Panorama

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Title: Panorama
Issue Date: Volume XV (No.9) September 1963
Year: 1963
Language: English
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Ano, Manila, Philippines TNI PHILIPPINE MAGAZINE OF OOOO I KA DI NO Vol. XV MANILA, PHILIPPINES No. 9 WE FEAR THE WRONG THINGS The Gospel everywhere hints that we fear the wrong things. One wonders if the same warning should not apply to our times. The majority of people today, if queried, would say that the atomic bomb was the greatest danger facing the world. But is there not something else in the world more dangerous still than nuclear warfare which can bring havoc to humanity? That one thing is hunger.’ "Hunger?” we ask. But this is because we know not its. mean ing. Ten thousand die of it a day. Our garbage collectors gather up in one dav from our refuse cans enough food to feed six hundred rhillion people for several days. We know little about it, but hunger is the ammunition for a future war; hunger is the arsenal in which is forged the swords which will cut down those who have full pantries, but who share not. The revolution of the 20th century will be a peasant revolution. It will not come from those who live on the land, but in slums; not from those who work with tools, but from those who have no work. It will rise out of the depths of the cities, overwhelming all who refuse to see that hunger is something that either kills self, or in the end, kills others.. "Everywhere prices rise and hunger sits at the hearth of mil lions of people. Here is the match to light the flames of war.” xxx The rich so often give to the rich, and it remains for those who have little to give to those who have nothing. All of us must awaken to the responsibilities that are on us toward the poor, wherever they be and be kind to them — not to prevent revolution, but to keep civil wars and strifes out of our own hearts. — Bishop Fulton Sheen. ■ A young journalist peers into the local scene from the long perspective of history. OUR YOUTH AND THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION Alfredo R. Roces Revolution is a term ap plied to the overthrow of a government or a social sys tem with another taking its place. The term unfinished revolution is new, first heard in a speech of President Macapagal last June 12. I have been asked to talk on this topic and I feel it is es sential to state at the outset that I do not represent the present administration; what I have to say is not an official interpretation of the Liberal Party’s unfinished revolution. I am not an apologist for the administration, neither am I a member of the opposite camp. I am a newspaper columnist who considers po litics a source of amusing commentary. I turn my guns on whatever crosses my sight and I wish to retain this perspective, without political color and with truth as my only interest. Objective comment Thus what I have to say about the unfinished revolu tion is a personal interpre tation and does not carry the official imprimatur of the originator of this term. Nei ther is this talk the cyni cal brick-and-tomato-throwing opposition of those po litically committed to pessi mism about any program of the administration. What I propose to attempt is a se rious and, as much as possi ble, objectiye comment about this term from a history and cultural context. The revolution referred to is that which exploded Jn the late 1800’s upon the pre mature discovery of the Katipunan. 'It is interesting to 2 Panorama point out what others have observed, that this was the first national uprising against a colonial power in Asia. But while most students re cognize the political reper cussions of such an armed desire for change, the desire for other changes in the so cial structure are seldom giv en their due importance. The revolution for one thing re vealed two strong desires among Filipinos, aside from basic freedom and dignity, and these are opportunity for education and land. It was land that brought the first troubles between the rulers and Rizal’s family. His tale of “Cabesang Tales” is the lament of those de prived of land. Tragic history Philippine history is tra gic because each time the Filipino people reached a cultural level, wherein a maturity and flowering was in sight, a force outside it self nipped it in the bud. Thus our intellectuals who had been educated in the Spanish culture first found their talents needed to spark a national revolution and later found themselves with out anyone to leave a lega cy to. The Americans had come, they had sunk the Spanish armada and, with the forces of Aguinaldo sweeping like a tide towards Manila, waited for reasons we perhaps can never really ascertain. Their mission to destroy the Spanish, navy was accomplished and they watched the Filipinos fight their way to the Walled Ci ty of Manila. Soon Ameri can troops landed and as sumed positions in front of the city. The Spaniards chose to surrender to the Americans after a mock bat tle. By right of conquest America claimed a foothold in the Philippines. Inciden tally, Spain later contested the fact that Manila had sur rendered to the Americans one day after the Treaty of Paris was signed, the peace treaty between Spain and the US, thus voiding the staged battle and the victory, on technicalities. Such is the way of history. We had lit tle to say for ourselves. Cultural gap With the coming of the Americans there was a cul tural gap created. The gene September 1963 3 ration steeped in Spanish culture soon clashed with the younger generation who spoke English, drank CocaCola and danced boogiewoogie. It is the writer Nick Joaquin who has most poig nantly written of this pain ful void between two gene rations, of revolucionarios who became useless old men instead of respected heroes, of poets who found there was no audience who read Spanish, and who had to turn to politics or business to survive. The unfinished revolution does not touch on these, rather it speaks of the many aspirations that died stillborn ifi the coming of the Yankees. Said Gen eral Aguinaldo when a clash between the US and the re volucionarios seemed inevit able, in his Otro Manifesto del Sr. Presidente del Gobierno Revolucionario: "My nation cannot remain indifferent in view of such a violent and aggressive seiz ure of a portion of its terri tory by a nation which has arrogated to itself the title: champion of oppressed na tions. Thus it is that my government is disposed to open hostilities if the Am erican troops, attempt to take forcible possession. I de nounce these acts before the world in order that the con science of mankind may pro nounce its infallible verdict as to who are the oppressors of nations and the torment ors of mankind. Upon their hands be all the blood which may be shed." Forgotten heroes The bloodshed according to Leon Wolff in his book “Little Brown Brother" to taled 4,234 Americans dead and more than two thousand wounded at a cost of six hundred million dollars. Six teen thousand Filipino re bels were killed, their corpses actually tallied by the Am ericans, and about 200,000 civilians dead of disease. The revolucionario turned from hero to a pathetic fig ure forgotten by the Ameri can-oriented generation and this is best expressed in the words of Apolnario Mabini, who after finally signing the oath of allegiance from his exile in Guam, said: "After two long years of absence I am returning, so to speak, completely dis 4 Panorama oriented and, what is worse, almost overcome by disease and sufferings. Neverthe less, I hope, after some time of rest and study, still to be of some use, unless I have returned to the Islands for the sole purpose of dying.” Three months later, at the age of 38, he died. ‘Dimmed voices’ This was the unfinished revolution. The men who started it and who fought in it could have told us much about their aspirations. Some of what they had to say are available in documents, such as in the Malolos Constition, but their voices have dimmed and been ignored. For we were learning about the three little pigs that went to market and the great American democracy. "We were chewing gum, laughing at Charlie Chaplin and wear ing coat and tie. We left Cervantes and took up Shakespeare, we no longer heaped praises on Magellan and Anda and instead talked about Lincoln and Washing ton and the cjierry tree. In a little over 40 years we had forgotten the Filipino-Ameri can war, and, worse, we had forgotten the Revolution. When the Japanese hordes came, the Americans had me tamorphosed into allies, and after three painful years un der the Japanese, the Ameri cans returned as liberators. This caused even greater ob session with things American. They were the great golden gods. And what of the Revo lution and the Katipunan? Aguinaldo still lives, an old veteran who saw our best boulevard named after De wey — the admiral who rais ed the revolucionario’s hppes of casting aside the Spanish yoke, only to dash it’t» the ground wth the sudden desire of the Yankee to pick up the white man’s burden. But to day we are an independent nation. We have slowly and painfully looked long and hard at ourselves And we desire to seek our roots, our neglected past. The new concepts It has been a strange twist of local history that those who have defied the con querors and shut them out completely have slowly with ered and died, while those who learned to take in the new ideas and the new cul 5 ture managed to flourish. Thus, those who defied the Spanish regime and her cul ture still survive today only as cultural minorities. They are, for the most part, vanish ing tribes. Only the Mus lims remain strong and they are comparatively dis-oriented with the rest of contem porary Philippines. Those who fought the Americans, atid tried to conserve the Spanish heritage are slowly withering away while those who learned to acce'pt the new culture managed to prosper. But now we are in dependent and perhaps we should learn to adjust to the new concept of a young nation in Asia. Per haps those who fail to see this and remain reactionary will find themselves bitterly londy. Only time can tell. But the lesson of history is there. The present trend is to reach back for our old ideals, to return to the values and aspirations of our forefathers who embodied our greatest moment as a people in the revolt of the Katipunan. And this is the unfinished revolution you hear about. In concrete terms there are two point's which President Macapagal underscored. These are land reform and a new concept of foreign affairs which will place us in our true geographic location which is Southeast Asia. 2 vital points The unfinished revolution means a new look in our for eign affairs department in the sense that there will be greater interest regarding af fairs in Asia. There will also be much effort towards get ting to know our neighbors and much more importance stressed on Asian affairs.. This we hope, of course is not at the sacrifice of losing West ern military support which admittedly is vital to our se curity in this region at pre sent. But it indicates that we now do not expect to live under the US patronage for ever, and that we shall make efforts to strengthen our se curity on our own through allies and self-reliance in the distant but inevitable future. The unfinished revolution also seems to want to tackle the problem of land reform. In fact the bill towards such action, the Agricultural Land Reform Code which hopes to 6 Panorama abolish land tenancy, has just been signed. The merits or demerits of the bill I do not wish to discuss. Its implementaton will also be something one must wait and see before giving comment. But its intentions are worth while. Land reform is not just a possible key to our economic plight; it has be come the crying need of our present times. Every revolu tion in current history has tackled this problem of land reform. It just cannot be ignored in our present times. When Ben Bella took over Algeria from the French if was land reform he started at once, and it is the same in all emerging young na tions. The Chinese lost the mainland and the lesson learned from it led to a land reform in Taiwan, their last island home. When Fidel Castro triumphed in the Cu ban revolution, he imme diately instituted land re form, an act which led to US enmity, for much of Cuban land was