The Curtain of Ignorance

(See Cover)

One major nation, and one only, has been pronounced "aggressor" by the United Nations. That nation is Red China.

Last week Britain's Clem Attlee emerged from a month's wining and dining with the aggressors and pronounced them charming fellows. "The West has nothing to fear from Communist China," he declared. Furthermore, he assured an audience in Australia, when he stopped off for a little visit, that the Communists had given China the most honest government in its history (a matter of 5,000 years or more). His words came clearly, if a little oddly, over the sound of Communist artillery hammering Quemoy and the howls of Red Chinese leaders for the "liberation" of Formosa.

Among fellow Britons, Socialist Clement Attlee is widely regarded as a sensible man (a position that the rest of the Western world does not necessarily share). But last week Attlee and thousands of other Britons were suffering from a need to believe--a need to believe that Communism really is not plotting the free world's destruction (despite what the Reds have long said), plans no more nastiness (despite what the Communists and satellites have done and still do, at home and abroad), and wants only "peaceful coexistence" if the West will just extend a trusting hand. As the horror of atomic and later of hydrogen warfare burned more deeply into Britain's consciousness, the need became more insistent (every Briton knows the statistic that four to eight well-placed nuclear bombs would just about wipe out his island). As the years went by and the assault never came, the belief became easier.

To such compulsive dreamers, warnings from the U.S. became irritating saber-rattlings. Last week in the land of the U.S.'s strongest ally, the compulsive belief was the central political fact. And the trip of Clement Attlee and the seven Laborites was both the result of it and the chief encouragement for it.

Whisper in Great Cornard. Like most political tempests, this one began as a whisper in the grass roots. Young (34) Len Fisher is the local handyman in Great Cornard, a village of 1,000 souls which has drowsed on Suffolk's green plains through seven centuries of British history. He is also secretary of the local Labor Party, and early last year, he got to thinking. Like many another Briton, especially of Socialist persuasion, he was worried about the hostility between Communism and the West. And he was worried about rearming the Germans. So he sat down at a table in his cottage. In his careful, council-school hand, he wrote out:

"Resolved: That the Labor Party arrange for an official delegation to visit the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China as a step forward to more friendly relations between East and West." Eight of the village Laborites met in the cottage of old Bill Webb, the village road sweeper, and approved Len's resolution. In due course, Len's resolution reached the Labor Party's annual conference at Margate.

The conference did not get to Len's resolution last year. But it caught the eye of General Secretary Morgan Phillips, a stocky ex-miner from Wales, one of Labor's shrewdest political brains and a politico who can sniff a budding political bloom a year off. Had not the Conservatives profited by Churchill's appeal for one more "parley at the summit"? Phillips dispatched a letter to Peking. Months later, at Geneva, China's Chou En-lai gave a benevolent go-ahead.

If it had not been for Clement Attlee, the trip might have been just another junket. But 71-year-old Clem Attlee, who had been Prime Minister of Great Britain (1945-51) and might be again, decided to go himself. Britons never forget that Attlee was the man who, in 1947, ordered Britain to rearm against the threat of Communism, who with these words sent British troops into Korea in 1950 to repel Communist aggressors: "They talk of freedom while they murder it. They talk of peace while they support aggression. They are ruthless and unscrupulous hypocrites who pretend to virtues which their philosophy rejects." "They won't fool old Clem," said pub pundits with satisfaction.

Mission to Moscow. Why did Attlee go? In political terms, it was because he knew that rabble-rousing Nye Bevan would go. Attlee, as a supporter of German rearmament, well knew that he will come under heavy attack from Bevan's left-wing supporters at the Labor Party conference at Scarborough late this month. If Attlee did not go, Nye would appear the anointed apostle of peace, bringing fair-sounding pledges from Malenkov and Mao. And Bevan could paint Attlee as the dour and unpopular proponent of "Guns for the Huns" who refused to go.

Besides, as Socialist Richard Grossman put it: "Attlee has seized the peace initiative from Churchill." There were risks.

He might annoy the U.S. (which he has-often done) or he might make a fool of himself (ditto). But baiting the U.S. is always a politically profitable exercise in Britain. As for making a fool of himself, Britons have never condemned any statesman for going anywhere with the hand of friendship extended--not even (at the time) Neville Chamberlain.

