WORLD CRISIS: The Mark of Cain

The 20th century’s long parade of horrors, through the villages of the Russian kulaks, into the torture chambers of the Gestapo and the prisons of the Falangists, through the streets of Nanking and Lidice, past the ovens of Buchenwald and the lime pits of Katyn Forest, might have left governments too hardened and peoples too toughened to the news of wholesale brutality and murder. But the hot shiver of fury that circled much of the world last week showed that it has not truly calloused the human heart.

Governments could do little, short of war, to stay Russia’s brutal repression of Hungary. Diplomats could only register protests. But the people could and did respond with a revulsion that grew into a worldwide cry of anguish.

Silence. In Denmark, at noon one day, every church bell in the country chimed in unison, and the nation (pop. 4,500,000) marked five minutes of silence (the last occasion was their deliverance from the Nazis). In Montevideo. Uruguay, students burned the Soviet consulate to the ground. In South Viet Nam, all 123 members of the Legislative Assembly paraded through the streets of Saigon, wearing mourning white in sympathy for Hungary. In Reykjavik, Icelanders roughed up a Communist Member of Parliament, and demands rose for a reconsideration of Iceland’s decision to eject U.S. forces from the NATO air base there.

By coincidence, it was the week of the 39th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution—time for Communists everywhere to celebrate, as the New York Daily Worker put it, the day when “a new era of human society was inaugurated, one that will eventually eliminate all exploitation, war, oppression.” In Soviet embassies and legations around the world huge supplies of vodka went undrunk, caviar uneaten, hypocritical greetings unspoken, and crowds demonstrated outside while un smiling Russian hosts tried to hide their embarrassment at the scarcity of guests.

In most capitals only satellite diplomats, a few neutralists, some Egyptians turned up—and wherever he appeared, the loneliest man was the Hungarian, shunned and shunning. “I hope they choke on their caviar!” said a demonstrator outside the Russian embassy in Stockholm. A Finnish protocol officer, required to attend in Helsinki, insisted: “I’m not thirsty. I’m not hungry.” A pamphlet distributed by students outside the Russian embassy in Washington taunted: “Try our new cocktail . . . freshly mixed in Hungary. It’s spiced with children’s tears and blood.”

The revulsion went far beyond rhetoric. The anger of those who had long hated Communism was joined by the disillusionment of those who could no longer deny their doubts. All over Western Europe. Communists Parties were riven.

France. For the first time, the streets of Paris were dominated by anti-Communist crowds, and at last the myth seemed to be laid to rest that the Com munists were the legitimate heirs of the French Revolution. Anti-Communists of all shades—not just the right—joined in spontaneous demonstrations in Paris. Marseille and Lyon. In Bordeaux they tore down the nameplate on Place Stalingrad, renamed it Place Budapest. Flags flew at half-staff. The National Assembly broke into tumult and fighting after Communists jeered a resolution extending sympathy to the Hungarian rebels. “History will judge those who do not associate themselves with this homage!” cried Foreign Minister Christian Pineau.

Next day more than 25,000 Parisians—including 300 Deputies and Senators, five Cabinet members and five former Premiers —marched up the Champs-Elysees to lay a wreath under the Arc de Triomphe for the Hungarians. After the ceremony, thousands in the crowd, many so young that they carried schoolbooks, made off through the streets singing La Marseillaise and shouting “Thorez to the gallows!”

Their first objective was French Communist Party headquarters. Earlier, the government had offered the Communists police protection, but Party Boss Jacques Duclos refused the help, sure that his party toughs could fend for themselves. When evening fell, a dozen Communists stood guard on balconies before closed iron shutters, as from five narrow streets the mob surged in. The Communists greeted them with a fusillade of bottles, one a Molotov cocktail that exploded in flames in the crowd (see cut). The youths regrouped and rushed the building. One shinnied up a traffic light to fasten a bloodstained Hungarian flag. The others pried at the shutters, smashed the windows and climbed inside.