owned by US fruit and oil companies and hotel magnates. Unless we want to wait for a Fidel Castro to emerge in our country, one who will push the entire na tion towards communism with Russian nuclear rockets in our midst, we should look at our agricultural land sys tem. We should awaken to current history. Land reform Land reform is necessary in the Philippines. But this is not enough^ With land reform must go dedicated and graft-free government support to the tiller of the land, and likewise a strong educational program. Other wise land reform will merely shuffle the ownership of lands without creating social progress, agricultural abun dance, and economic stabili ty. There should also be a system of just and speedy compensation for the land lords or a great injustice will have been committed. No ampunt of good intentions can justify an injustice. This, the unfinished revolution pro poses to tackle. The coming years will be crucial. You should be aware of this for much of the future depends on the implementation of this program, its effectivity, equitable and just means, September 1963 7 and finally its desired effect which is the common good. Graft remains President Macapagal also mentioned a frontal attack on our economic problems through the removal of im port controls. He claimed that graft and corruption was thus eliminated and that moral regeneration was on the way. But 1 feel it pertinent to point out that graft and corruption has remained. This time, instead of work ing for a license as in the days of control when wealth was assured through a dollar license, the greed for illegal wealth has shifted to our har bors. Now anyone can im port anything provided he pays his taxes on it. The corruption has therefore shifted to the bringing in of goods without taxes or with a nominal amount of tax. Smuggling has become na tionwide as never before. This aspect, which involves our law agents, should be looked into. Search for soil The unfinished revolution, to my thinking, is the crystal lization of our various past, vague aspirations. These were reflected in our nation alistic actions such as in the use of Pilipino and demand for a national language, street name changing, our so-called Filipino-first slogan and our research into our past. It is the inevitable evolution of the Filipino in search of his soul. He now finds himself more and more confronted with his pro blems. He must find solu tions to them. No large power can be blamed for his ills. No large power can save him’with foreign aid for'his sufferings. No outside im perialist can now suffer the blame for our own indolence, or our own lack of morality. Our ancestors who fought for a united country free of op pressors have been rediscover ed. They stand ready to judge us. Challenge to youth The future of this unfi nished revolution belongs to you, the youth. It is hard to imagine that those of the pre-war American era will ever see the fruits of this. But you who belong to the true generation of an inde pendent Philippines may at 8 Panorama last bring the Filipino race into full flower. God will ing, there will be no outside force to nip your efforts in the bud. The land reform will be in your hands in its actual implementation. The moral regeneration is like wise in your hands. An awareness 'of Asia with a slight devaluatioin of every thing imported and foreign, specially US, is needed. For we have adopted the bad with the good. In this sense, in being completely "west ernized” we have betrayed those who fought the revolu tion. In neglecting our. mi nority tribes, we have been traitors to our own race. In discriminately denuding our forests, we have defiled our own land. In succumbing to materialism and moral bank ruptcy we have been traitors to ourselves. Peaceful fight You may ask, what have I to do with all these? The learned statesman, or if you are cynical, the politicos, have taken care of all these and they are cutting up the cake which I shall not see a share of. Allow me to re peat a thought once given by Senator Manglapus: The men who fought in that un finished revolution were young men. And they were not old intellectuals, they were young ordinary people like Bonifacio or better still like Emilio Jacinto who died at the age of 23. Bonifacio was 29 when he led the Katipunan. Antonio Luna was a general at 29. And Emilio Aguinaldo was the first Pres ident of the Philippines, af ter successful battles, at the age of 29. One who died for him, Gregorio del Pilar, was 24. Osmena was Speaker of the House at 29, and so too Roxas. Jose Rizal wrote his novels in his late 20's and was killed at 35. You may of course argue that you have no ambitions to be a hero, much less the kind who dies at 23 or be killed at 35. Remember, however, that the unfinished revolution was started by young men like you. And there is one important as pect of this unfinished revo lution today, and \ that is that it is a peaceful revolution. The final fruits are to be achieved without recourse to force or violence. You September 1963 9 will be revolucionarios in peace. There is, of course, still violence in Ilocos, in the piers, in Intramuros, and the world outside. In Vietnam, in Korea, in Alabama. That is precisely why you must join. To put an end to violence. All revolutions are desirous of a quick end. Re volutions cannot go on for ever, it is a phase in which a change is introduced as a reaction. The peaceful phase could be a happier alternat ive to another bloody bath for other reasons and other changes if our system fails today or in the future. — (Address delivered at the Fifth Annual Junior Mem bers’ convention of the Children’s Museum and Li brary, Inc., at the FEU audi torium, August, 1963.) LIVE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE If I should sell both my forenoons and after noons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth liv ing for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birth right for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than' he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are selfsupporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving. But as it is said, of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophe sied. — Henry David Thoreau. 10 Panorama ■ Painfully self-conscious, the Asians — especially Fil ipino—seem unready to treat Westeners as equals. DO ASIANS HAVE AN INFERIORITY COMLEX? Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil Few statements about AsiaWest relations can ever be wholly true or wholly false. Most of them must remain uneasy generalizations. Asians have neither race, colour, re ligion, ideology, language nor history in common; and the political grab-bag we know as the West is almost as di verse. But two things do hold Asians together: the common experience of Western domi nance atid the fierce desire to be completely free of it. The diplomat from Bangkok, the Tokyo industrialist, the coolie in Hong Kong, the Manila lawyer, the teacher in Singapore, the Indonesian colonel and the Indian writ er are bound — if by nothing else -?• by their awareness of the West. It may be out right hostility, well-reasoned dislike or, at the other ex treme, a sedulous and abject fondness. But it is always an obsession. White Man’s Bonus Asians tend to exaggerate both their importance in the Western scheme and the place of the West in their own plans. This makes us painfully self-conscious' and quite unready to treat West erns as complete equals. Where does one find the sang-froid ' to treat an im mensely rich uncle — uncle whose unwilling ward one has been for many years — exactly as one of the boys? One must either hurl a brick or kiss his hands. Even that most recent achievement of Asian diplo macy, the Confederation of Malaysia, hailed everywhere as the final cutting-away of the Western apron-strings. September 1963 11 was not brought off without many a side-glance at Lon don and Washington. One of the satisfactions derived from one’s coming-of-age, it appears, is that of watching for any signs of discomfiture on the faces of one’s erst while mentors. Paradoxically enough, in Manila and other big Fili pino cities, it is the social elite who show more signs of cultural insecurity vis-a-vis Westerners, By their be haviour they proclaim that they consider Americans and Europeans better managers for their business establish ments, better guests at dinner and better husbands for their daughter^ than Asians. White executives and em ployees command at least twice the salary given to a Filipino of equal ability and experience. The official rea son is that the foreigner has a higher standard of living; but it does not fool any body. A higher salary is sim ply the White Man’s Bonus — a neat compensation for Kipling. Manila landlords, offering houses or apartments to let in newspaper advertisements. tack on the following annoucement as a certification of quality: “For Americans and Europeans only.” Visit ing foreigners are lionized and feted within an inch of their lives: a white guest-ofhonour is a status symbol, something like a TV aerial or the tail fins on a new Am erican automobile. Our middle classes and the people from the rural areas, less accustomed to foreigners, display a mixture of curio sity, awe and circumspect hostility. A sandalled, dark* glassed, barebacked Ameri can tourist strolling down a village street is a curiosity to be stared and gaped at and, from a safe distance, perhaps hooted at. After all, a white person is as outlandish and as rare in distant Filipino barrios as a polar bear. Many Filipino women, like other Asians, are uncomfort able in the presence of white foreigners. I know several who will not go to a party if they are told beforehand that Americans are on the guest list; or finding them there unexpectedly, will try to avoid speaking with them. I do not think it is hostility or 12. Panorama racial prejudice so much as a feeling of unbridgeable distance. An American or a European is an utter, un knowable alien. But so would an African be. The fact is there hasn’t been much of an opportunity to feel at home with foreigners. Even at the apogee of the Spanish regime or that of the American occupation, white foreigners never made up more than one . percent of the entire population. Light-Coloured, Eyes As in other parts of Asia, notably India, a fair skin, a sharp nose and light-colour ed eyes are prized as attri butes of beauty in the Phil ippines. The best proof is that a great majority of our film stars are Caucasians or Eurasian^ who have chosen Filipino screen names; and Kair-and skin-bleaches are a popular article of trade. And why not? For centuries the ruling classes were white or half-white. And politics has shaped aesthetics. The intellectual and cul tural pupillage is even more marked. The most frequent and effective argument in any dispute begins with, “In America ...” or “ Dr. A of USA says ...” The cheapest, most tawdry item from an American department store is more precious than the finest Filipino handicraft. Of course, for every provo cation there are dozens of speeches and letters-to-thecditor denouncing “colonial mentality” and “inferiority complex.” This ambiva lence is particularly amusing in the'question of inter-marrage. Sinibaldo de Mas (a kind of latter-day Machiavelli to the Spanish*crown) recom mended in 1842 that marri ages between Spaniards and the natives of the Philippines be forbidden as a means of keeping the colony loyal and docile. When, despite offi cial discouragement, these t alliances occurred, they were socially disastrous for both parties. Perhaps for that reason, many fine Filipino families still frown on marriage with whites; but many more, no less, consider such an alliance a welcome arrangement. It is quite common in Manila to hear of a father who is not on speaking terms with a daughter who has married an American. In a study of September 1963 13 Philippine social motives con ducted on Manila factory workers, J. Bulatao cites a typical value judgment: “Marriage to a simple Fili pino (although a ‘financial blunder’) is preferred to a for eign marriage .... for the sake of cherishing things that are Filipino.” Miscegeneration is unpatriotic! Yet peo ple in coffee-shops will say of a rich, beautiful and talented Filipina: “Who can be wor thy of her? She should marry an American!” The