The Contortionists

To East Berlin last week went the intellectual acrobats and performing seals of Communism's traveling peace circus. Two hundred strong, they staged their third meeting of the World Peace Council beneath a Barnum-&-Bailey-sized replica of Picasso's peace dove. And as usually happens when Communists gather under a big tent, the verbal contortionists stole the show.

French Nuclear Physicist Joliot-Curie led off with an exhibition of how to face in two directions at once. In one breath he told the council that U.S. troops in Europe and Korea should go back home where they came from. In the next, he implored the rest of the world to "help the American people out of the isolation in which they are being kept." But it was Ringmaster Stalin's favorite literary gymnast, Author Ilya Ehrenburg, who brought down the house with a faultless demonstration of how to say one thing while meaning another.

"We respect the American people," cooed Ehrenburg, suppressing the other Russian line about the germ-spreading American cannibals (TIME, June 30). "We respect their genius, their achievements in science, their inventiveness, their industry." As for the "happy-go-lucky American character," Ehrenburg admitted that it does have a "certain charm." "It is time the plain American should understand that Russians are not massing to deprive him of his little Ford, that the Chinese have no intention of meddling with his television programs, that Koreans do not lust after Mr. Smith's refrigerator.

The Soviet people want peace, not because they are fainthearted and weak, but be cause they are truly generous. They want peace with America, with the America of the Progressives, the Republicans and the Democrats." In the U.S., Ehrenburg went on, the people are allowed to choose be tween Democrats and Republicans, be tween psychiatry and physiotherapy, be tween vacations in Florida and the Rock ies. But not between war & peace.

Now the olive branch disappeared and out came the stick. Unlike the Russians, Ehrenburg told a cheering audience of some 2,000, the Americans are led by "a little group of madmen dreaming of a new war ... If this handful of criminals decides to impose the American way of life [on the world] by force of arms, that way of life will collapse like a pack of cards."

With these peaceful words, Contortionist Ehrenburg took his seat and the trained seals flapped their flippers thunderously.

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