, above the threshold of Hell, are, "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here...
...The British press has given considerable notice to Defense Secretary McNamara's Congressional testimony that abstinence from test resumption would in no way jeopardize U.S...
...So everybody does business in Geneva...
...They left at the same time, after squeezing the world-public-opinion lemon dry...
...One very great man at the top," says the best British correspondent dreamily, "one man who could see beyond his own country, and beyond the next election . . ." Would it be that easy...
...The Swiss Post Office—which, as in all Communist countries, also operates the telephone and telegraph systems—installs communications facilities, provides free typewriters (but no paper), and rents office space to the visiting news outfits...
...but not so bad as usual...
...China policy, and scare both the Americans and the Russians into talking sense—maybe...
...He did not say Nyet...
...There were seven hundred correspondents here...
...The scuttlebutt at the Maison was that both sides wanted to test and will test...
...Russians would accompany them all the time...
...But they—they look as if they had been starched without being washed...
...The day after the Conference opened, Mr...
...Kennedy made his "peace race" plea a year ago the bottom fell out of the stock market...
...And the Russians know it...
...Why should our government have told us or anybody else the truth about Guatemala, the U-2, and the Cuba invasion until it was caught...
...Will your Aunt Kate, or you, or I? Will President Kennedy...
...never had so many watched so few do so little...
...Geneva is the nearest thing there is to France—which is where all international delegates would like to be except for the certainty of assassination...
...European headquarters here spend $13,500,000 a year in Geneva...
...In the past few years the Genevese have grown a lot richer...
...All governments and, I suppose, nearly all people, want peace along with things they want more than peace...
...indeed, it is believed that even very small tests can now be pinpointed to within one-tenth of a mile across the globe...
...delegates of some sort show up here...
...One of the Italian delegates tried to be funny, and succeeded...
...Not," a French correspondent added, "that anybody wants it, believes in it, or thinks that it's possible...
...What about the Americans...
...There is really no sign of man's ability to break his historical habit of mind in the face of the new nature of war...
...They were realishque when the United Nations set up shop in New York to avoid the unhappy connotations of the old League's Palais cles Nations—which opened the day Franco opened fire on Madrid...
...Like President Kennedy the Russians know that getting there the fastest with the mostest is still the only hope, but they won't say the opposite and they are simply impossible in the pirouette...
...There was a much more dubious rumor that both sides had agreed that after one more round of tests—one for the road, so to say— they would both quit...
...That is the United Nations, through Charter revision to limit national sovereignty...
...government— there is no more likelihood that it would be admitted openly than there is that the Russians would reveal either the exact nature of their recent tests by way of challenging the American monitoring claims or their own monitoring records to support their claim that they have detected all the American tests without inspection...
...The captains and the kings did not depart...
...Anybody for opium...
...Even Senators Fulbright and Jackson are saying that now, though President Kennedy still calls it "the only hope...
...Rusk said, at one point, that the Russians opposed any agreement because they themselves "feel a military need for new tests...
...As far as peacemaking goes, Geneva is the city of genteel failure...
...Whether the American government has admitted to the British that its demand for inspection is a phony—or whether the Pentagon has admitted it to the U.S...
...It's expensive for the Russians (the Americans don't care) and testing won't produce the anti-missile missile anyway...
...The Swiss, whose car purchases rose twenty per cent last year, had their money on the Motor Show, and where the Swiss have theii MILTON MAYER, who writes regularly for The Progressive, recently attended some of the sessions of the disarmament conference in Geneva as a representative of this magazine...
...The West, then, looked bad here...
...And of course it was never, but never, suggested that there should be inspection...
...the same kind of people can trust one another...
...What institutions...
...In Machiavelli's lexicon, appearances are all that matter...
...The Russians issued the fewest...
...They had manipulated the General Assembly into manipulating the Americans into accepting their view of the three-way-world-cum-veto...
...Picking the brains at the Maison de la Presse was easy...
...The very fact of the Conference was a triumph for their troika gimmick...
...But it would wreck ours unless it was planned...
...If the basic attitudes are irreconcilable, everything is...
...Meanwhile, all hell had broken loose in Algeria, Syria, Vietnam, and Argentina, and President Kennedy took the occasion to say that the United States would use nuclear weapons first if Europe "were being overrun by conventional forces...