contradictions ’ can probably be resolved by re membering that some Fili pinos have not got over the humdrum lessons of coloniz ation ("Never trust a white man!”) while others have been quick to learn the ad vantages of connections — another , historical lesson, when you think of it. Left-Handed Compliment.. The Indonesian attitudes are less complicated; or per haps they only seem so be cause I know them less well. But one might say that, in general and despite a rather pugnacious nationalism, In donesians take their former colonizers, the Dutch, quite cahnly. I have heard them describe their period of tute lage as “a blessing in dis guise”; a left-handed compli ment, since what they mean is: “At least we did not have our culture destroyed by colo nizers like the Spaniards.” Unlike Manilans, Indonesians treat their Eurasians with lof ty contempt; and like In dians, they view Americans with humorous condescen sion. The Japanese seem to be the most successful example of selective admiration of the West. Having got over their anti-social phase of isolation and conquest, they now ap pear to know just what they want from the West and what to discard. Of course in re cent years, this discriminatory faculty has not been working as well as usual. The tooWesternized Tokyo teen-agers are every bit as absurd as the ‘cowboys* and 'gangsters’ in Manila. Still the Japanese seem to have developed a most level-headed, profitable and dignified way of dealing with Westeners. Certainly the most curious thing about the Asian atti tude in general is that most 14 Panorama every Asian will say more or less what I have been saying in these paragraphs without feeling that any of it applies to him personally. An Asian of any nationality will sit down with you and agree that fawning hospitality and craven diplomacy and dou ble pay scales and intellect ual subservience exist; but that he himself is an except ion. “Yes, I’m afraid we do re tain,” he will say in his best objective manner, “an in feriority complex.” Then, with lordly scorn, he will add, “Not that it goes for you or me." I think that there are ma ny more exceptions than we each- individually suspect; but the wicked tale of our inadequacies and insecurities goes on ballooning over our heads, like a puff of smoke on a windless day. — The Asia Magazine, Sept. 1, 1963. LIBERAL EDUCATION Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of view faith. Philo sophy, however, enlightened, however profound, gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying principles. Liberal education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a can did, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life — these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a university; but still they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for consciuosness, they attach to the man of the world, to the profli gate, to the heartless — pleasant, alas, and attractive as he shows when decked out in them. — Alfred North Whitehead. 1963 15 ■ A British member of parliament reports on a jour ney with his wife to talk to studens in European universities. HEIRS TO THE NEW EUROPE Aidan Crawley No generation ever had such a tantalising future as that which is now passing through the universities of Europe. They are the first which can reasonably hope to live their lives without fighting a major war; they have the propect of repairing the failure of the generation now ruling them and of building the first truly Eu ropean communty. At the same time they iriUst enter an ideological struggle which has,divided the whole world and threatens them with an nihilation. The young men and women who throng the lecture halls from Berlin to Naples in numbers which overwhelm their instructors have the destiny of Europe and of the Wsetern world in their hands.1 My wife and I visited uni versities in France, Italy and Germany to try to find out what these students feel and think. Everywhere we were struck with the apparent well-being, the good manners and, above all, the appear ance of the young people. Beatniks seemed non-exist ent; no black stockings, no long hair or dirty finger nails. But the students of France, whom one might have expect ed to aspire to European leadership in view of the attitude of their President, are the least interested. Al though almost all of them are critical of General de Gaulle and, even when avow ed Roman Catholics, tend to be Socialist, they have uncon sciously absorbed the Gen eral's propaganda and are obsessed with the future, not of Europe, but of France. There could scarcely be a more romantic setting for a University than the old once16 Panorama Roman city of Aix, which seems to grow out of the woods and hills and vine yards of Provence. The uni versity buildings themselves are new and oppressively ugly; but once the lectures are over the students leave them in droves and head for the broad Avenue de Mira beau. It is there, in the cafes on the side-walks, in spnshine dappled by the plane trees overhead, that the real life of the university goes on. Occassionally you hear Eng lish or German voices, for among the 11,000 students 800 come from abroad — 300 of them belonging to an Am erican Foundation. But most of the groups drinking coffee or “coke" were dark-complekioned and some, whose parents had recently come over from Algiers, were al most Arab in appearance. The students were delight fully easy to talk to. None of the French students spoke English or any second lan guage; few had been abroad or wanted to travel except to Africa; none would have voted for General de Gaulle. He was “old-fashioned,” “a man of another century." Yet although they would discuss at length who and what should come after him, in the same breath they would echo the General’s “regret" that Britain's terms for entry into the Common Market had been too harsh. The government-controlled radio and television services had done their work. The chief faculties at Aix are Letters and Law, and the usual student ambition is to become a civil servant or to practise law or medicine in a French city. It was the ad vantages or disadvantages of living in a particular part of France and not the possibili ty of living elsewhere that interested them. Those studying economics saw some point in the Common Mar ket from France’s point of view, but the idea of Europe as a Community had become quite unreal. It somehow seemed right that the section of the Uni versity of France which is es tablished at Grenoble should possess a nuclear reactor and be renowned for its faculty of science. There is nothing of the softness of Provence here; instead, the towering Alps hem in the university September 1963 17 so that the eye is inevitably carried upwards towards the space which the physicists are probing. The Dean o£ the scientific faculty, who gave us lunch in the nineteenth-century chateau which the State has converted into a club for its employees, was a celebrated young professor who at once claimed to be living an in ternational life; he admitted, however, that this was an eccentricity confined mainly to scientists. But unlike most professors on the Continent, he knew some of the students personally and offered to in troduce us to them. "But I warn you," he said as we parted, "that if you criticize Karl Marx you will get no thing out of them.” Student life at Grenoble seemed more of a struggle than at Aix. -Within a few minutes of talking to any group of students we found ourselves discussing the cost of living and the difficulty of paying for board, lodging and books on an allowance of less than £300 a year. And the professor was right. As at most French universities the number of women students outnumber ed men, and a charming girl with a crucifix round her neck told us although she and her closest friends still went to church, they were all "true Socialists.” Guy Mollet, the moderate leader of the French Socialist Party, was as much an object of derision as de Gaulle. In Grenoble we found definite hostility to the Common Market. The only student organ ization of any kind was the Socialists’ Student Union, and the president, a girl with fine brown eyes who was planning to be a teacher, poured scorn on the whole European idea. She admit ted grudgingly that it might have raised the standard of living a little, but because it had at the same time streng thened the "capitalist-mono polists” it was not in the in terests of France. "Let us socialize France first,” she said. "We can then think about Europe later.” And although in Paris we found sons and daughters of business men who took the opposite view, the interest in the Common Market was also purely economic. The 18 Panorama idea of a political union of Western Europe which M. Monnet and M. Schumann were advocating with such passion ten years ago, seems not to have pouched these young people at all. In Paris also we. met the one undergraduate — he planned to become a banker — who was actively hostile. He was guarded in his re plies to us, and afterwards the Frenchwoman who had introduced him- told us that he said to her, “How can I talk frankly to those .English people when everyone knows that England is our enemy and only wants to wreck all our plans?” « • « We had not been long in Milan before we realized that the - Alps have now tak en the place of the English Channel. In'political terms, crossing from France into Italy is to go from an island oh to the mainland. Already 2,500 of the 14,000 students at Milan University are learning English, and their interest in other countries — particularly Gremany — is al most greater than in Italy itself. Whether the students were the sons of famous Italian families or young men and women whose parents had recently migrated from the south, Europe seemed their ohe great hope. The idea of Europe — not de Gaulle's Europe of nations but a strong federal Europe with a parliament directly elected by the people — is the answer not only to their dreams but to their domestic problems as well. For Catholics the Europ ean Community is the best defence against Communism and the only cure for the un employment which is still visible everywhere from Na ples to Sicily. The Common Market is the beginning, not the fulfillment, of Italy’s mi racle; ' if prosperity is to spread downwards and the poverty of the South which has seemed eternal is really to disappear, then the Com mon Market itself must be expanded. Even the leaders of Italian Communism have deviated from the Moscow line far enough to recognize that Italy has benefited from the Treaty of Rome, and the young Communists are straying farther than their leaders. September 1963 19 The famous Pedrocchi cafe in Padua, where the hole made by the Austrian bullet which killed an Italian stu dent in 1866 is framed in the wall, is still the meeting place for the students of Europe’s second oldest uni versity. As we sat talking to two or three, more and more drifted " into the famous “White Room” until our cir cle must have numbered twenty. They explained, in a mix ture of German, French and English, that to them the new Europe was the natural extension of the Risorgimento. Italy had never become one nation; Italians must find their true expression in the European family. The Alps had not been a barrier under Austria; they did not think of them as a barrier now. Ever sirice the Common Market has been founded Italians have poured across the Alps, and although they do not assimilate easily with the French or Germans (or with any other of the north ern races) they feel passion ately that they have a right to work and settle among them. All this the students echo ed and re-echoed, yet every one of this particular group called himself a Communist and talked of the “alien ation” of their souls which would take place when they left the university and began to work for a “capitalist monopolist.” “Our labour is all we have to sell. It should not be bought by any individual/* they asserted. However, when I asked how they pro posed to effect their revolu tion they were shocked. “We do not agree with the Rus sians,* they said. “We are sure we can win the coope ration of our people.” Their simple faith in the humanity of the State as an employer was tempered only by their dislike of Rome. They explained to us the virtues of the proposals for “structural reform” which would turn