A Triumph for Global Opinion

Even in Marshall McLuhan's "global village," world opinion remains a force of unpredictable strength. Worldwide indignation did nothing to stop the savagery inflicted on the Biafrans, nor could it persuade the terrorists in Canada to spare the life of Quebec Labor Minister Pierre Laporte (whose three alleged kidnapers were arrested last week outside Montreal). It has had no leverage at all on Hanoi, which has rejected every U.S. proposal for an exchange of P.O.W.s, and continues to hold more than 300 Americans in its prison camps. Yet last week, in two cases that created shock waves throughout the world, opinion had at least a staying effect on regimes that were poised to inflict cruel punishments as warnings to dissidents within their borders.

Both instances--in Spain and the Soviet Union--involved totalitarian regimes that have professed stony insensitivity to world opinion in the past. But they could hardly ignore the startling collection of political bedfellows and adversaries that formed against them last week. Longshoremen in Marseille and Genoa refused to handle either Spanish or Soviet cargo ships. Italy's Communist Party blasted the Soviets for sullying the image of socialism. Italian right-wingers, meanwhile, accused Madrid of doing the same to conservatism. In Lisbon, the Spanish ambassador got a dressing down from a delegation of 40 Portuguese journalists --none of whom have ever been particularly vocal about murders of political dissidents in their own country.

"Without the pressure of Western opinion," said Florence's conservative daily La Nazione, "the Burgos six would have died, and the Russian Jews would have had no hope." Despite last week's turnabouts in Spain and the Soviet Union, however, Woodrow Wilson's conviction that "opinion ultimately governs the world" remains eminently debatable. Though it helped to stay the firing squads in Burgos and Leningrad, that fact holds scant comfort for the 26 convicted dissidents, who still face long and harsh years of imprisonment despite their year-end rescue from execution.

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