THE NATIONS: Flight of the Dove

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WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH —Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell

Among the most significant phenomena at San Francisco last week was one invisible to the naked eye. It was a slow shower of feathers. The Communists’ dove of peace, the bird that walks like a bear, had lost most of its plumage.

Was that the last the world would see of the raddled bird? Far from it. As the Communists well knew, given a quick laundering, a brush, and a few weeks to grow its feathers back, the peace dove would look as fat and fair as ever to the party faithful and to people of short memory.

Communism’s dove of peace was hatched long ago. The Russian Revolution of 1917, in fact, was achieved largely by pacifist slogans. Then the Bolsheviks went on, as Lenin knew they would, to make a bloody civil war. Since then, the dove has been more or less important in Communist mythology. To understand what happened to the dove at San Francisco, it is necessary to understand the recent rebirth of Communism’s strange bird.

Three years ago, the Communists’ seal-like genius Pablo Picasso drew a dove. Its wings beat over Europe, Asia, America. Before he came forth with his design, the new dove line had been hatched within the walls of the Kremlin. In 1947, the Kremlin concluded that everything possible had been squeezed out of Franklin Roosevelt’s era of the grand design. The West had turned firm and patient. It had begun to rearm. The Kremlin’s answer was the peace offensive and the dove.

Fledgling Years. Even the shrewd dismissed it as a relatively harmless propaganda device. It was not. The peace propaganda campaign was a coldly calculated master plan to sabotage the West’s efforts to restore the world’s free economies and to defend itself.

In October 1947, Andrei Zhdanov laid down the line at the first meeting of the Cominform. The U.S., said Zhdanov, had launched “an aggressive and openly expansionist policy” aimed at the “preparation of a new imperialist war.” He added significantly: “Between the wish of the imperialists to loose a new war and the possibility of organizing such a war, there lies a vast distance.”

. . . Of Exceptional Dimensions. A little later, Paris’ official Cahiers du Communisme spelled out the policy more explicitly. Cahiers proclaimed that the “leaders of the U.S.S.R.” had laid out “a plan of exceptional dimensions”—an “offensive of the world forces of peace.” Cahiers outlined the plot: “Principal direction of effort: to isolate ‘American imperialism’ and its ‘servants . . .’ Vulnerable points of the adversary: the economic crisis and the general crisis of capitalism which threaten it; the will for peace of all those threatened by ‘imperialist adventures.’ ”

So began the “fight for peace.” The Cominform called it “the pivot of the entire activity of the Communist Parties.” The cry of peace could oppose the keeping of U.S. troops in Europe; it could stir up workers by blaming low wages and high prices on rearmament programs; it could prey on mothers whose sons must fight, on men of God who hated war, on the indifferent and the despairing, on the timid who feared that arming for self-defense was provocative.

At Wroclaw (formerly Breslau) in Poland in 1948, a “group of French and Polish intellectuals” held the World Congress of Intellectuals. Many men of good will attended, to hear Russians like Alexander Fadeyev, secretary general of the Union of Soviet Writers, lambast America. Some, like British Scientist Julian Huxley, returned to complain in apparent bewilderment that the congress “preached war, not peace.” The congress paid no attention, elected a permanent International Committee of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, and planned national branches to hold other peace meetings.

Next, there was the “Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace” in Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria in March 1949, where U.S. left-wingers applauded the U.S.S.R.’s “fight for peace.” Cried U.S. Playwright Clifford (Waiting for Lefty) Odets: “I cannot blame the Soviet Union because an apocalyptic beast is running loose in our world today, and its name is money, money, money.”

In Berlin, the airlift planes droned on, balking the Reds’ attempt to starve the city. The Chinese Communists marched toward Nanking.

The Emblem. Not until the spring of 1949 did the dove achieve bodily form. As the World Peace Congress met in Paris, Communist Poet Louis Aragon went to Pablo Picasso, who likes to say, “I came to the Party as to a fountain.” Aragon wanted an emblem, and his eye fell on a lithograph of a dove on the wall. “Ha,” said Aragon. The World Peace Congress, after hearing Baritone Paul Robeson assail “the slanders of the American mercenary press,” happily adopted Picasso’s dove and happily applauded Fadeyev’s attack on the makers of the North Atlantic Pact. “We, the people of the world, shall punish you severely,” cried Fadeyev in his most peace-like manner.

