Big Lie

In the modern art of international propaganda, the Communists have scored a triumph of sorts.

With a massive outpouring of hate and vilification, they are now pillorying Americans as depraved monsters who have unleashed germ warfare on the people of North Korea and China.

U.S. spokesmen, echoed by the British Foreign Office, have scornfully belittled the propaganda as a monstrous and incredible Big Lie. Through the U.N., the International Red Cross has offered to investigate, and has been brusquely rebuffed by the Communists. Meanwhile, the Big Lie is spread with undiminished intensity by Russian and Chinese press and radio, by such native-son instruments as New York's Daily Worker and the West Coast's Daily People's, by France's Humanite and its Communist-Physicist Frederic Joliot-Curie.

In Red China since February, as much as a third of press space and radio time has been given over to the theme: infected bread and fish, plague-carrying fleas and other insects are being dropped on

Chinese villages and cities by U.S. airmen. In Russia and its satellite nations, the outcry is almost as clamorous. In Western Europe, U.S. denials are swamped by "eyewitness reports."

Last week, for example, Radio Moscow named five British businessmen who, after arranging a $28,000,000 commercial deal with Russia at the recent Moscow trade conference, journeyed on to Peking. There they studied a bacteriological warfare exhibit which was supposed to show germ-carrying U.S. bombs. Exclaimed one Briton: "Inconceivable that the evidence shown us was forged." Communist organs in France are whipping up a demonstration against the new NATO Commander Matthew Ridgway, who is being denounced as the "microbe killer." Capping it all, the Pyongyang radio has been broadcasting the "confessions" of two captured

U.S. airmen, giving their names and serial numbers, and quoting their alleged denunciation of the "inhuman Wall Street capitalism" that forced them to engage in germ warfare.

The Big Lie is making progress--as big lies often do. In Western Europe it is weakening the moral weight of the U.S., especially among the neutralists. European officials are worried--and puzzled over how to challenge the slander. Last week U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson felt compelled to answer it publicly.

Said Acheson: "Utterly false Communist charges . . . part of the 'hate America' line which is now being supplemented with a 'hate Americans' line.

"Sowing the seeds of hate among people may in the Communist view produce some short-range benefits, but I am convinced that, as their cynicism is increasingly revealed, [the Communists] will find that they were in fact sowing the wind."

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