Politically, it was a sound guess. Polls showed that Britons approved the trip more than 2 to 1. Labor voters were for it overwhelmingly. Some Tory papers deplored the trip, but chiefly because it might offend the U.S. The belief in "peaceful coexistence" is not exclusive to Socialists in Britain.

The little group of seven men and one woman who climbed aboard a plane early last month and set off for Moscow looked as nondescript as any lot of gawking sightseers. There was little old (69) Wilfred Burke, a colorless trade unionist whom rotation had made chairman of the Labor Party. Three others were hard-knuckled unionists: knobby Harry Earnshaw of the textile workers, big, handsome Harry Franklin of the railwaymen, shrewd, balding Sam Watson, a longtime battler of Communists in Durham's "Little Moscow" coal fields. And there was tall, leggy Dr. Edith Summerskill, onetime Minister of National Insurance and a militant feminist, who has terrified British males of all political hues by demanding that husbands pay their wives wages.

Self-constituted group manager and perhaps the most optimistic was Secretary Morgan Phillips, who cherishes the belief that Communists can be changed. He likes to recall another Labor Party trip he arranged to Yugoslavia, when he spent long hours over rakija with Tito, persuading him to make a break with Moscow. "I have great hopes of this visit to China," he confided. "It could be as historic as was our Yugoslav journey."

Even Bevan himself, though noisily Marxist, has a somewhat jaundiced eye for Communism as a system. Bevan is too much a demagogue to approve a system where demagogery is without influence, too much an opportunist to like a system that demands unquestioning submission to discipline. In the tense days before the Berlin airlift, Bevan was one of the few who wanted to send an armored train through the Soviet blockade to relieve Berlin.

Phlox & Talks. The Russians, in no mood to niggle when they had such a good thing, welcomed the travelers like long-lost brothers. They sent a special VIP plane to Helsinki to pick them up, put them up lavishly in the Sovietskaya Hotel in suites complete with pianos and radios. "Truly a place for important people," glowed Unionist Harry Franklin. Georgy Malenkov himself invited them out to a handsome country dacha, and after picking a bunch of phlox and gladioli for Dr. Summerskill, told her gallantly: "What has been wrong too often in the world of education is that men have been too impertinent and women overmodest." Dr. Edith agreed.

At dinner, somewhat tanked up on vodka, Nikita Khrushchev discoursed freely, "since I am neither Prime Minister nor Foreign Minister but only the Secretary of the Communist Party." Khrushchev's theme: European peace could be guaranteed by nations with common interests--Russia, Poland, France and Britain. In the U.S., he went on, there are some who want war, and demand that Russia make concessions even before negotiations start. Russia would never give in as the price for negotiation. He then toasted "peaceful coexistence."

Nye Bevan brought up the subject of a U.N. seat for Red China. The U.S. might agree to exclude Nationalist China from the Security Council, he suggested helpfully, and admit Red China to the Assembly. And then after a while, Red China could be moved up to the Council. Khrushchev became very angry. China was not a "beggar," he snapped, but a great nation seeking its rights. "A very downright person," Attlee pronounced

Khrushchev, "but I got the impression that though he did not speak very much, Mr. Malenkov was the dominating personality."

Next day the Britons gawked at a lavish agricultural exhibit, where Bevan peered dourly at the gilt-and-gingerbread buildings, commenting: "Pure Victorian. All show. This is the Victorian age of Russia. An immense show of wealth, concealing poverty. The landau at the door, the servants in the attic." At lunch there were long silences between toasts, broken at last by Attlee, who abruptly asked: "How do you get your milk in Moscow?" The Russians told them, in a laborious hum of translation, broken by the clear, social-worker voice of Dr. Edith: "I'm not interested in yield. What about safety? Are all your supplies pasteurized?"

That night Malenkov broke a personal precedent by dining with them at the British embassy, lingered long after midnight.