Communists locked themselves in behind steel walls and doors above the second story. When demonstrators set the building afire, the panicky Reds threatened to open fire with a machine gun. Alarmed, French police broke through and dispersed the mob. Instead of going home, demonstrators surged about eight blocks away to the offices of the Communist newspaper L’Humanité, hurled cobblestones through windows, fought with Communist defenders until past midnight. In all, 106 Frenchmen were injured, and a Communist died of the pummeling he took.

The intellectual carnage inside French Communism was also devastating. While Thorez was praising the “exalting example of the Soviet Union” in shooting down Hungarians, Jean-Paul Sartre, playwright, novelist and grand high cockalorum of existentialism, spoke up for the disenchanted. Sartre, who once wrote one of the theater’s most effective anti-Communist plays. Red Gloves, and then wished he had not, defected once again. ”Intervention [in Hungary] was a crime,” he cried in a four-page protest in the anti-Communist L’Express. “The Red Army fired on an entire people. And the crime for me is not only the tank attack on Budapest. It is also that it was rendered possible by twelve-years of terror and stupidity. I condemn entirely and without reserve the Soviet aggression.”

West Germany. The depression over the sufferings of Hungary was so widespread that radio stations canceled regular programs and switched to serious music; the opening of the annual carnival season was postponed indefinitely; bars and dance halls were empty for much of the week. At noon one day, all work and traffic throughout West Germany was halted for three silent minutes, and for three days flags were lowered to half-staff. There were mass demonstrations in every major city and university town, topped by an outburst of 100,000 in West Berlin.

Italy. In the home of the largest Communist Party outside the Iron Curtain, 3,000 party members in the deep Red city of Rovigo (pop. 14,600) alone reportedly turned in their membership cards last week. Defections were reported all over the country. Pietro Nenni, leader of Italy’s fellow traveling Socialists, announced: “For the first time in many years there is deep disagreement between us and the Communists.” Connoisseurs of his serpentine mind were divided over whether he was capable of honest feeling about suffering anywhere, or just trying to save his own hide in the Communist wreckage. The Netherlands. Even children’s TV shows were interrupted to urge prayers for the Hungarians. Some 30,000 Amster-dammers gathered one night in Dam Square to cheer denunciation of Russia. In Belgium, 5,000 university students stormed the Russian embassy in Brussels. Great Britain. Crowds marched in London streets wearing armbands of mourning. The Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company called off its scheduled trip to Moscow. “Gabriel,” chief political cartoonist of the London Daily Worker for 20 years, quit in disgust. The Oxford University Communist Club met and voted unanimously to dissolve. At a diplomatic party at Buckingham Palace, the Queen nodded stiffly to Soviet Ambassador Jacob Malik and moved on without a word, followed by an equally rigid and unsmiling Queen Mother and Princess Margaret.

There were large areas of the world where there was no revulsion at all (Russians were told vaguely of some “white reaction” in Hungary; China’s 602 million were told just about nothing. In most Moslem nations, the report of the Hungarian bloodshed and the emotional response to it were dulled, even drowned, by indignation at the Franco-British-Israeli invasion of Egypt. An exception: Tunisia’s Moslem Premier Habib Bourguiba, who indicted Russia for “waging pitiless war against a weak country.”

In the Satellites. Poland, for the first time since the war’s end, did not declare a holiday on the Bolshevik anniversary; in Rumania, which has a sizable Hungarian minority, the scheduled Bolshevik Revolution parade was canceled for fear it would provoke anti-Communist disturbances. In a special message to the world, Pope

Pius remembered the words that God spoke to Cain: “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth to me from the earth.” And he added: “The blood of the Hungarian people cries vengeance to the Lord.” The United Nations General Assembly, having already voted, in vain, to send a commission of inquiry into Hungary, voted overwhelmingly to promote large-scale relief for Hungary’s victims, and voted decisively (48-11, with 16 abstentions, mostly all Arab-Asian) to indict Russia for its “intolerable” acts of repression.

An awareness that words alone could not save a single Hungarian life seemed to intensify everyone’s revulsion to the news from Hungary last week. But perhaps the words and deeds were not so ineffectual as people thought. By the spontaneity and depth of their protests the world over, they helped to make Budapest a name that would long reverberate.