...In ignoring the Conference, and reducing the Western nations to four (to the East's five and the neutrals' eight), General de Gaulle got even with everybody for not having been invited to Yalta and Potsdam seventeen years ago...
...The Americans filled the Nile with tears when the Russians violated the test moratorium (though not when the French did...
...Another form of fortification may have developed even before this report reaches print...
...Or is nobody, on either side, serious...
...I have never met a Genevese who wasn't completely cynical (or, as the Genevese would say, completely realis-tique...
...In addition, H.000 U.N...
...First of nuclear operations and then of all military and military-related operations...
...As the delegates to the Disarmament Conference entered the ghostly council chamber of the Palais to begin their deliberations, they had their choice of keeping their eyes discreetly on the threshold or lifting them to the words, "The Nations Must Disarm or Perish...
...but he was, and the Russians appeared to understand "the only language they understand...
...Besides, they were able to exploit, and intensify, Western division...
...But Julius Caesar found it a Gallic place in 58 B.C., and Zurich and Lucerne are just too, too Teutonic...
...Tsarapkin, the Soviet test ban man, was asked the old question about inspection...
...They can't get these things any more...
...Kennedy an excuse for reversing the hopeless U.S...
...Inspection, if it means anything, means control...
...salaries...
...So when things got the least bit homey here, the Russians had only to ask the Americans when they were kidding about inspection—in September or now...
...And how strengthened...
...The new disarmament study prepared for the United Nations argues that it has only to be planned to work—and when Mr...
...Peace and humanity, both of which there is always less...
...There had never been any Russian...
...the kings hadn't cottoned to Khrushchev's suggestion that they come in the first place, and the captains would stay on for months (maybe years) to discuss a preamble to disarmament...
...and in Moscow Premier Khrushchev announced his global rocket which, no matter which way you turn, hits you from behind...
...non-political agencies atrophy here, none of them with money enough to do the splendid non-controversial non-political assignments given them by governments whose consuming interests are all controversial and political...
...The delegates here seemed—¦ the Russians no less than the Americans—to be as honest as men generally are...
...The tumult and the shouting died...
...There is only one institution, and only one way to strengthen it...
...These words," he said, "I think are not Dante's...
...security...
...His articles have appeared in many American publications, including Life, Harper's, Fellowship, and Liberation...
...Why should either party trust the other—or be trustworthy...
...Do the Russians really believe that inspection teams—even of neutrals-would be Western espionage agents...
...When I asked a Swiss editor, "Who made the worst mistake at the Conference...
...Disarmament was never possible when the world was not divided in power as it is now—for the first time—between those who want to change it and those who want to keep it as it is (or, more precisely, as it was...
...On March 15 the seventeen-nation Motor Show opened with five hundred hopeful dealers (including France...
...they are building them themselves right now at home...
...And if they couldn't—also good...
...It still has an air which would, or should, discourage Khrushchev from taking his shoe off in public...
...They haven't found a better way since, and Little Julie is a big girl now, and her father an old, old man...
...Living costs are high, but not as high as at home...
...Woodrow Wilson's goofy dream of open covenants openly arrived at had flowered in secret covenants secretly avoided...
...If the Russians could keep the Americans from testing—good...
...The vacant chair here for France, which already belongs to the Nuclear Club, was a reminder that another member of the Club may be along any minute: Communist China, which is expected to explode its first H-bomb pretty soon now...
...They didn't find out...
...that both sides had reached a "Western," that is, gentlemanly or silent, agreement on the point...
...Fixed Flop in Geneva by MILTON MAYER Geneva The seventeen-nation—formerly the eighteen-nation—Disarmament Conference opened here March 14 with five hundred hopeless delegates and a vacant chair for France (which didn't bother to attend or even send an observer...
...As honest as Metternich and Clemenceau, or as you and I. But disarmament is not an honest subject...
...money (and their heart) you can't go wrong in putting yours...
...So the sentiment in England is building up against the Americans...
...There is disagreement among the experts," Hanson Baldwin, the New York Times' military editor, wrote as the Conference opened, "as to whether or not Moscow really wants arms limitation...
