THE NATIONS: Flight of the Dove

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WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH —Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell

Among the most significant phenomena at San Francisco last week was one invisible to the naked eye. It was a slow shower of feathers. The Communists' dove of peace, the bird that walks like a bear, had lost most of its plumage.

Was that the last the world would see of the raddled bird? Far from it. As the Communists well knew, given a quick laundering, a brush, and a few weeks to grow its feathers back, the peace dove would look as fat and fair as ever to the party faithful and to people of short memory.

Communism's dove of peace was hatched long ago. The Russian Revolution of 1917, in fact, was achieved largely by pacifist slogans. Then the Bolsheviks went on, as Lenin knew they would, to make a bloody civil war. Since then, the dove has been more or less important in Communist mythology. To understand what happened to the dove at San Francisco, it is necessary to understand the recent rebirth of Communism's strange bird.

Three years ago, the Communists' seal-like genius Pablo Picasso drew a dove. Its wings beat over Europe, Asia, America. Before he came forth with his design, the new dove line had been hatched within the walls of the Kremlin. In 1947, the Kremlin concluded that everything possible had been squeezed out of Franklin Roosevelt's era of the grand design. The West had turned firm and patient. It had begun to rearm. The Kremlin's answer was the peace offensive and the dove.

Fledgling Years. Even the shrewd dismissed it as a relatively harmless propaganda device. It was not. The peace propaganda campaign was a coldly calculated master plan to sabotage the West's efforts to restore the world's free economies and to defend itself.

In October 1947, Andrei Zhdanov laid down the line at the first meeting of the Cominform. The U.S., said Zhdanov, had launched "an aggressive and openly expansionist policy" aimed at the "preparation of a new imperialist war." He added significantly: "Between the wish of the imperialists to loose a new war and the possibility of organizing such a war, there lies a vast distance."

. . . Of Exceptional Dimensions. A little later, Paris' official Cahiers du Communisme spelled out the policy more explicitly. Cahiers proclaimed that the "leaders of the U.S.S.R." had laid out "a plan of exceptional dimensions"—an "offensive of the world forces of peace." Cahiers outlined the plot: "Principal direction of effort: to isolate 'American imperialism' and its 'servants . . .' Vulnerable points of the adversary: the economic crisis and the general crisis of capitalism which threaten it; the will for peace of all those threatened by 'imperialist adventures.' "

So began the "fight for peace." The Cominform called it "the pivot of the entire activity of the Communist Parties." The cry of peace could oppose the keeping of U.S. troops in Europe; it could stir up workers by blaming low wages and high prices on rearmament programs; it could prey on mothers whose sons must fight, on men of God who hated war, on the indifferent and the despairing, on the timid who feared that arming for self-defense was provocative.