Ostriches

The difference between a confused intellectual and an ostrich is that the ostrich cannot manufacture its own sand.

Last week, beaky, squeaky Franc,ois Mauriac, famed French Catholic poet, novelist, playwright and editorialist, ground out some highly refined sand for frightened Frenchmen to stick their heads in. Writing in the Paris daily Le Figaro, Mauriac insisted that he knew the difference "between the iron collar of a totalitarian state and a regime of freedom founded on the respect of the human person.

"It is not that which separates the U.S.S.R. from the U.S.A. which should frighten us," he added, "but rather that which they have in common . . . The institutions and customs of a great democracy [the U.S.], mistress of half of the world, tend to create a type of man who can be utilized to the full and therefore . . . standardized. Indispensable to the two clashing cultures is the treatment of man as a means and not as an end . . ."

Mauriac's lazy escapism finds an echo in the hearts of many Frenchmen and other Europeans--specifically, in important minorities of two French parties, the Socialists and the Catholic M.R.P., who still fondly yearn for some kind of neutral "third force" without links either to the U.S. or Russia. Happily, this cozy view is not representative of France nor of Western Europe. The answer to Mauriac (also published in Le Figaro) came last week. Hard-hitting Commentator Raymond Aron wrote: "The whole [neutrality] argument rests on the hypothesis that Europe's neutrality would be respected in case of war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union ... A perfectly unreasonable hypothesis . . . The 250 million Western Europeans still possess a considerable industrial potential, superior even to Soviet potential. Why should the Russians not want to mobilize it? Whether we like it or not, in our epoch there is no choice between belligerence and neutrality; when one doesn't fight, like a free man, for one's self, one fights, like a slave, for a master.

"France will continue to be a theater of the cold war, tomorrow like today, with or without an Atlantic pact. Let's not forget that it is the Soviet Union which has a quarrel with all free peoples, and not the American republic which has a quarrel with the Soviet Union."

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