...Peace in our time," an old Tory formula, would bolster the Government of a packed little island which, with its American bases, would be the first to be blown into the sea...
...Will Senators Fulbright and Jackson agree with President Kennedy's assertion that "we prefer world law...
...The peacemakers of yore, from Metternich to Clemenceau, were all the "same kind of people...
...Except for UNESCO in Paris and the F.A.O...
...control of American arms and industry by foreigners, maybe by Russians...
...Do we trust the Russians...
...But the Russians never do too badly...
...After thirty-nine months of continuous negotiation, the Russians and the Americans had not got past the first item on any disarmament agenda, the test ban...
...The by-election at Orpington, which put a Liberal into Commons and knocked out both the Tory incumbent and the Labor challenger, was being taken as a very serious sign of the precarious condition of the Tories...
...without peace they can get only death...
...The London New Statesman says that the accuracy of British analyses of the recent American underground tests "stunned the Pentagon...
...Dussoix, the city treasurer, says he can not understand the Genevese antagonism to foreigners...
...And, as the Conference collapsed, the Swiss people, in the year 1962, rejected a constitutional amendment which would have forbidden their comic little army nuclear weapons...
...Breaking all records, in its own way, the Disarmament Conference ended a week afterward when the Foreign Ministers went home in the taxpayers' new jets...
...In doing so he also notified the Russians of still another split in the West, whose cause he damaged with the four French tests in the Sahara during the moratorium...
...I talked to a Carbide Man, who wants to remain anonymous (and probably will...
...nobody had anything to do but listen to briefings from square-headed "briefing officers" of the delegations, buy one another's paper to see if anybody had got anything on a private line (nobody had), and sit around waiting for handouts—"communiques...
...The Red Cross "Geneva Convention" was the first, providing ground rules against bombing hospital ships unless absolutely necessary and for feeding captured officers better chow than captured powder-monkeys got...
...There is no evidence—and the Common Market no more provides it than the United Nations does— that the British or the Germans are any readier than the Russians for supranationalism, and considerable evidence that the French are, if anything, less so...
...Everybody went home in his new red Porsche, and the Swiss went to the bank and deposited the money...
...he said, "Anyone who thought that anything would be done...
...The English came and went away unhappier than ever...
...and that they were both satisfied that the Conference had created the proper "sales atmosphere" for the new tests at home...
...it's just that, now that it's less possible than it ever was, 'world public opinion' must be made to believe it is being considered...
...And they are not impressed by pre-Victorian palaces...
...As these perishable words are being written, the Maison de la Presse is being closed...
...But the habit of mind is as old as the race, and there simply is no basis for believing that we can break it...
...They go through your time-honored pirouette like dancing bears, but they don't take it seriously...
...But you can't trust the Russians...
...The Russians," said a German correspondent, who doesn't put it in writing, "forced the Americans to pretend, for the first time, to talk about 'general and complete disarmament,' which is what the Russians have always pretended they wanted to talk about...
...But in another, may be: The Russian resistance—assuming, with difficulty, that they have any interest in an agreement—may reveal either their conviction that any supranational agency, with supranational authority, would be a capitalist scheme or their real inability to comprehend anything supranational, beginning with inspection...
...So the perfidious Al-bionese—with a full-fledged ban-the-bomb civil disobedience movement on their hands—want a test agreement badly...
...in Rome, all the U.N...
...sometimes they themselves were...
...Those Swiss know how to live—and where...
...So did Hitler...
...When there's a hiatus, or peace, the enemy countries in the next war all come to Geneva to prepare it jointly...
...On what view of sovereignty can a nation—any nation— let morality interfere with its life and death...
...Nor they you...
...So do the Russians, in the same way...
...But they are willing to provide all the amenities of profit-making, including "les plus explosifs strip-tease actucls" in their curtained honky-tonks and a $1.20-per-play limit Casino (but no limit on the number of times you can play...
...There was, of course, no pretense of "general and complete disarmament" talk here...
...The purpose of the Conference was "general and complete disarmament...
...In one sense, certainly not...
...It—for "West," always read "American"— got away with an unexpectedly tough line on Berlin...
...The Genevese are Frenchmen with money and Calvinist meanness (but without piety...
