THE NATIONS: Flight of the Dove

• Share

(3 of 5)

As by a miracle, the dove rises from the paper and joins the moonbeam and the wind in flight back to the little girl's room. The little girl sits on the dove's back and off they fly, across the Alps, the Caucasus, the Urals. "Voici l'immense Union Soviétique. A great, a very great country," says the dove. "Yes, a big country full of song," agrees the little girl. "Here they work and sing," says the dove. "And now, look here, the Himalaya, and down there is China." "I hear the singing in China, too," says the little girl. "Another big country," explains the dove.

They arrive over America. "This is the kingdom of death," says the wind in a grave voice. "This is the vultures' hideout. Here the monsters are laying eggs, destructive eggs. A single one of these eggs will burn everything, if it is dropped on a town. Women will weep and little children will cry over their dead mothers' bodies . . ." "Bombs, bombs, that's what you mean," stammers the little girl. But one deep, beautiful voice arises from America, below. "Who is that man singing?" asks the girl. "It is Paul Robeson, one of the greatest singers in the world," says the dove. Finally, the dove and the girl land in Stockholm and in Warsaw, where many other doves arrive, thousands of doves, millions of doves. Like snowflakes they descend from the sky. And the vultures are frightened and are driven back into the land of eternal darkness.

They Cried for Peace. Always, in Communist whimsy and in hard-boiled oration, the dove cried "peace." In eight languages the signs on East Berlin buildings proclaimed: "Peace, Pax, Paix, Paz, Pace, Frieden, Béke, Mir." There were peace days, peace weeks, peace bicycle races, peace dances, peace cigarettes. Japanese could buy a sedative called the Sleep of Peace and enjoy it on a Peace mattress.

And for peace meetings, Communism trotted out its shiniest fronts and most attractive faces: artists like Pablo Picasso, Rockwell Kent and Diego Rivera, authors like Howard Fast, clergy like Britain's Dr. Hewlett ("Red Dean of Canterbury") Johnson, and Metropolitan Nikolai of the Russian Orthodox Church.

"Are You for Peace?" Two years ago at Stockholm the Peace Partisans launched their great petition campaign. It was called the World Peace Appeal but it said nothing about peace. It did not condemn aggression. Those who bothered to read it found that it merely demanded the unconditional prohibition of the atomic bomb—the one counterweight to the vast Red Army