Conditioned Reflex

COMMUNISTS

In the huge, high-ceilinged Salle Pleyel, Paris' Cartiegie Hall, the thin, chirping syllables swooped and soared from the public-address system like some kind of static. Finally, the record scratched to an end. Some 2,000 delegates to the World Congress of the Partisans of Peace, realizing that the speech was over, applauded madly.

Few, if any, knew what had been said. The speech was in Chinese. It might just as well have been in Urdu. To the delegates it was important only that it had been made by a Communist, China's Kuo Mo-jo.* The seekers after "peace"--of the Soviet-Russian variety--perfectly exemplified a lesson of the great Russian physiologist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov: to an artificial stimulus, they had made a conditioned response.

The six-day congress was a bigger & better version of last month's Waldorf-Astoria "peace rally" (TIME, April 4). The U.S. State Department put it succinctly: "The same group of performers will go through their act in Paris as they have done before."

"Where Are the Cheers?" The speakers produced their well-worn libels with the pride of a paterfamilias displaying yellowed family photographs. Some of the veterans seemed bored; Soviet Pundit Ilya Ehrenburg fought the good fight part of the time in the bar, sampling French liqueurs. Fragile, gray-haired Mme. Eugenie Cotton, French physicist and president of the International Democratic Federation of Women (who had been denied a visa to the New York conference) smiled tender approval of the proceedings. The conference chairman, lean, somber Communist Frederic Joliot-Curie, France's atomic-energy boss, set the keynote. "We are not here to ask for peace but to impose it. This congress is the reply of peoples to the signers of the Atlantic pact. To the new war they are preparing we will reply with revolt of the peoples."

Then Britain's Harvey Moore, observer for the International Association of Jurists, went up to the banked microphones. The delegates cheered the news of Nanking's fall (see FOREIGN NEWS). Asked Moore: Did the partisans of peace want the Chinese civil war to stop? No, was the bellowed answer. Cried Moore: "You cannot be for war and peace at the same time." Freedom of the individual, of the press, of elections, were "vital to peace," he said, and asked: "Where are the cheers?" There were none. He declared that the "bureaucrats of the proletariat no less than the bureaucrats of the bourgeoisie" must learn that "men want freedom to learn the truth, to be free of fear of the police, to change their governments." Again he asked: "Where are the cheers?" Again there were none.

"Hello, My Friends." Most of the congress' American sponsors--Charlie Chaplin, Artie Shaw, Professor Frederick Schuman of Williams College, et al.--did not show up in Paris. But the U.S. delegation included such well-conditioned specimens as Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Negro author and chairman of the U.S. delegation, Howard Fast, a frequent New York Daily Worker contributor, and Artist Rockwell Kent. Most flamboyant of all the troupers was Baritone Paul Robeson, who vowed that American Negroes would not fight for the U.S. in a war with the Soviet Union* and cried, partly in Russian, partly in English: "It is a pleasure to say hello to my friends from the eastern popular democracies of Europe--those democracies which are showing us how people can direct their own destinies in the interests of mankind."

But there was one frustrated little fellow who was not allowed to say hello to any of his friends. That was "World Citizen" Garry Davis (TIME, Jan. 10). He had refused an invitation to be a delegate to the congress but had naively asked permission to address the crowd so he could get his appeal for world government through to the folks from behind the Iron Curtain. The Reds refused.

The partisans staged a gigantic "peace rally" in the oval Buffalo Stadium just outside Paris. Parades and demonstrations en route had been forbidden by the police. Within, the 'boys let themselves go. Miners paraded in blue denim and flat steel helmets, bearing red banners with the name of the C.G.T. locals on them. They held their fists high in the Communist salute and bellowed the Internationale.

Banners proclaimed: "Our blood will never flow again to make American capitalists rich," and "French women will never send their sons to fight the Soviet Union."

The star speaker was Howard Fast. Cried he: U.S. prisons are "filled with political prisoners" and the "terror is only beginning." The audience lapped it up.

Peace, it was wonderful.

* His recorded address was flown in from Prague, where some 350 delegates refused entrance visas by the French government held an "overflow" peace conference of their own.

* His statement was promptly denounced by Walter White, secretary of the National Association of Colored People, who said: "In the event of any conflict that our nation has with any other nation, we will regard ourselves as Americans . . ."

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