At Paris, the World Peace Congress found a title (“The Partisans of Peace”) and “elected” a permanent bureau, which comprised the men who have fronted for the peace movement in its various titles ever since. France’s Frédéric Joliot-Curie, president of the Communists’ World Federation of Scientific Workers, was president.

Forth from the Paris conference flew Picasso’s dove, to breed wondrously. The dove was plastered on posters, stamped on ash trays and handkerchiefs, brooches and earrings. Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland and Russia put it on postage stamps. It was stamped on tickets to rallies in France and on banners to fly over the rallies; in Belgium, they made it out of spaghetti and macaroni for sale to peace-lovers. On U.S. automobiles in France, little dove stickers appeared, with the words “American, go home. We want peace.”

The Moonbeam & the Wind. The bird’s finest hour came when French Communist Pierre Gamarra turned it into a charming fable. The wind and a moonbeam visit Pablo Picasso in his home on the Riviera. They beg him for a bird, big and strong, to carry a little girl to Wonderland. “To Wonderland?” asks Picasso, rubbing his chin. “What’s wrong with this little girl?” “She’s afraid of war,” whispers the wind. Whereupon Picasso seizes his pen and draws a white dove.

As by a miracle, the dove rises from the paper and joins the moonbeam and the wind in flight back to the little girl’s room. The little girl sits on the dove’s back and off they fly, across the Alps, the Caucasus, the Urals. “Voici l’immense Union Soviétique. A great, a very great country,” says the dove. “Yes, a big country full of song,” agrees the little girl. “Here they work and sing,” says the dove. “And now, look here, the Himalaya, and down there is China.” “I hear the singing in China, too,” says the little girl. “Another big country,” explains the dove.

They arrive over America. “This is the kingdom of death,” says the wind in a grave voice. “This is the vultures’ hideout. Here the monsters are laying eggs, destructive eggs. A single one of these eggs will burn everything, if it is dropped on a town. Women will weep and little children will cry over their dead mothers’ bodies . . .” “Bombs, bombs, that’s what you mean,” stammers the little girl. But one deep, beautiful voice arises from America, below. “Who is that man singing?” asks the girl. “It is Paul Robeson, one of the greatest singers in the world,” says the dove. Finally, the dove and the girl land in Stockholm and in Warsaw, where many other doves arrive, thousands of doves, millions of doves. Like snowflakes they descend from the sky. And the vultures are frightened and are driven back into the land of eternal darkness.

They Cried for Peace. Always, in Communist whimsy and in hard-boiled oration, the dove cried “peace.” In eight languages the signs on East Berlin buildings proclaimed: “Peace, Pax, Paix, Paz, Pace, Frieden, Béke, Mir.” There were peace days, peace weeks, peace bicycle races, peace dances, peace cigarettes. Japanese could buy a sedative called the Sleep of Peace and enjoy it on a Peace mattress.

And for peace meetings, Communism trotted out its shiniest fronts and most attractive faces: artists like Pablo Picasso, Rockwell Kent and Diego Rivera, authors like Howard Fast, clergy like Britain’s Dr. Hewlett (“Red Dean of Canterbury”) Johnson, and Metropolitan Nikolai of the Russian Orthodox Church.

“Are You for Peace?” Two years ago at Stockholm the Peace Partisans launched their great petition campaign. It was called the World Peace Appeal but it said nothing about peace. It did not condemn aggression. Those who bothered to read it found that it merely demanded the unconditional prohibition of the atomic bomb—the one counterweight to the vast Red Army

Millions signed, in confusion and innocence. “Are you for peace?” the collectors demanded. It was difficult to say no. By the fall of 1950, the Communists counted 450 million signatures, including 1,500,000 from the U.S., more Bulgarian signatures than there were Bulgarians, 243,500,000 Chinese, and so many Hungarian signatures that apparently every Hungarian down to two-and-a-half-year-olds had signed. The Peace Partisans collected thumbprints from illiterate East Indians, summoned African Negroes to peace-signing with jungle drums. Complained an Italian Communist: “During the last unit meeting, I told them I had already signed. The organizer replied: ‘Peace can be served with one, two, three, or 20 signatures.’ So I signed again.”