Italy itself into a federation of autonomous provinces, several of which would be Communist con trolled. One young writer com plained that' only “porno graphic books could make money in Italy” and that nei ther a book nor a poem with 20 Panorama out a Left-wing slant has much chance of being publish ed: although not a Commu nist himself, he was prepared to accept a period of Commu nist rule as a "purge." But a professor pointed out that the authors to whom this young man was objecting could not really be described as pornographic, and the young Communists them selves dismissed the idea that corruption o r decadence among the upper classes had anything to do with the in crease of a million Commu nist votes at the last Italian election. Success was due simply to the force of Com munist ideas. Only one of those with whom we talked in Padua — and I took him to be their leader — had parents who wei'e members of the Com munist Party. The rest all came from Roman Catholic families, but said that they did not discuss their views at home. "Our parents simply do not understand and it would be useless to try to make them." But for all their zeal for Socialism, none of them was looking for a job at the hands of the State; the majorty of the little group in Padua were being trained as engineers and expected jobs in industry where high pay might to some extent com pensate them for the indig nities of private employment. The only student who intend ed to try for a job as a mem ber of Professor Hallstein’s European civil service was the son of an ancient and wealthy Italian family in Mi lan. • * • The impression that the northern passes of the Alps are less of a barrier than those between France and Italy is not purely subjective; in the most northerly Italian villages German is the com mon language and the church spires' take on a faintly By zantine look so that each vil lage might have been trans planted from the Danube valley. In Freiburg, the last uni versity town we were to visit the narrow streets were festoned with branches of birch and the entrance to the thir teenth-century cathedral was paved with patterns of flo wers in honour of the Feast of Corpus Christi. It was 21 too cold to sit in the square, but from seven o’clock, when the service of celebration fi nished and the bells were quiet, the cafes in the cathe dral square filled with stu dents. The young couple who came to- our table were engaged to be married, she a physical training instruct or, he studying to be a doc tor. They longed to talk and we were soon caught up in all the yearnings and anxie ties of the new Germany which seem only to increase with prosperity. The next night the whole of a fraternity, twenty young men living in the same house, came to dine at the invitation of an old friend of ours who had himself been at Freiburg in the 1920s. These fraternities are neither clubs ncir colleges, but sim ply houses, financed largely by past inmates,' where stu dents live together and run their own establishment. The twenty young men we met were a fascinating cross section of modern German life. Two impressions stood out after conversation lasting in to the small hours. These young Germans are already international i n outlook. During the afternoon their host had taken me up to a platform on the mountain above the town and shown me the panorama of the Rhine valley with the moun tains of the Vosges in the distance. "When I was a student,” he said, "we never went into France. Those lovely mountains were closed to us.” Today hundreds of students cross over into France every week-end and of those who came to dinner two had spent a year in the United States, two a year in England, a young woman who had just got her medical degree was soon leaving for Nigeria, and others had plans to work in Africa and the Middle East. In their outlook on Europe they Were not less enthusias tic than the young Italians, but far more practical. In spite of their admiration for President de Gaulle they had no interest in his vision of a Europe of the Nations; but in discussing a truly federal Europe they at once wanted to know just what powers the central government would have, how it would collect its taxes, through what insti 22 Panorama tutions it would govern and in discussing a truly federal Europe they at once wanted to know how it would organ ize its civil service. And for the first time we ourselves were plied with questions. Was England really interested in Europe? Were the British afraid of being dragged into a war by Germany as they had been told? Were the British still suspicious of Germany? As the evening wore oh and we became more inti mate, we were able to broach the subject of the war, and to ask what they were being taught about Hitler and what they thought of the inter-war years. All spoke nostalgically of the Weimai Republic and blamed its failure upon the Allies and the- Treaty of Versailles; about the war itself they knew practically nothing. Yet we learned from each student that Hitler was the great dividing line between them and their parents. For it seemed that each, at some time, had come to ask his parents the same question: how was it that they had al lowed Hitler to do the things that he did. And although they told us that their pa rents had tried to explain the power of the Gestapo and the psychological effect of terror, they had plainly been unable to exonerate themselves in the eyes of their children. As we drove slowly across France to Brussels, sorting out our ideas, we could not help feeling deeply depress ed. The dynamic has gone out of Europe. The vision which Sir Winston Chur chill resuscitated in 1945 of the world’s most talented peoples joining together to rekindle thq flame of West ern civilization, in alliance with, but not dependent upon, the United States — in opposition to Communism but also in the hope of be ing a catalyst which would bring understanding with the Communist world — is dying. For all the enthusiasm of the young Italians and Ger mans, one could not feel that they alone .would be able to revive it. We had been as tonished to learn that how ever politically-minded they might be, no student in any of the three countries we had visited belonged as a full member to a political party. September 1963 23 These young people will not join the parties because they despise the politicians who lead them. We realized, as we reflect ed, that not one student had proclaimed his intention of entering political life, and at Freiburg the young Germans had confessed that however strongly they held their views, they knew they would not have the slightest effect. In Brussels the Communi ty's liaison officer with uni versities and youth move ments within the Common Market countries reflected our anxiety. He was reliev ed to know that we had found any interest in Europe at all. He said that few of the youth organizations still took Europe seriously; the young farmers in particular, anti notably the French, were doing excellent work thrashing out in detail the harmonization <of the price and support systems of their respective countries. But when I suggested that all these youth officials would form the cadres of the new European community and would finally realize the European idea, he could do no more than hope that I might be right. Neither he nor any other politician or professor with whom we had talked could see any end to the pause in the evolution of Europe which General de Gaulle's rejection of Britain has brought about. And if the dilution of the Europe idea is to be prevented, if the en thusiasm of all the young Europeans outside France is to be harnessed before it evaporates, if the radicalism of the young French is to be given any other expression than a Socialism which would ally itself naturally with the Communists, then a new inspiration must be found. As a French professor said to us, "It is useless preachihg anti-Communism. Un less the philosophy of the in dividual can be vividly re clothed, liberalism in Europe will die." To the Continent al liberal Britain is still the supreme example of that phi losophy, and it is from Bri tain that the inspiration must come. What hope is there that we can fulfill this role? To 24 Panorama do so we need to be bold. We need to speak in Europe, unflinchingly, of our political beliefs. We need to op pose at home and abroad all trends towards personal gov ernments. We must take the initiative in forming new and responsible political in stitutions in Europe; and we must propose a form of fede ral government and define its power. — The London Times, July 28, 1963. THE WANT OF HAPPINESS The more perfect civilization is, the less occasion has it for government, because the more it does regu late its own affairs, and govern itself; but so con trary is the practice of old governments to the rea son of the case, that the expenses of them increase in the proportion they ought to diminish, x x x But how often is the natural propensity of society disturbed or destroyed by the operations of the government! When the latter, instead of being in grafted on the principles of the former, assumes to exist for itself, and acts by partialities of favour and oppression, it becomes the cause of the mischiefs it ought it prevent, x x x Whatever the apparent cause of any riots may be, the real one is always want of happiness. It shows that something is wrong in the system of government that injures the felicity by which society is to be preserved. — Thomas Paine. 25 ■ A member of the Manchester Education Commit tee of Britain reports on Soviet vocational schools. INSIDE RUSSIA'S SCHOOLS Kathleen Ollerenshaw An unimposing stone-faced building, a heavy door and then, just inside a dark en trance hall, a "shrine” .. we were entering Vocational Technical School Number One in Moscow. The "shrine,” the director explained later, is the focal point of the school. It is lined with trophies and prize lists and topped by the ubi quitous portrait of Lenin. The Red Flag stands in the centre guarded by a privileg ed pupil, A week later, as we went into the entrance hall of a new school in Leningrad, we were faced, on the wall, with an elaborately embossed "creed” — the code of con duct that pupils have to learn and recite. In a place of honour in these same schools we saw a dozen or so photographs with citations displayed in a fram ed merit board. The photo graphs were of the schools’ star pupils. The merit board was a feature of all the Russian schools we saw and a teacher whose record was outstanding was also includ ed on one. Ubiquitous, too, was the list of laggards, pin ned to school notice-boards for all to see. Our interpreter unblushingly remarked, "They are given the works” — presum ably by their fellow pupils. The merit boards provide a strong incentive for teach ers as well as for pupils. Teachers are paid a bonus for examination successes of the young people in their charge, and, in reverse, pu pil's failures influence in spectors’ reports on indivi dual teachers to be demoted or even to lose their jobs. These are some of the sym 26 Panorama bols of the motive force of Soviet education. Here a re ligion — Marxism-Leninism — is combined with material incentives and a deeply em bedded ideological fervoui to form an education system that is skilfully tailored to meet the needs of the State. The problems that beset us in Britain when attempt ing to plan manpower do not exist. In Russia it is sim ple: THERE IS A PLAN. This is known to everyone, displayed diagrammatically on public hoardings and giv en meaning as yearly targets are visibly met. In a country where the demands of the State over ride everything, manpower planning — even with a po pulation approaching 220 million becomes merely a matter of logistics. State ownership and control over the purse make planning still more precise. Through care ful streamlining of educa tion and training, and by re lating pay to education "grades,” each branch of the economy receives (more or less exactly) the intended quota of recruits. In theory, the fifteen sepa rate Republics of the U.S.S.R. have full legislative powers: there are separate Ministries of Education. In practice, all schools, together with timetables, curricula, textbooks, teaching methods and standards, are control led by the Ministry of Edu cation in Moscow. For high er and specialized secondary