Off to Peking. Next day, singing their Moscow hosts' praises, the delegation took off for Peking. Franklin burbled of the "never-to-be-forgotten" sight of the Kremlin by moonlight, described Molotov as "carefree of spirit ... He left an impression upon me of being perfectly sincere," while Malenkov "cannot resist that friendly grin when someone has made a crack at the Russians or one of their particular policies." Wrote Morgan Phillips: "I am convinced--unless I know nothing of international affairs and human be havior--that the personal friendliness shown to us in the Soviet Union has been altogether genuine . . ..There are grounds for a renewal of optimism."

Seven British journalists (among them correspondents of the London Times and the Daily Worker) had been invited also, but long before they reached China, Morgan Phillips firmly put the press in its place. He forbade any Laborite to talk to the journalists. "We are not going to have you people breathing down our necks and have to be on our guard about what we say for 24 hours a day," said Phillips. Everywhere the group went, the Chinese were forced to double all arrangements--a plane for the delegation and a plane for the press. Reporters were shut out of factories until the delegates had left, or shunted off from corridors until the delegates had passed.

The two sets of travelers dropped down on Peking, where the new workers' state had imposed its own bare order on the ancient city's leisurely ways. From dawn to dusk, music floated from loudspeakers to soothe and encourage the workers. Huge portraits of Mao Tse-tung, Stalin and Malenkov glowered from the walls of the Forbidden City, and soldiers armed with automatic rifles were everywhere ("to guard against invasion from Formosa," the Chinese explained). The Socialist delegates from Britain marveled at the disappearance of filth and the smell of human refuse from the streets, wondered aloud at the absence of beggars, exclaimed over the universal refusal to take a tip.

The people, noted Unionist Harry Earnshaw, "appear happy, well-fed, and smiling--in cheerful contrast to the gloomy faces of the people in Moscow . . . We saw no evidence of hunger or famine. Indeed, it would be impossible for the people to work as hard as they do if they were not receiving adequate food." Old China hands among the correspondents disagreed: "All gaiety and charm have disappeared," wrote one. "There are obvious signs of starvation amongst many potbellied, naked little boys and girls sitting apathetically beside gutters ..."

The No. I Tour. The Communists showed off new factories, rattled off health statistics (they have abolished plague, cut the infant death rate from 20% to 4%, they claimed). They invited criticism, were respectfully eager to learn. The delegates asked to see a jail. Inspecting it, they noted, without apparent alarm, that two-thirds of the several thousand inmates were political prisoners, marveled at how hard they worked. "We do not even scold them," said the prison director. Correspondents discovered why: nearly all were under sentence of death, were allowed two years' grace to see whether a prisoner "truly and sincerely would see the error of his ways."

The unionists were disturbed to find that union leaders are not workers but party functionaries. Working conditions are poor, they agreed, but Harry Earnshaw happily reported that improvements "are being slowly made, not--as might be thought--by ruthless sweating, but by active and willing cooperation among the workers in the exercise of what is called 'social conscience,' and by methods which are not inconsistent with our union traditions, and which are selflessly designed to increase production."

A sample of such "social-conscience" methods was provided inadvertently when the delegation flew up to Manchuria to visit new steel mills provided by the Russians. At an old coal mine, which had been confiscated from the British (the fact was not mentioned), a foreman had been tried a few days before by a people's court convened on the spot, and summarily shot for inefficiency and sabotage. This, at least, seemed to distress some of the visitors.

But their distress quickly faded before what they regarded as an extraordinary note: "No flies." Said Franklin: "The most remarkable development in the world in the past 50 years." The British delegates, who, like all Socialists, love tidy planning, learned that cards are posted in each house, on which the resident must note the number of flies, rats and cockroaches killed. "The householder's rent is raised if insects are found on the premises," explained Franklin. He added, with the expansive generalization that characterized the delegates' utterances: "I don't think the peasants are very interested in political matters. Their desires are more material, for it is food and security they value, and it is for this reason they praise and accept the leadership of the Communist Party." Wrote one correspondent, sourly: "It was impossible to say what the people thought, because nobody was allowed near them."