...When there's war, the cartels with headquarters in the warring countries do all their joint business here (and in Zurich...
...Taxes are low," he said, "both corporate and personal...
...1962...
...There can not be many Africans— not, at least, if the Communists can help it—who do not know that the French tests were held as far from France as possible because the health of white men is important...
...This means a tacit alliance—a new cousinship—of absolutely everybody against the new bounders...
...They don't mean to wreck the United Nations, but only to take it for a megaphone, which, statutorily, is all that it is...
...If this is the fact of the matter, there is no solution to Berlin, or to testing, or to anything else...
...At any rate, it will mean a new shuffle, and anything's better than," with a gesture toward the Conference chamber, "this...
...there would, of course, still be war, but hasn't there always...
...the Conference may pretend that it is still alive, but the Swiss don't...
...The most substantial of all the American correspondents at the Conference thinks that a Chinese bomb will be all to the good...
...At Geneva C. L. Sulzberger wrote in the New York Times, "We don't want war but we intend to protect ourselves if war comes...
...Ever since 1864 the gentlemen have been talking peace at Geneva...
...the Russians were demonstrating how heartless they were in pouring strontium 90 into the bones of the helpless little children of the peace-loving world...
...Why should one government quite suddenly, and for the first time in history, be different from another in respect to "the national interest...
...With Lloyd George and Wilson-rank commoners—the spirit of Geneva began to deteriorate...
...If the Russians-—and they might, they might—suddenly accepted inspection, would we...
...if he hadn't he would have gone to war to get Austria, which he was able to get peacefully...
...Nobody took the Geneva Convention seriously, and when the Swedish fellow tried to talk to Hitler about it he discovered that the Little Corporal had never heard of it...
...When I told an unpleasant cabbie— the Genevese are not too pleasant—to drive a little more carefully lest he run over a delegate, he said, "Anybody you run over is a delegate," and he didn't say it pleasantly...
...Ten days later the Motor Show ended with all records broken...
...Will the American people, in their present temper, surrender any of their sovereignty...
...the Americans the most and the crudest...
...police force and measures to "strengthen institutions for the maintenance of peace and the settlement of international issues by peaceful means...
...Will Senator Goldwater...
...To the "dreary history of disarmament negotiations"—the words were Dean Rusk's here in Geneva—the Conference added a dreary chapter...
...He did not allude to anything so sordid as the fact that this is exactly what Mr...
...These words were written in the year 1962 by a man who writes— not just reads—the newspapers...
...If Khrushchev, who is about due, pulls a nice new rabbit out of the hat, he will fortify the British...
...They were willing to intimate that maybe they wouldn't run up a new crisis in Berlin right away...
...So the Russians will get their summit conference (probably after the new round of tests...
...Now that the Americans were going to pour, there were no more American tears...
...Last September the Americans "gave" the Russians forty-eight hours to stop testing and accept a new unpoliced moratorium, with the fatal assertion that present detection methods are "adequate" without on-site inspection...
...The company pays the moving by air freight, plus U.S...
...The kids are better off, and the private schools are cheaper...
...But at least they weren't there, and the cafe in which Lenin prepared the revolution had long since been fumigated...
...And they were all brothers over the skin: They meant to keep the social lid on, though international peace was never their purpose unless they had just lost, or were sure to lose, a war...
...he said Nykogda, "Never...
...Nor did they stage a walkout...
...The question before the Conference began was, Which of the two will leave first, thus "showing that he doesn't want disarmament...
...The words date from 1936...
...One referred to Tsarapkin's proposed test-ban troika as "one from the Communist bloc, one from the free world, and one from uncommitted nations"—excluding the last from the "free world...
...Are we desperately to grab hold of the "great man" theory of history and see that even the one great man is missing...
...For three bucks you can get a decent meal, for five a good one...
...Geneva is a large body of delegates entirely surrounded by hotel-keepers...
...But the three thousand clerks permanently employed by the U.N...
...Rusk not only insisted that the United States would accept inspection but, as he was leaving, called for a U.N...
...Far from its being a threat to their iron-controlled system, disarmament would bolster the Russians' underproducing economy (especially in agriculture, their weakest area...
...It will shake up the United Nations, give Mr...
Vol. 26 • May 1962 • No. 5
