PLAIN PEOPLE: A Scout Is Existentialist

Some of Europe’s matrons and moppets got a clearer idea last week of how they were expected to fit into the Communist scheme of things. The lesson for both: don’t have any truck with international organizations connected with the West.

In Bucharest, demonstrators surged about the building where the Rumanian Red Cross Society was holding its annual convention. Shouting “Adjournment!” (the demonstrators complained that leftists’ applications for Red Cross membership were always turned down), the crowd demanded that the meeting be transferred to a hall down the street, already carefully packed with “non-members.” In the scuffle, several good, grey ladies suffered battered heads and shins. The convention suspended its meeting.

In Strasbourg, French Communists heard Communist Deputy André Marty deplore the big sum the French Government planned to spend on the Sixth World Scout Jamboree (30,000 Boy Scouts are scheduled to encamp on the meadows at Moisson, northwest of Paris, in mid-August). The $956,000 allocated for the meeting, said Marty, could better be spent for recreation centers. “Existentialists” with reactionary backing, he added, were trying to demoralize French youth.