Happy Hospitality. But the delegation, in the happy swirl of rice wine, tinkling gongs, friendly smiles and endless toasts, seemed not to notice. Premier Chou En-lai himself welcomed them at the Peking Pavilion of Purple Light, launching a round of banqueting, toast-drinking and speechmaking that lasted for 19 days. In Peking's sweltering heat, the Laborites downed innumerable toasts, consumed huge quantities of shark fins, lotus root and roasted duck skin, amid a continuous flutter of fans. At banquets, Chou linked arms with

Attlee, made a ritual of rising, walking along the table to clink his glass in gracious courtesy with each delegate. He toasted world peace, Anglo-Chinese friendship, Queen Elizabeth. Chou even attended a banquet given by British Charge d'Affaires Humphrey Trevelyan, whose very presence Chou had ignored for more than a year.

Two-Way Traffic. At last Mao Tse-tung himself received them in a secret rendezvous in the Forbidden City. Over fragrant tea and flanked by Chou and the party's chief theoretician, Liu Shao-chi, Mao-asked solicitously if they were tired from their rounds, and Franklin admitted that all of them together would not make one "Model Worker." But Mao was in a serious mood. ("He would make an outstanding labor negotiator," said Earn-shaw.) Blandly, he laid on the line his terms for coexistence. He wanted Attlee to ask the U.S. to 1) withdraw the U.S. Seventh Fleet and abandon its support of Chiang; 2) cease arming Japan; 3) cease arming Germany.

According to Attlee's own account, "I pointed out that a two-way traffic was needed, and that they might propose to their Russian friends the giving of complete freedom to all the satellite states to choose their own governments, the reduction of armaments in the most heavily armed state in the world, Russia, and the cessation of Russian-inspired activities in other countries." Then Mao complained that the U.S. was "aggressive and was seeking to build up a ring of subordinate states from Japan to Indo-China. Whereupon I said: 'As Russia has done in Europe?' "

The preposterous effect was of two moderate, reasonable men restraining the (equally) reprehensible acts of two obstreperous partners. Attlee himself seemed to regard this episode as showing how he stood up to the Communists, and Moscow's Pravda obligingly reacted a few days later by denouncing Attlee's unfortunate remarks after the Russians had shown him such a good time.

In Shanghai, that abandoned monument to British mercantile capitalism, Attlee & Co. talked happily of more trade, but made no serious effort to seek out the embittered British businessmen who have been struggling for five years to settle up their firms' affairs and get permission to leave. Once there were 5,000 British in Shanghai; now there, are 186, the men sitting forlornly in their empty offices, reading detective stories because the Chinese will let them do nothing else. The golf courses where Englishmen had played, the clubs where billiard balls had clicked, were silent and desolate. As for reports that things are now a little easier, one businessman snapped: "Oh, yes, the lift boy says 'Good morning' to you again, but they are still taking away the lift."

Tired, hot and irritable, the pilgrims stopped off for a two-day rest at the ancient beauty spot of Hangchow, where pagodas rim lovely West Lake, in which gold carp come at a visitor's clap. Swimming in a pool in the grounds of a former Buddhist temple, gliding over the lake, the delegation seemed oblivious of the landing craft they had seen assembled along Shanghai's Whangpoo River, and of the Peking radio's loud declaration that China intended to liberate Formosa forthwith--and would "brook no U.S. occupation, no U.N. trusteeship, no neutralization."

In Canton, where the authorities hastily had the main streets painted and beggars and refugees hustled out of sight, Morgan Phillips issued a farewell statement for the delegation: "We sympathize with the efforts the Chinese people are making . . . This sympathy and understanding should be shown by the rest of the world in immediate and practical form." With that, they emerged into the outer world at Hong Kong.

Hong Kong Impressions. Attlee and most British Socialists have never entirely believed that the Chinese Communists are real Communists; they regard them as the product of a genuine popular revolt against Chiang Kai-shek's government, and believe that much of Red China's hostility comes from the U.S. refusal to grant it recognition. At a press conference in Hong Kong, Attlee admitted that his "impressions" had not much changed. But the man who had said he knew eyewash when he saw it professed not to have been taken in: "We found, and expected to find, that China is being run by Communists on principles with which we do not agree." Other impressions:

P: "The evidence that we had everywhere is that the Chinese have a government that is incorruptible."

P: "There is no pretense that everything is all right yet. That is an engaging contrast with Russia, where we were always assured that they are ahead of the whole world in everything."

P: Government hostility to missionaries and religious bodies is "more due to nationalism rather than Communism."

