THE NATIONS: Flight of the Dove

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Marked Word. Had the Communists captured the word "peace"? No, but they had left their mark on it. In South Africa, the moderate Rand Daily Mail wrote: "In some parts of America, if anyone talks of peace, they send for the police." In Bonn, the movie To Live In Peace was a box-office flop because West Germans thought it was Communist propaganda. Pope Pius himself felt impelled to declare last year: "Some—you know who—accused the Church, the Pope, of wanting war . . . No, no, this is not true. The Church detests war with its horrors. It wants peace."

What did the Communists mean by peace? They did not mean coexistence. "As long as capitalism and socialism remain, we cannot live in peace. In the end one or the other will triumph—a funeral requiem will be sung either over the Soviet Republic or over world capitalism," wrote Lenin.

Assault & Siege. Did that mean that Communism wanted war? Not necessarily. Lenin, who wrote nothing without purpose, once wrote admiringly of the tactics used by a Russian at Port Arthur: "Without testing the strength of the fortress by the practical attempt to carry it by assault, without testing the power of the resistance of the enemy, there would have been no ground for adopting the prolonged method of struggle." In Korea the Communists had tried an assault. They had found a startling resistance. They had also forced an association of the free nations tinder that assault. Facing that fact in San Francisco, they may decide to adopt the prolonged method of struggle.

If the Communists believed their doctrine, they were deeply confident that "the imperialists" were bound by their inherent "antagonisms and contradictions" to fall out among themselves. "The soundest strategy in war is to postpone operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the delivery of the mortal blow possible and easy," advises Lenin.

Signs & Portents. Last week the dove's defeathered wings flapped noisily, as the Soviet Peace Council announced a nationwide drive for signatures to the current World Peace Council appeal for a five-power conference to include Russia, the U.S., Britain, France and Red China (the World Peace Council claimed 430,870,591 had signed already in 48 countries). But in Kaesong, the truce talks stayed stalled. In Berlin, the Communists had twitched the noose of blockade by imposing a road tax on incoming vehicles, and Gromyko muttered of "a new war."

No one would surely know what the Kremlin planned until the Kremlin struck. Until then, the peace dove would be around for a long time, crying to all who would listen: "Peace, it's wonderful."

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.