No Marching in the Streets

While the imposition of martial law in Poland has been resoundingly denounced by many leading Eurocommunists, the crackdown has failed to elicit the same kind of emotional response from Europe's pacifists. Accustomed to portraying the U.S. as the chief threat to world peace, leaders of the antinuclear crusade have been confounded by General Wojciech Jaruzelski's move against the Polish workers that had evidently been ordered by Moscow. In all of Europe, only a few thousand have demonstrated against Poland's imposition of martial law, although more than 2 million people had turned out for anti-nuclear weapons rallies in major European cities last fall.

In West Germany, the key country in the antinuclear movement, the activists tended to approve of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's initial lukewarm reaction to Jaruzelski's crackdown. Typical was the attitude of Erhard Eppler, a member of the national executive committee of Schmidt's Social Democratic Party and a foe of the nuclear arms race. "For the most part, the peace movement was just as disgusted with what happened in Poland as anyone else," Eppler told TIME Senior Correspondent William Rademaekers. "The events were a shock, but the shock was overshadowed by the very emotional reaction of the Reagan Administration . . . If there is any nation in the world that should not show too much indignation at military governments and martial laws, it is the U.S.--the world's biggest backer of military regimes."

At the first large gathering of the peace movement in West Germany since the military takeover in Poland, the Max Planck Institute's Alfred Mechtersheimer argued in Frankfurt two weeks ago that the Polish crisis has "enlarged the danger of war," but not so much because of what the Communists had done. The real problem was U.S. willingness to "take risks" in reacting to the crisis and "make every political crisis a potential point of departure for war in the erroneous belief that a nuclear war may be both conducted and limited."

In Britain the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament condemned martial law in Poland. Its leaders, however, are unwilling to take stronger action, because they do not want to side with the U.S. Says Bruce Kent, the C.N.D. head: "We will come in with the Americans when they will treat Turkey, Haiti and El Salvador the way they are treating Poland." By far the strongest condemnation of the events in Poland was issued by the Dutch Inter-Church Peace Council, which had been one of the most effective peace groups that organized protests against the deployment of U.S. missiles. The council conceded that the situation in Poland had been an enormous setback for the pacifist movement. Said Council Leader Mient-Jan Faber: "We were bewildered and outraged."

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