education there is one central Ministry only. . Compulsory full-time edu cation begins at seven. In 1958 Khrushchev recast the system, bringing a new em phasis to practical wdrk in factories, mines, farms, build ing or public services as a re quired ingredient of all se condary education. The se ven-year compulsory "incom plete secondary education” and the ten-year "complete secondary ducation’* are now being replaced by eight-year and eleven-year courses. With certain exceptions students may not enter higher educa tion until they have had oneand-a-half to two years’ fulltime employment — perhaps in office, farm or factory — as well as having a certifi cate of completed secondary education. School classes are un streamed, but promotion September 1963 27 each year is dependent on a pass mark and is not auto matic with age. A recent development, now going strongly ahead, is in special schools for those who show exceptional academic talent. Places are competed for at about the age of twelve. Exceptions are also made for those with special talent for art, music or ballet. “French schools” and “Eng lish schools” are also prov ing popular where selected children from the age of se ven have all lessons in the chosen language. At fifteen or sixteen about half of the pupils are siphon ed off from the main stream of secondary education into vocational technical schools. Th^se schools are directly as sociated with a particular en terprise — an automobile factory perhaps, a metal works or foundry, a collect ive farm, a hospital, a central post office. Their pupils are essentially craft apprentices undergoing compulsory training along with part-time education. Only a few, per haps one in ten in the lowest ablity ranges, go from the eight-year schools into jobs for which no preparatory training is required or given. In a vocational technical school specializing in com munications which we visited in Moscow, boys and girls were together in ordinary lessons, but all the vocational study was in single-sex groups. The reason appear ed to be that girls would not be able to lift heavy equip ment: instruction in tele vision repair work and cable laying was therefore reserved for boys. To balance this, girls only were allowed to learn how to install and re pair telephone exchanges. Strong boys were not to be "waited” in training to do work that girls could dol About half of all pupils in the vocational schools join evening courses in order to gain the certificate of cqmpleted secondary education. Yuri Gagarin was trained as a foundryman at a vocation al technical school, studied simultanously a t evening classes, and earned" himself a place in a specialized insti tute of higher education — and from there to the first manned sputnik. His por trait — a model for Soviet 29 Panorama youth — is in every voca tional school. This careful channelling of future craftsmen and tech nicians into distinct occupa tions is the foundation of the new economy. There is no thing haphazard; recruitment is not affected by booms and slumps, by adolescent fashions, parental preferences or other variable factors. Children are expected to do a prodigious amount of homework and there is prob ably a good deal of overwork and strain. Pupils have to clean their own classrooms, workshops and equipment — even coming in on Sundays to scrub floors and clean win dows — and are awarded me rit marks for this. Partici pation in inventors clubs, hobby cjubs and other outof-school activities is virtual ly compulsory. Marks are gained for examination suc cesses, for good behaviour, tidiness and good work in the clubs. All privileges de pend on obtaining good marks and the chidren we saw appeard to be working keenly and to be full of nor mal high spirits out of school. Whether those who are black-listed are teased, bul lied or merely sent to Coven try we could hardly ask. The education grade (on a six-point scale) determines admission to higher educa tion . and recruitment to all forms of employment. Al though grades can be im proved by part-time study at any age, wages depend on grades and, except in teach ing, do not normally increase with length of service. IJigher up the ability scale recruitment to technical posts and semi-professional occu pation (including nursing and most school teaching) is equally logical. There are teacher training "schools,” schools for nurses, schools of art and design, and schools which train officeworkers and aspirants to other com mercial or social work. In Tbilisi I visited a school which trained girls (no boys) for the printing trade. The 250 girls were being taught to become compositors, type setters, linotype operators, and printers — occupations which the unions in Britain restrict to men. My visit to this school was unscheduled, made at my own request and alone. Un expected, I was spared the September 1963 29 usual preliminary pep talk of prearranged visits and spared, too, the shadowing presence of "the party mem ber” to whom we had be come accustomed. Refreshments (at 11 a.m.l) were on the grand scale. This time there could be no hiding behind friends. The toasts — to Peace, to Friend ship, to Women the World Over had to be taken "bot toms-up” in glass after glass of Georgian champagne punctuated with cognac. My memories of that school are as rosy as the blooms snatched from the vase and thrust into* my arms as 1 left. Some of these schools are "technicums,” which rank higher than the vocational technical schools and pro vide completed secondary education together with tech nical or semi-professional training. Most recruit at 'seventeen or eighteen. In tending teachers have to do two years’ teaching as part of their training. The education in all tech nical schools is free and there are grants, but entrance is strictly competitive and by selection, and the numbers are controlled to meet plan ned needs. If recruitment for some occupation lags, grants are increased and other baits introduced. A student trying to live on an unsupplemented basic grant, unless home-based or receiving some parental as sistance, will have a tough time; the basic grant is suf ficient for only the frugal existence. Once the realms of higher education are reached, the controls which govern the precise allocation of profes sional manpower to meet the State plan are even more stringent. Places in higher education are restricted; there is competitive entry by g ra d e s; and differential grants between institutes of higher education and, more significantly, between sub jects. Mathematicians, for instance, receive up to 50 per cent more than the basic monthly grant. The arts people appear to see nothing unfair in this. “Why should the scientists not be paid more?” a girl studying languages in Lenin grad told me. "Their talent is not given to everyone and we need them.” 30 Panorama Among the few students permitted to proceed direct ly to higher education from school without time spent in employment, the majority are mathematicians and phy sicists; the Russian planners are too rational to waste available mathematical abi lity in routine production. The universities have no monopoly of prestige in Rus sia as they have here. Only one-sixth of higher education graduates are the products of universities as such, and of these one-half are mathe maticians or pure and appli ed scientists. All the major technologies — as also agriculutre, medicine, architec ture, most advanced foreign languages courses, training for social planners, econo mists or accountants — are provided' in separate, special ized institutes. Polytechnics which provide high-level courses in metal lurgy, engineering, building,* applied science and applied mathematics are increasing in number, but the greater part of higher education even in Moscow is still given in specialized institutes an alogous to our College of Aeronautics at Cranfield, to the Institute of Food Tech nology at Weybridge or to the Royal College of Art. Britain’s -shortage of uni versity places for qualified applicants is mirrored in Russia, but more sharply. In the U.S.S.R. there are three applicants for every full-time vacancy in insti tutes of higher education in cluding universties — and in Russia this is accepted as reasonable. Only half of all higher ducation students are on full-time courses: of the rest, about three-quarters are studying through corres pondence courses run by the universities and institutes themselves, and one-quarter at evening classses four nights a week. We asked a senior official of the State Committee on the Co-ordination of Re search and Development in Moscow in which areas they intended to expand higher education most notably. "To increase part-time evening and correspondence exten sion courses still further,” he told us. Correspondence courses are a highly developed and im portant feature of Soviet edu cation. No particular virtue September 1963 31 appears to be attached to having been ‘exposed to the atmosphere o f university life,” but then no university life as we know it at its best exists in Russia. Exposure to factory or office life, allied with, continued study and in struction, is regarded as more valuable. All correspondence stu dents go to a parent institute on paid leave for four weeks during the summer vacation for practical work in work shops and laboratories. This means that higher education establishments (and voca tional schools) are far more heavily used than equivalent buildings in Britain. “Alter nating-shift” courses, evening classes, a five-and-a-half-day week throughout term and correspondence students in during vacations means that buldings, apart from a fourweek break in August, are in almost continuous use. All teaching appointments in Russia are subject to review every five years. An army of inspectors is ready to descend without warning on any lecture or classroom. Teachers have no freedom to experiment with syllabuses or methods, but they are given real in centive (promotion or cash) to make suggestions for im provements. In Moscow we visited a centre for scientific and tech nical education where me thods study is done and vi sual aids are devised. We interrupted a group of teach ers who had come in for a refesher course from local schools (where there is shift working in the schools this is simple to arrange). Al though we were many times assured that there is no short age of teachers (and no short age of money for education) and all classes in the voca tional schools we visited had twenty-four or fewer pupils, many teachers double-bank with evening or other teach ing in order to augment their incomes. Women hold many posts of high administrative and professional responsbility in education and outside it, but not in the same numbers as men. Opportunities for wo men, as indeed for all sec tions df the community, are geniunely equal, but there are, as in this country, mark ed sex preferences between subjects. 