Black Czechs
AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS
London, Thursday—Mystery still surrounds 'the thinking of top party officials here follow- ing the British invasion and partial military occupation of Biafra. Little mention of the 'crisis' has been made in the British press, and official party organs like Daily Telegraph and Times Newspapers Limited have confined themselves to .printing brief propaganda reports from Lagos describing Field-Marshal Ade- kunle's triumphal progress through 'liberated' areas.
There have, surprisingly, been none of the conventional references to 'liberating' troops being greeted with garlands saf flowers, or to impromptu choirs of freshly scrubbed children singing The Lord's my Shepherd, I'll not want: he makes me down to lie'—a blasphemous Wilsonist hymn in praise of party secretary Shepherd, who has responsibility for-the satel- lite countries. Perhaps because it is common knowledge that all flowers, leaves and even insects have long since •been eaten by the starving, .and that the 'liberated' areas have in all cases been abandoned by every man, woman and child strong enough- to drag 'themselves out of the path of the 'liberating' army, the British press, notorious as it is for its lies and distortions, fell that such stories at this time would be too much even for the British public.
Nevertheless, the extent to which the party line has been uncritically accepted by rank and file party members and by the average British citizen has made nonsense of reports reaching the outside world during recent years of ,a 'change of heart' or of 'liberalisation' or of any softening of the old hypocritical imperialist tradition. Straightforward accounts of the tens of thousands fleeing before the 'liberating' army, reports of the shelling of deserted cities and -of the bombing of civilian areas, which have caused violent anti-British demonstrations in liberal countries like Western Germany, are read here with only mild interest. You cannot, as the old British peasant proverb has it, make a chicken without breaking a few eggs: vio- lence, bestiality and the infamous 'Sandhurst tradition' are as much a part of the British way of life as the sanctimonious justification of such behaviour in pulpit and Parliament, and if the party decrees a federation, then a few hundred thousand or even a million lives are a small price to pay for so pure an academic ideal.
it is above all else this traditional :penchant for self-righteous moral posturing that dis- tinguishes British imperialism from that of the Russians or the Americans. Reaction here to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia pro- vided the official party with the ideal conditions for a grandiose display of British holiness. Any action that might have been taken against the Soviet Union in the form of economic or even cultural sanctions was seen as potentially harm- ful to British interests there, and dismissed as being 'likely to occasion a return to the cold war': having said that, Premier Wilson was free to condemn 'the assertion that any state, if it is powerful enough, has the right . . . within its own claimed sphere of influence, to extin- guish the rights, and particularly the right to choose its government, of any small nation which it thinks is standing in its way' (minis- terial cheers). In the case of Biafra, the glow of self-righteousness is more difficult to induce. as a grim parody of 'parliamentary democracy' during Tuesday's debate on the invasion showed. Few foreign observers have either the patience or the capacity to understand the intricacies of British casuistry, but the party argument seems to be that by arming, training and equipping one satellite country to invade another Britain is 'maintaining her influence for peace.'
The most vicious example of British official hypocrisy, however, has been on the question of 'aid.' No other country on earth could plaster its streets and public buildings with heartrending posters of starving Biafran child- ren, demanding money specifically for Biafra, collect the pence of its poorest and most gullible citizens, old people and schoolchildren, and then cynically issue discreet directives to the -various state puppet 'charity' organisations, like 'Oxfam and 'War on Want'—the title of the latter has been seen as grimly apposite in recent days—that such aid is not to be delivered until the 'blockade of Biafra has resulted in its ex- tinction as a nation. No other country on-earth, certainly, could make a poker-faced statement of its official desire to bring food to the starving, and then provide the anti-aircraft guns to shoot down any aeroplane trying to do so. But the posters remain, the money of the poor con- tinues to flow in, and the British conscience is at peace.
However great the complacency of the aver- age British citizen may be—and he has learnt, to do him credit, that there is little he or his 'elected representatives' can do when the party bosses and the faceless dictators of the sinister "cs' or Civil Service have once made -up their minds—it is nothing to that of the party theore- ticians. With the full support of the United States—the Co-Aggressive Pact on South-East Asia and West Africa seems strong enough to weather even the wildest storms of world pro- test—and with Soviet Russia actually fighting shoulder to shoulder in the drive to crush Biafra, some foreign correspondents have found it remarkable that Premier Wilson, his Foreign Minister 'Iron Man' Michael Stewart, or their 'opposition' stooge Edward Heath should have bothered to tell such monstrous lies, denying again and again their intention of invading Biafra, and even stating their intention of withdrawing support from the puppet dictator Gowon if such an invasion should occur.
Their motives, certainly, remain a mystery. In Biafra, those still alive wait under the guns of British troop-carriers for the apparently in- evitable executions and brutalities, and for the methodical destruction of resistance that Britain has taught her satellites. With the establishment of a quisling lbo government, the men of the Whitehall Palace may consider that the boundaries of British imperialist influ- ence in West Africa are once again secure. But as the Biafran saying goes, it is hard to put back the clock, particularly the clock of a time bomb, if one is actually sitting on it.
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