SUCH IS LIFE
'What I expected was Thunder, fighting, Long struggles . '. .'
SO Mr. Stephen Spender began a poem of disenchantment in which he recorded the discovery that life, helpless under the wearing of time, is not quite like that after all. A similar discovery is now being made, rather more happily, by several millions of people who, since 1947 or thereabout, had learned to view the world in terms of strictest black and white and to live in an atmosphere of perpetual crisis. The thunder, the fighting, the struggle might always be waiting round the next corner. But the world, it seems, need not be quite like that after all; and we have it on the authority of no less an expert than Marshal Bulganin, the titular head of the USSR, that 'There are many unsettled questions in the world. And this will be the case in the future. Such is life.'
Such it is indeed, and such it always has been to those resistant to totalitarian concepts. But such platitudes become startling new wisdom in the mouths of Communist statesmen working out, to whatever end, their theory of co-existence. Their effect is immense. Black and white suddenly merge into grey, that pacific colour which best suits diplomacy. The violent clangour of the propaganda war subsides to a distant whisper, scarcely audible through the excited buzz of voices talking peace. It is left to Jehovah's Witnesses to anticipate with relish the imminent onset of Armageddon while others relax in the sunshine of this double summer. Russians on tour in America have been struck dumb by the girth of the hogs that Iowa raises, and Americans on tour in Russia have found much to admire in Russian farms. Instead of Mr. David Lawrence crying woe to appeasers in the New York Herald Tribune we have Mr. Stewart Alsop describing his carousals in Kiev with Ivan Ivanovitch.
But the change of atmosphere is not confined to the area of dispute between Russia and the Western world. Hard on the heels of Russia comes China to stir into soothing grey the black and white of its quarrel with America. The propaganda tap which was gushing venom until the other day is abruptly turned off. Mr. Chou En-lai, picking up the threads he started to spin at Bandoeng, announces that the Chinese people want no war with the United States, says that China is willing to enter into negotiations with the 'local authorities' for the 'peaceful liberation' of Formosa, and, by deciding to release the American airmen unjustly imprisoned on a trumped-up charge of espionage, gives his ambassador at Geneva a magnifi- cent opening for the talks with his American counterpart. At the beginning of 'Little Geneva,' indeed, it looked as if, as an angel of peace and good will, Mr. Wang Ping-nan, the Chinese ambassador, was going to put Messrs. Bulganin and Khrush- chev in the shade. His exuberance was in striking contrast to the sober caution of the American ambassador. Mr. Johnson, and to the bluntness of Mr. Dulles, who, when asked at his press conference on Tuesday whether America's renuncia- tion of force meant that China might now expect to gain its ambitions through negotiation, replied that it did not.
There have been 'many occasions when Mr. Dulles has said what might well have been left unsaid by the Secretary of State. This• is another of them. If China did not expect to gain its ambitions, or some of them. by negotiation, then China would not be negotiating; and it is a strange thing when that recent advocate of a return to diplomacy announces publicly that there is no point in China's being diplomatic. Nevertheless, China, like Russia, seems to be set on a detente, and America is bound, within the limits of principle, to respond. Peace is breaking out all over, and so long as two things are not for a moment forgotten the West can breathe more easily. The first is that the Communist world has been forced to return to diplomacy not only by its own internal difficulties but also by the unity, patience, and determination of the West. Peace is what the West has always wanted, and the special variety of peace which goes by the name of co-existence in the Com- munist vocabulary can only be harmful to the West to the extent that it weakens its unity, patience and determination. The second thing is that the people of the West must not lull themselves into reading a change of essential policy into the Communist world's change of attitude. Thetre is not the slightest sign that Russia's essential policies have changed in any important particular, and all that can be assumed at the moment is that Russia will continue to seek a détente without sacrificing any part of the position which it has built up in Eastern Europe. Nor is there any indication that China's objec- tives are other than they were before the thaw set in. Formosa is still to be 'liberated,' although not now, if one listens to Mr. Chou En-lai in preference to the not wholly subdued rumblings of Peking radio, by frontal assault.
But the recognition of the constancy of Communist aims need occasion no disappointment in the West. Under the shadow of the hydrogen bomb we are all learning to walk warily, and Mr. Dulles and Marshal Bulganin are agreed at least in this : that we must teach ourselves afresh to live with insoluble problems (a technique that was almost forgotten when diplomacy went out of fashion). It would be as unreason- able to expect Communists to undergo a 'change of heart' as it would be to refuse to treat with them at all because of -their faith. It looks as if for the next few months at any rate— given always that constant vigilance by which the West survives —we shall have to rest content with the moral, as the Foreign Secretary with his new abandon might express it : 'It ain't what you do, It's the way that you do it.'
Previous page