32 Panorama Biology laboratories will commonly be filled with wo men only: physics laborato ries with men. Only one in five mathematicians and phy sicists at Moscow State Uni versity are women, but four out of five of all higher edu cation students reading eco nomics and more than twothirds of those reading me dicine are women. The professional women whom we met were welldressed generally with severe hair styles, but with lipstick, nail varnish and high-heeled shoes. The head of an en gineering training depart ment of a vocational school in Moscow was positively fancily dressed, with frills, curls and stiletto heels that seem ed a danger as she picked her way between closely-aligned milling ' machines —though perhaps this was in honour of our visit. The girls in the workshops wore their regulation bandeax but, defying safety, most of them allowed fringes to have full p 1 ay. In class rooms, lectures and offices bouffant *hair styles, pretty dresses and fashionable shoes are usual — something that is difficult to square with the poor quality of goods in the shops; but one explanation may be that more girls are taking up home dress-mak ing and, of course, there is a black market. Even the newest buildings are not up to our standards. Although some administra tive rooms are very grand (particularly when in a con verted palace or stately home), the working condi tions in some of the insti tutes are terrible. Work shops, laboratories, libraries are good, very fully equip ped and heavily used, but lighting everywhere is be neath our requirements and sanitary arrangements are atrocious. But then neither lighting nor plumbing are priorities — their turn will no doubt come. The system is so openly based on selection by. compe tition, on marks, grades, pay ment by results and other material incentives that the Western visitor tends to be irritated after only a short time. What happens to those who go to the wall of whom we are told nothing? What is the suicide rate? — another Jorbidden question. But material incentive is 33 not the whole of it. There is also a geniune thirst for knowledge and an enthu siasm for education that can not fail to impress. A very real seriousness of purpose is evident everywhere. The wholly rational ap proach to p 1 a n n i n g, the straightforward answers giv en to our often naive ques tions, befogged as we Britons are by traditions, conventions and vested interests, came as a series of shocks. And, in the end, the questions re main. Can tight controls and the concentration of directive ta lent in the centre — appro priate when Russia was edu cationally an undeveloped country — continue indefi nitely? There are already at tempts t,o liberalize the sys tem and to delegate more powers to the separate Re publics. Is this compatible with Communism? Can they resolve the tensions between local initiative and central control? (For that matter, can we in Britain?) In Russia, at the slightest sign of recalcitrance or de viation from a currently ap proved party line, the brakes can be clapped on, the pro cess reserved. The future development of the Soviet educational system — which, within its limits, seems at present to work with un doubted efficiency — is, like everything else in the U.S.S.R. dependent on the evo lution of ideological Com munism itself. — The Lon don Times, August 11, 1963. Those who give their votes before they hear the debate, and have weighed the reasons on all sides, are not capable of doing. To prepare such an assem bly as this, and endeavour to set up the declared abettors of his own will, for the true representatives of the people, and the lawmakers of the society, is certainly as great a breach of trust, and as perfect a declaration of a design to subvert the government, as is possible to be met with. — John Locke. 34 Panorama ■ Is it: Prosperity for the Soviet Union first — and good luck to the rest of the comrades? THE SHATTERED MONOLITH Edward Crankshaw Fifteen years ago the West-decade and a half, em World deployed itself to meet "a very real menace. This was the menace of Rus sia under Stalin, byt it was called, confusingly, the Com munist challenge. When Stalin died, in 1953, that menace died with him — but it has taken 10 years for this fact to be brought home to us. Three years later Stalin and Stalinism were denounced by Khrush chev, who, at the same time, rejected Lenin’s teaching about the inevitability of war and violent revolution. At that point the interna tional Communist movement, which had been held together only by Muscovite singlemindedness, began to fall apart at the seams. The idea of the Commu nist monolith was always a simplification. It distorted, perhaps stultified, political thinking in the West for a Now we show every sign of oversim plifying the Sino-Soviet quar rel as we once oversimplified the Communist menace it self. Already people who, until a few-months ago, re fused to believe that there was a rupture of any kind are busily dividing the Com munist world into pro-Russian and pro-Chinese fac tions, and totting up the scores: the French Commu nists, we are told, are 100 per cent pro-Russians; the Ma layans, 100 per cent pro-Chi nese, the Brazilians, all 50,000 of them, 50 per cent pro-Chinese, and 50 per cent pro-Russian. And so on. Private aims The assumption under lying these statistics appears to be that the pro-Russian and pro-Chinese parties, or factions, are being used as passive instruments for the 35 furtherance of the aims of Moscow and Peking. In fact, long before the Sino-Soviet quarrel began, at least some of the fraternal parties were using Moscow to further their own private aims; now they are using both Moscow and Peking. One simple example, to set the tone. The Rumanian comrades have lately been making inviting gestures in the direction of China, which is a long way, and de fiant gestures in the direction of Russia, which is just across the border. Nobody in his senses would believe for one moment that Mr. Gheorghiu Dej and his colleagues, des perately trying to make the Rumanian economy work, are eager to join with the Chinese in a militant revolu tionary crusade, conducted in the teeth of Soviet disap proval, to shatter the last bastions of imperialism and capture Asia, Africa, Latin America for the cause. Like all Eastern or Cen tral European Communists, the Rumanians want, and need, a quiet life, not a nu clear holocaust. They are not interested in the outer world, except as an outlet for trade. Their object in appearing to flirt with -Peking has no other purpose than to warn the Russians of the present limits of Moscow’s authority. The Communist world, they are saying in effect, is not what it was. This is no time for you, Nikita Sergeievich, to start bulldozing our legitimate national aspi rations.- .You could do this once upon a time because you had all power; we lay in your shadow, and there was nowhere else for us to go. Now there is somewhere else for us to go. Moscow lost its virtue as the headquarters of a cohe rent and disciplined inter national movement when, with the death of Stalin, it lost the will and the strength to conduct itself imperially. When it comes to imposing an alien system on weak neighbors, there is no stable halfway house between ruth less discipline and chaos. The public defection of_ Chi na from the Muscovite cause (in which she was never se riously joined) merely high lights chaos. The first thing the West has to do is to start looking 36 Panorama at the world as it is and to think of it in terms of peo ples, races, nations (ancient and newly emergent) instead of in terms of blocs. Com munism means one thing in Italy, another in East Ger many, another in Poland, another in Sweden; some thing quite else in Indonesia, in Venezuela, in Syria. Stalin ruled by rigid disci pline. In the interests of the Soviet Union, Russian power and Russian gold were used to subvert idealists, rebels and intellectual thugs all over the world and to disci pline them into fifth colum nists active in the cause of Moscow. Those who queried Stalin’s orders or produced ideas of their own were ex pelled from the brotherhood, killed. 6f course the idea of in ternational Communism, of the dynamic of world revo lution, existed. It burned with a smoky flame in innu merable souls, some noble, some envious, some power seeking, some merely des tructive, all conspiratorial by nature. Some of these were Russians, a rapidly decreas ing band; but Stalin and his functionaries were not among them. This is not to say that their way of thinking was not heavily conditioned Joy ideas received from Lenin. It was. But the ends to which they applied this way of thinking were not Leninist ends; their assumption of absolute power inside the Soviet Union was facilitated by the almost schizoid dualism of Russian people. Lenin himself was driven by dreams of international brotherhood — until, with t h e responsibilities and harassments of power upon him, he was forced increas ingly to identify himself with Russian ends and to adapt himself to Russian, as distinct from Marxist, met hods. But the dream was real enough, and for a long time it had nothing to do with natonialism or Russian power All the peoples of the world were to advance on lines evposed in a clearcut his torical formula, involving vio lent revolution and the tem porary dictatorship of the proletariat After that (here the vision was hazy, but oil the more exciting for it) they were to dwell together in September 1963 37 concord, according to their different national habits, each for each and all for all. In this dream, which did not last long in the Soviet Union, there was indeed a Commu nist menace — not a Russian menace as later, under Stalin, but a world-wide series of linked internal menaces to the then ruling classes of all lands. Seamier side The Leninist dream still lingers on in some quarters (not Russia; not, one would say, China; and not notice ably among the leading cad res of the 89 fraternal par ties), but it does not cut much ice. The remarkable thing is that it survived Sta in at all. K h r u s hchev discourses upon it with warmth, enthusiam and, sometimes, wit. “We shall bury you!” he cheerfully exclaims. But this prophecy is full of semantic pitfalls. Who are “we”? And who are "you”? If by “you” Khrushchev means a whole range of enterpreneurs, from the late Mr. Rachman up to quite a height, symbol izing the seamier side of what we optimistically call the capitalist system, then how right he is: but then "we” includes all the rest of us. If by "we” he means the Soviet bloc — the Warsaw Pact Powers — and "you” the Western Alliance, then he is asking for trouble and he knows it. But if he means by "we” Moscow Commu nism and by "you” every thing against it, then the West has an imposing new comrade in arms disposing of 650 million souls, increas ing at the rate of 30 million a year. It is more to the point to ask what Khrushchev means by Communism, and only he can supply- the answer. His statements, as so far deliver ed do not take us very far. Lenin's apocalyptic dream appears in his mind to have been reduced to the quest for material abundance, leisure, and culture to fill in time: the kind of thing Bri tish Prime Ministers are re buked for in the leader-pages of The Times. A menace to the higher values it may well be; but it is not what we mean by the Communist me nace, or even the Russian menace. Nor is it what many of the fraternal parties mean by 38 Panorama Communism. The Chinese have shown themselves espe cially bitter and contemptu ous of Khrushchev’s unex pressed slogan: Prosperity for the Soviet Union first — and good luck to the rest of the comrades! And Chineste cri ticism here is sharply echoed by poor, weak and aspiring people who inhabit backward areas over the greater part of the globe. No Rome Not for them the dream of “catching up with Ameri ca”: many of them would settle for a loaf of bread. The spectacle of Khruschev presiding comfortably over one of the “have” Powers, and arranging the world to fit in with his personal pros perity drive, does not appeal. To the have-nots, Chinese methods seem to have more to offer. But this is not to say that the fraternal com rades wish to exchange regi mentation in the interests of Soviet prosperity and power for regimentation in the in terest of Chinese imperial ambitions. If the Communist mono lith never really existed, the current image of two rival Communist Ropes is equally misleading. There is now no Rome at all. The focus of interest has shifted from Moscow and Peking to the individual fraternal parties all over the world, with more to come. Each has to be studied in the context of its own historical and geographical setting and tackled accordingly. But we know little about them. For example, we know that the Brazilian party which, though small, used to be so brilliantly organized under that most intelligent and per ceptive of Communist lead ers, Prestes, is now split right down the middle. We know that his rival, Grabois, is leading a militant, proChinese wing, which has now captured half the party, on a rapidly anti-American ticket. But we do not know to what extent Grabois is a fanatic, a convinced believer in Mao’s Road, recoiling in righteous indignation from the sophisticated gradualism of Prestes and looking for support from the angry, the impatient, the desperate who see their only hope in vio^ lent action soon or whether he is using China as a stalk Septempkr 1963 39 ing-horse in a personal bid to steal power from Prestes. If it comes to that, we do not know whether Prestes himself, so skilfully arguing Khrushchev’s line, regards the Russian comrades as the guardians of the true faith, or as Gringo barbarians use ful to Brazilian or LatinAmerican Communism be cause they have money to burn and an armament that frightens the Americans. The gentleness and sophistication of Prestes’s speech at the Moscow conference of Nov ember, 1960, warmly support ing Khrushchev against the Chinese, was in itself a re proach to the crudity of Rus sian methods. At the same meeting, Jesu Faria of Venezuela, who also supported the Russians, nevertheless indicated clearly that his respect for Khrush chev stopped well this side of idolatry. He supported Moscow because he thought Khrushchev’s policies more intelligent in the atomic age than Mao’s, and particularly because the Chinese had been actively engaged in trying to undermine his own authority over the Venezuelan party (oil again?). But he thought that many of the speakers at that meeting had been alto gether too uncritical of the Soviet comrades, who he said, had themselves committed many errors. He hoped that the Russians would be clever enough in future to devise' a system that would put an end to inter-party quarrel ling and prevent future schisms. Exasperation These remarks were a fore taste of more to come. The Cuban adventure last autumn did not at all redound to Khrushchev’s credit. If the Chinese had been more sub tle and had made at least some atempt to present their invasion of India'as anything but old-fashioned powerpolitics, had disguised their eagerness to do a Real-politik deal with Pakistan, had shown‘more concern for the fraternal comrades in S.E. Asia and less for Chinese na tionals in that area, and had resisted the temptation to boast of their contempt for the nucelar threat, which frightens most comrades, like all of us, out of their wits, they might have made much more headway. 