But they also got signatures of many an eminent man who should have known better. Italy’s Elder Statesman Vittorio Emanuele Orlando signed; so did ex-Premier Saverio Nitti. In Canada, Clergyman Alexander James Wilson signed because “I would do anything under heaven to ensure peace.” In the days when the dove was really flapping, his prize victim was Henry Wallace, who pleaded that the Russians were misunderstood and that “the tougher we get, the tougher the Russians get.” Others confusedly offered plans for “proving” the U.S. meant no offense. Example: Connecticut’s Senator Brien McMahon’s proposal for atomic disarmament in return for a $50 billion program of global aid, to include the Russians.

But the dove also fooled harder-headed men, and less obviously. For one of the dove’s faces is terror. To the Russians, the peace-lovers warned, the least gesture of self-defense looks hostile. Russians were so nervous, in fact, that the slightest thing might terrify them into fighting. Such pleaders urged a peace of paralysis. In Germany Pastor Martin Niemoller and Kurt Schumacher’s Socialists argued inanely that though the Communists had built the East German army to 200,000 men, the formation of a few West German battalions would provoke war.

Expanding Peace. Korea was a blow that would have killed a less resilient bird than Russia’s dove. Just before the invasion, the Peace Partisans announced that more than half the North Korean population had signed the Stockholm Peace Appeal. But the redoubtable peace-lovers quickly set to work. “Mothers are to instill into their children a deep hatred of the imperialist warmongers, the murderers of Korean women and children,” announced the Bulgarian Peace Congress. Early this year, something called the World Peace Council demanded that the United Nations withdraw its charge that the Chinese were aggressors.

“The growing resistance of the colonial and dependent countries to aggression,” the council explained smoothly, “constitutes a natural contribution to the cause of the preservation of peace.” Without a break in stride, the China Peace Committee cheerfully changed its name to the “Chinese People’s Committee in Defense of World Peace and Against American Aggression.”

Marked Word. Had the Communists captured the word “peace”? No, but they had left their mark on it. In South Africa, the moderate Rand Daily Mail wrote: “In some parts of America, if anyone talks of peace, they send for the police.” In Bonn, the movie To Live In Peace was a box-office flop because West Germans thought it was Communist propaganda. Pope Pius himself felt impelled to declare last year: “Some—you know who—accused the Church, the Pope, of wanting war . . . No, no, this is not true. The Church detests war with its horrors. It wants peace.”

What did the Communists mean by peace? They did not mean coexistence. “As long as capitalism and socialism remain, we cannot live in peace. In the end one or the other will triumph—a funeral requiem will be sung either over the Soviet Republic or over world capitalism,” wrote Lenin.

Assault & Siege. Did that mean that Communism wanted war? Not necessarily. Lenin, who wrote nothing without purpose, once wrote admiringly of the tactics used by a Russian at Port Arthur: “Without testing the strength of the fortress by the practical attempt to carry it by assault, without testing the power of the resistance of the enemy, there would have been no ground for adopting the prolonged method of struggle.” In Korea the Communists had tried an assault. They had found a startling resistance. They had also forced an association of the free nations tinder that assault. Facing that fact in San Francisco, they may decide to adopt the prolonged method of struggle.

If the Communists believed their doctrine, they were deeply confident that “the imperialists” were bound by their inherent “antagonisms and contradictions” to fall out among themselves. “The soundest strategy in war is to postpone operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the delivery of the mortal blow possible and easy,” advises Lenin.

Signs & Portents. Last week the dove’s defeathered wings flapped noisily, as the Soviet Peace Council announced a nationwide drive for signatures to the current World Peace Council appeal for a five-power conference to include Russia, the U.S., Britain, France and Red China (the World Peace Council claimed 430,870,591 had signed already in 48 countries). But in Kaesong, the truce talks stayed stalled. In Berlin, the Communists had twitched the noose of blockade by imposing a road tax on incoming vehicles, and Gromyko muttered of “a new war.”

No one would surely know what the Kremlin planned until the Kremlin struck. Until then, the peace dove would be around for a long time, crying to all who would listen: “Peace, it’s wonderful.”

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.