COMMUNISTS

• Share

COMMUNISTS

In the huge, high-ceilinged Salle Pleyel, Paris' Cartiegie Hall, the thin, chirping syllables swooped and soared from the public-address system like some kind of static. Finally, the record scratched to an end. Some 2,000 delegates to the World Congress of the Partisans of Peace, realizing that the speech was over, applauded madly.

Few, if any, knew what had been said. The speech was in Chinese. It might just as well have been in Urdu. To the delegates it was important only that it had been made by a Communist, China's Kuo Mo-jo.* The seekers after "peace"—of the Soviet-Russian variety—perfectly exemplified a lesson of the great Russian physiologist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov: to an artificial stimulus, they had made a conditioned response.

The six-day congress was a bigger & better version of last month's Waldorf-Astoria "peace rally" (TIME, April 4). The U.S. State Department put it succinctly: "The same group of performers will go through their act in Paris as they have done before."

"Where Are the Cheers?" The speakers produced their well-worn libels with the pride of a paterfamilias displaying yellowed family photographs. Some of the veterans seemed bored; Soviet Pundit Ilya Ehrenburg fought the good fight part of the time in the bar, sampling French liqueurs. Fragile, gray-haired Mme. Eugénie Cotton, French physicist and president of the International Democratic Federation of Women (who had been denied a visa to the New York conference) smiled tender approval of the proceedings. The conference chairman, lean, somber Communist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, France's atomic-energy boss, set the keynote. "We are not here to ask for peace but to impose it. This congress is the reply of peoples to the signers of the Atlantic pact. To the new war they are preparing we will reply with revolt of the peoples."

Then Britain's Harvey Moore, observer for the International Association of Jurists, went up to the banked microphones. The delegates cheered the news of Nanking's fall (see FOREIGN NEWS). Asked Moore: Did the partisans of peace want the Chinese civil war to stop? No, was the bellowed answer. Cried Moore: "You cannot be for war and peace at the same time." Freedom of the individual, of the press, of elections, were "vital to peace," he said, and asked: "Where are the cheers?" There were none. He declared that the "bureaucrats of the proletariat no less than the bureaucrats of the bourgeoisie" must learn that "men want freedom to learn the truth, to be free of fear of the police, to change their governments." Again he asked: "Where are the cheers?" Again there were none.