40 Panorama It is probably not too much to say that, for a whole variety of reasons, the gen eral feeling among Commu nists in most countries about Russia and China is “A plague on both your houses!” Dismay, exasperation, some times contempt, are felt by many Communist leaders who were not privileged to be born Russian or Chinese in the face of the imbecilities and crudities displayed by the heirs of Ivan the Terrible and Confucius. In purely practical terms this quarrel, or the way it has been conducted, has alienated fellow-travellers and the ea ger members of "front” or ganizations all over the world, has bored to distraction the faithful who are trying to get on with the march to wards die millennium, has caused neophytes in darkest Africa to raise their eyebrows. In intellectual terms, it has plumbed depths of mental squalor which make, the flesh of the more intelligent Com munists creep. In political terms it has indicated that the senior partners of the Socialist camp are more in terested in their own power struggle than in the future of the movement. In the last resort, and for the time being, Russia will win when it comes to com manding the allegiance of the party as a whole. She has the money, the power and the prestige. It has yet to be proved that Mao’s soli citude for the weaker brethen is any deeper than Khrush chev’s: it is easy to appear solicitous when you have no thing much to give. Khrushchev, though an inferior dialectician to Mao and his worshippers has much more good sense. He is closer to the age we live in, and he is being dragged ever closer by the demands of fraternal comrades, such as Togliatti of Italy, who actual ly live in it. With his very vivid sense - of the calamitous nature of nuclear war (no doubt the Chinese are just as afraid but they dare not say so), he appeals directly to all those gdod comrades who do not want to be blown up. On a lower level, he is belov ed by many smaller parties, who know that their only hope of survival is to lie low for sometime to come. September 1963 41 He is one, also, with those parties who either rule or in habit countries with comparativey advanced economies, which, though they may dili gently beaver away (as in Britain) to make things dif ficult for their present mas ters, would nevertheless pre fer to live as desrtuctive mi norities in a comfortable land than inherit a ruin. More than this, Russia really has the last word, if she cares to say it, with parties which would naturally gravitate, one would say, to China: she has, for example, more to give to Laos (if she cares to give it) than the Chinese. But what does it all amount to? And where is the central leadership on the march to revolution? Khrush chev may reassure himself with Leninist slogans, but knows very well that for the forseeable future he is in terested above all in conso lidating Soviet power and se curity, avoiding war, and augmenting the prosperity of his country. There is no dy namism here. Warnings China cannot begin to pre tend to leadership of a world that embraces Europe and North America. Other par ties, though they may value Moscow’s support, have their own problems. When the Swedish Communist leader, Hagberg, announces to the Moscow Conference that the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat is outdated and that Swedish Commu nists are determined to co operate with the Swedish Socia Democrats, whom they see as a true workers’ party, the writing is on the wall (this was a secret speech among Communists, not an essay in propaganda). When Mr. Gollan, of Lon don, at the same meeting, reads the Chinese a lecture explaining that they have no conception of British ways and true appreciation of the strength of the British La bour movemen, he is also warning the Russians. As for Italy, Togliatti and Longo are already far out in a deeply heretical move to^ wards ‘'reformism." They are meeting with opposition within their own party, but it is not at all clear whether the "Chinese” wings in Pa dua and elswhere are moti vated by admiration for Mao 42 Panorama or dislike of Signor Togliatti. These uncertainties are legion. The only certain thing is that the proper way to approach the Communist menace is to pay less atten tion to Russia and China and a great deal more to the problems of the separate countries of the “Socialist camp” and to the discontents in our own midst. Each country that feels it can pro duce a better solution than the Communist solution should strain itself to the utmost to prove that it can — and help, even at a sacri fice, the weaker brethen.1 — The Observer, July 28, 1963. LESS DEMOCRACY? Carl L. Becker writes that one of the conditions essential to the success of democracy is a measure of economic security. “Democracy does not flour ish in communities on the verge of destitution. In ancient and medieval times democratic government appeared for the most part in cities, the centers of prosperity. In modern times democratic institutions have, generally speaking, been most successful in new countries, where the conditions of life have been easy for the people. Democracy is in some sense an eco nomic luxury, and it may be said that in modern times it has been a function of the development of new and potentially rich countries, or of the in? dustrial revolution which suddenly dowered Europe with unaccustomed wealth. Now that prosperity is disappearing round every next corner, democracy works less well than it did.” September 1963 43 ■ It is astonishing the way people today allow them selves to be misled by brands, labels, and marks, including diplomas. DON'T BE FOOLED BY LABELS What’s in a name? The answer, of course, is — a loti We know what Shakespeare thought: “A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.” The label was not important; the real ity was what mattered. But today a rose by any other name would fetch a different price. It would be a differ ent commodity. The reality matters little: it is the label that sells. When I was a boy in the nineteen-twenties and thir ties, I used to be sent to a shop across the street. It sold everything: mustard, starch, boot-polish, cough mixture, mops, string, seal ing-wax, pit-socks, and thick pink bloomers which dan gled down from a criss-cross of lines over the counter. I would ask for a loaf of bread, a pound of butter, a bar of soap — just that. Nowadays, the shiny chronium super market deals with all this. The shelves carry dozens of differently packaged kinds of bread: all sort of butters and margarines — all of which taste different, in spite of the fact that most of us can not tell one from the other. Manufacturers brand their products: it is a monopolist's trick: cornering a market, giving a commodity a brand image, a label, so impressive as to make it seem unique. “Don’t ask for soap — ask for Joe Soap: the softest sdap on the market!” This cult of being wedded to the label rather than the reality has spread from pro ducts to people. Montaigne said long ago that we ought not to judge men by the kinds of shirts they wear. But we are more sophisticat ed than that. Not by shirts only, but by accents, educa tional backgrounds, examin ation qualifications, income brackets, occupations, do we separate man from man. Of course- we all believe that at bottcJTh — wherever that may Panorama be — a man’s a man for a that: that is, so long as he is well-labelled about where he has come from and where he is going; so long as he has his credencials. We cannot feel really happy until we have everything labelled. We all come into the world the same way, and in our first naked, crying hu manity there is not much to distiguish us. My elder son was born in hospital, and I remember when I first went to see him I was taken into a room full of shelves of babies in aluminium baskets. They were all so much alike they had to have little labels of tape tied round -their wrists to identify them. The first label — the family name: and it decides so much. Borneo and Juliet, for example, died because of the family labels they wore. After this, the process of ticketing really goes to work. Human infants, innocent of what is happening, are label led for their roles in society. They are “male”. They are “Negroes”, "Jews”, “Europ eans” and think what limit ations, humiliations, and tra gedies may stem from these labels. They are “working class”, "middle class” or “aristocracy”, and the whole of their personal lives will be profoundly affected by whichever label is stuck upon their “I.Q.”, by some examination, by some school, and this will largely deter mine their warnings, their security, their opportunities for happiness and fulfillment for the rest of their lives. What is frightening is that these labels are so inade quate. “Male and female created He them.” But this is a gross over-simplification. It should properly read: “Male and female, and the longserie s-o f-graduations-i nbetween, created He them.” It is the same, in this con nection, with labels “natur al” and “normal” and “un natural” and “abnormal”. Sexual attributes called “na tural” and “abnormal” are those with which nature has endowed the minority. Mak ing the unnatural natural, and the abnormal normal, really boils down, unless we exercise great care, to forcing the minority to fit in with the majority — a repugnant and indefensible ethical princi ple. September 1963 45 But we do not only label children. We label adults, too — and our label is more often than not a judgement When we call people “wild cat strikers”, “employers”, “Roman Catholics", “homo sexual s”, “criminals,” we think we are saying some thing about them as persons, but we are really judging categories. Society could not go on without some labelling; but in our more complicated and wealthier society, falseness is not only more possible — it also pays. We are nearer to having equal opportunity to be unequal, and we are set at one another’s throats by those who stand to gain from our snobbishness. We are so stuck up with false labels as to miss real quali ties of living, like one of those touring motorists whose windows and wind screens are so gummed up with ostention that he can not see where he is going. It is even old-fashioned now to speak of “keeping up with the Joneses” which has been defined as spending money you don’t have on things you don’t want, to impress people you don’t like. Now, we have to do all we can to be superior to them. If they get a 1961 car, we must exchange our 1959 for a 1962. If Mr. Jones is a “chief clerk”, I must call myself an “office manager.” In our highly specialized so ciety, our occupation is a very important label. We love to try and corner a ca reer. We love “differentials.” In the