The Awakening

Most dramatic symbol of the cold war's progress last week (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) was Tibet's Dalai Lama, who, at the cost of physical defeat, won a psychological victory. Red China's rape of Tibet stirred the neutralist powers of Asia as the Soviet rape of Hungary never had. With shock, Asians suddenly realized that there could be "yellow colonialism" as well as "white colonialism."

"The picture of Asians kicking Asians around is not a prospect that pleases," declared the Times of Indonesia. In Rangoon the Nation bluntly declared that this was "no time for neutrality," urged the Burmese government to reconsider "seriously" its foreign policy. Even the high panjandrum of Asian neutralism, India's Nehru, showed signs of distress—and the Indian public showed far more. "Mr. Nehru's India," declared London's Economist, "may be emerging from the age of innocence. In later years, the Republic of India may look back upon this month as its moment of truth."

In the Mideast, too, one of the torchbearers of neutralism showed further signs of awakening. The U.A.R.'s Gamal Abdel Nasser, ranging himself against the Reds who surround Iraq's Premier Abdul Karim Kassem, admitted that he once thought that Arab Communists were independent of Moscow. "But they were not," said Nasser; they were trying to sow dissension and "put us into spheres of influence."

None of this warranted unalloyed Western rejoicing. Soviet control of strategic Iraq would be a disastrously high price to pay for the education of Nasser—even if his new understanding should prove genuine and lasting. And the education of the Asian neutrals was being paid for in Tibetan blood. But if the moment of truth had, in fact, come for the "uncommitted" Afro-Asian nations, Communist imperialism might be in for tougher times in the years ahead.