(Snapped the Rt. Rev. Daniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne: "How could he be the vehicle of so much misin formation?")

Attlee's most astonishing statement: "I believe that the Chinese peasant has got a government that is doing something for him, which is concerned with the prosperity of the peasant, and rests upon the confidence of the peasant population." Old China hands were amazed. Even Red China's leaders acknowledge repeatedly that the government does not have the confidence of "the greater part of the peasant masses." Snorted the Hong Kong Standard: "It almost appeared as if the Laborite mission had not really visited China at all, but some mythical country of the same name magically erected in the clouds by the Communists."

Fresh Fatuities. Attlee, met by his wife in Singapore, last week coursed on down to Australia (at the government's invitation), spraying fresh fatuities as he went. In Darwin, he remarked that "I do not think we need have any worries about Communist China. Communist Chi na is too busy looking after its 600 million people. That's twelve times as many as I had to look after when I was Prime Minister." In Canberra, he assured a group of Australian M.P.s that "the whole Chinese people are out for peace," and declared that the Chinese leaders were "genuine idealists." ("Nehru has never gone as far as that," said one astonished Indian M.P.)

Is Clem Attlee as gullible as he seems? It is hard to tell from his curious, deadpan way of writing and speaking. His sentences frequently end on a tentative note, as if the point will come in the next paragraph. He can be bafflingly bland. Sample (from his autobiographical account of his first trip to Moscow in 1936): "Unfortunately, my visit preceded by a few weeks the big purges, which removed a number of [the leading men] I had contacted, notably Marshal Tukhachevski." Attlee could walk with Dante through hell and emerge remarking that "different people had different tastes, but it did seem rather too hot."

In a series of articles for the New York Times, Clem Attlee did register some grey reservations. "The trade unions are not organizations for the protection of the workers, they are instruments for obtaining greater production and for insuring the docility of the workers."

P: "One morning some of us had a long session with representatives of the churches. They told us that freedom of religion was allowed, and the only arrests of bishops and priests had been due to their political and not to their religious activities. I was somewhat skeptical as to this, and the men we saw were, I thought, rather a hand-picked lot and not very impressive, especially the leading personality, who seemed almost as devotedly a Communist adherent as the Dean of Canterbury." -I "Regarding [trade], I do not think that one can expect a great development." While Attlee coasted south, Bevan and the others made a quick trip to Japan. Bevan echoed Attlee: "It is wrong to consider that the Communists will invade other countries," said Bevan. "They propose peaceful coexistence of the East and West camps." China, he predicted, "will not be content to play second fiddle to the Soviet Union." Communist Chinese leaders seemed to have "great elasticity" compared to the "set pattern" of Russian thinking, Nye went on. "Soviet leaders when conferring with Malenkov seemed petrified with fear in his presence, rather than having respect for him."

Riding the Stampede. As the tourists made their several ways back to Britain, the compulsive belief in the possibility of "peaceful coexistence" seemed to be swelling back home. Britain's powerful Trades Union Congress, the right wing of the Labor Party, gathered in convention at Brighton. A motion in favor of German rearmament, which went through overwhelmingly last time, barely squeaked through last week. In two weeks-the Labor Party itself will be holding its annual conference. If conservative unions like the T.U.C. have so little enthusiasm for tasks such as German rearmament, what could be expected from the Socialist constituencies, where Nye Bevan has his greatest strength? Clem Attlee and Labor's moderate leadership are in for trouble.

Attlee is a firm believer in the dictum that he who stands up to a stampede only gets stomped on; the way to handle a stampede is to ride with it, and perhaps turn it. But in trying to turn the coexistence stampede, Attlee the moderate had ridden closer and closer to the Bevanite position. Last week some began to wonder whether Clem Attlee was trying to turn the stampede or lead it.

To the U.S., the argument was not merely an academic exercise involving a minority party. A Gallup poll last week in the London News Chronicle shows the Tories have lost sharply in recent months; if an election were held now, the Labor Party would get 48% of the vote, Churchill's Tories only 42%. If and when Labor came to power, the opinions, prejudices and rationalizations of Labor's touring troubadours could have disturbing consequences for everybody.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.