social sciences,, for example, I may stand little chance of promotion unless I stake out a particular spe cialism — a “field” — for my self. I may be interested in sociology, but that is not enough: I must specialize in educational sociology, or in dustrial sociology, some field. I may study the social life of Biggleswater, a tillage with fifty peasants, five pigs, a pub-cum-post office. I “do research” on it. Then I publish my thesis and a few articles, and I can claim to be a “rural siociologist.” Since there may be only two other "rural sociologists” in the country, I may become an “authority”, an “expert.” And if I am sufficiently nar row-minded to persist in all this, I may become one of the ‘names’ in my field. My 45 Panorama own "name," even may be come a "label.” I have ar rived. My future is secure. But since many people are competing for ‘fields’ they are sensitive to boundaries. Chaps with SOCIOLOGY written across their chests and chaps with PSYCHO LOGY written across theirs are continually abusing each other, each claiming that the other’s field is bogus. We must preserve our own pro fessional distinctiveness, and so other people must be li mited to their labels. But this is not peculiar to social scientists. It is the same everywhere. We fit in with labels so much that we come to be lieve them. We really believe that if we are solicitors or executives in bowler hats and umbrellas we are superior to manual workers with shirt sleeves and overalls. We really believe if we are mid dle-class housewives who drive round to the shops in cars and get our goods on account, that we are superior to the working class house wives from the council e$ tate who walk — and pay cash. We become the labels we wear. If we are not care ful, we shall end up like a real and pathetic member of the Jones family whose plight is recorded on his grave stone: Sacred to the memory of Tammas Jones, Who was born a man, and died a grocer. Between cradle and grave, Tammas had lost his hu manity. Born an unspoiled human being, he died a bit of social machinery, a mere device for weighing sugar and tea. He had lost himself in fulfilling a social role. Just as we come into the world by the same entrance, we leave it by the same exit. Equal in our way of birth, we are equal also in death. We cannot take our labels with us. The pity is that we have to spoil our lives be tween these two great level lers with so much that is bogus, unpleasant, and un just. What can we do about it? I was much impressed, in a recent programme on open prisons, by a prison governor, who, when speak ing of the people in her prison, would use the word "inmates," or indeed any 47 word other than "prisoners.’’ She refused, as she said, "to put a prisoner label on wo men who come to this place." And why? Because it stood in the way of their regarding themselves as human beings; and stood in the way of other people treating them as- human beings. If we are sick of labels, then, there is one simple thing, at least, that we can do — stop using them. A man, whether black, white, working class, upper class, Christian, Muslim, atheist, Jew, American, Rus sian, intelligent, . unintelli gent, criminal, or virtuous — is a man, for a’ that, and it is about time we acted as though we really believed it. — R. Fletcher, The Listener. THE NEED IS GOVERNMENT Government is the thing. Law is the thing. Not brotherhood, not international cooperation, not security councils, that can stop war only by waging it. Where do human rights arise, anyway — security against the thief, the murderer, the foot pad? In brotherly love? Not at all. It lies in gov ernment. Where does control lie — control of smok ing in the theater, of nuclear energy in the planet? Control lies in government, because government is people Where there are no laws, there is no law enforcement. Where there are no courts, there is no justice. — E. B. White. 48 Panorama ■ An expose of trickery, venomous subtlety and com plete lack of ethics at the top — shades of Stonehill? BUSINESS VERSUS BUSINESS The collapse of ethics in our time nowhere is more devastatingly expressed than in the utter lack of principle at the top. The knifing and in-fighting among Organiz ation Men would have done credit to the conspirators at the court of Caligula. A business magazine, Modern Office Precedures, asked its readers: “Is it possible for a man to move up through the ranks of management solely by honest, decent me thods?” An overwhelming majority answer: "No!” The nature of this inter necine war of businessmen ranges from almost wholesale throat-cutting in the scram ble up the ladder to the exe cutive suite to all kinds of espionage, bribery and connivery in the attempt to filch a rival’s trade secrets. In both areas, in an atmos phere of intense combative ness in which only the end result is important, almost anything and everything goes. The battle for the heights of corporate power leads to the kind of suave, Organiz ation Man throat-cutting that is as lethal to careers as the lash of a jungle cat’s extend ed claws to a beast of prey. Norman Jaspan has pointed out repeatedly that the at mosphere in the executive suite inevitably seeps down and affects all the lower le vels of business. In this con nection, probably no conduct has a more widespread or deleterious effect on em ployee morale than the spec tacle of the bosses stabbing each other in the back with gangland professionalism. Yet, as Jaspan has noted, such back-stabbing and throat-cutting comprises "a rite being practiced by thou sands of executives in hun dreds of businesses.” It is a rite so widely prac ticed, indeed, that The Wall Street Journal last year be came concerned about it and conducted a survey to dis September 1963 49 cover just how prevalent is this ungentlemanly mayhem. In interviews with fifty exe cutives in twelve cities, it discovered an unlovely lot. The trickery ranged from the spikng of a rival’s drink just before an important meeting (thus guaranteeing that he would disgrace him self), to more * complicated and really Machiavellian plotting against a competitor. The vice president of one Eastern corporation, facing a rival for power in a rising new executive, went to the trouble of plugging the car buretor of his rival’s auto mobile. This made the new man late for his first execu tive meeting and started him off under a lowering, black cloud. In another instance, an elevator company execu tive waited for a colleague’s pet project to flop; then he submitted to his boss a file of memos — carefully back dated to indicate he had op posed the venture all along. Almost as telling as these examples was the uncons ciously revealing remark of the executive of a Southwest oil company. After faithfully denying that there was any throat-cutting in his business, he turned around and com mented ruefully: "Of course, some people in this company will do just anything to get ahead.” This attitude that a man is justified in doing "just any thing to get ahead” spells, of course, the death knell of ethics. Such an atmosphere, as Jaspan has noted, "forms a natural breeding ground for white-collar crime. Its chief elements consist of trickery, venomous subtlety and complete lack of ethics.” The Amorous Executive All three elements were illustrated by a case that ties together back-stabbings in the executive suite and in dustrial espionage — a new, multi-million-dollar postwar industry. This case involved three partners who were shar ing in the lush profits of a multi-million-dollar business. One of the partners was a fine business executive well liked and capable. The other two had no reason to be dis satisfied with him, except that they began to figure that if they could find a way to eliminate him they could gobble up his share of the profits. 50 Panorama Thus motivated, they adopted a common tactic of today, hiring detectives to “get” something on their partner. They had no idea what they might get; almost anything that could be used for leverage would do. Tak ing the quickest route to the source of secrets, the hired investigators promptly wire tapped the unsuspecting vic tim’s home and office phones. The result was a great dis appointment. No black and nefarious and usable tidbit of information came over the wires. Desperate, the two partners instructed the de tectives to bug their pal’s own private office. Nothing could be easier. A minute gadget — a wall socket microphone — was in stalled, and this faithfully monitored every conversation that was held in the office. Included was the chit-chat between the executive and his private secretary. The pair, the wall microphone revealed, were in the habit of staying late several nights each week — and it wasn’t just business that kept them. Armed with the irrefut able records of executive suite dalliance the two con niving partners at once drop ped their mask of friendship and lowered the boom on their onetime pal. “Resign,” they told him bluntly, “or we’ll play these records to your wife and children.” The indiscreet partner^ whose own office walls had con cealed the ears that were his undoing, had no choice. He resigned within the week. The downfall of the amo rous executive represents lit tle more than a minor inci dent in the new and growing field of industrial espionage, or IE, as business calls it. IE itself is Big Business to day. It keeps literally thou sands of detectives in bread and butter, trying to filch industrial secrets that may be worth millions, and it keeps another army of thou sands of counterespionage agents actively trying to thwart their designs. So im portant and so sensitive has the whole issue become that the protectors have a society, the American Society for In dustrial Security, ana when it held a convention last fall, some 2,490 members from chapters in fifty-eight cities attended. September 1963 51 In this new war between the forces of IE and counterIE, no trick is considered too low; nothing that succeeds is beyond the pale of ethics. Time was when such indus trial spying was a gentleman ly game played over a cock tail at a Madison Avenue bar. Rivals would try to pump information out of one another; each knew, of course, what the others were trying to do, and the whole affair had a somewhat sporting as pect. But today all the fant^ntastic gadgets of the twen tieth century are used as wea pons. The wire tap, the minute microphone planted in the padding of the execu tive chair, the spying air plane, the searching of waste baskets by hired detectives, the bribing of engineers and key' employees, the deliberate baiting of a rival with a se ductive Mata Hari — all of these are accepted techniques that are being practiced to day on a phenomenal and ever-increasing scale. Stealing Formulas The most coveted loot in this game of fraud and de ceit consists of the new dis coveries, the new processes, that are being developed constantly by American in dustry through the expendi ture of nearly $20 billion an nually on research. In a typical case last October, a federal grand jury indicted eight men in an internation al drug pirate ring for the theft of secret formulas from the heavily guarded Lederle Laboratories at Pearl River, N. Y. Two former employees of Lederle, using their passes to get by the. protective screen, had entered the labs at night, ostensibly to work, and had stolen research data and bacteriological cultures. Down the drain, according to Lederle, went work on new antibiotics it had taken a decade and more than $10 million to develop. When the stakes are so high, no trick is ignored that may lead to financial advan tage. On one occasion the board of directors of a multimillion-dollar East Coast corporation held a secret meeting in the president’s office to discuss new plans and processes. They were unaware that they were under the constant observ ation of a little man station ed on the roof of an apart 52 Panorama ment building half a block away. Through binoculars the observer, an expert lip reader, kept his eyes focused on the president’s lips, and as the corporate president talked, the spy dictated into a handy tape recorder every word that he said. The depths to which busi nesses will stoop in this anything-goes world of IE are illustrated by some of the cases in the files of Harvey G. Wolfe, of Los Angeles, who heads his own industrial counterespionage firm. Fa vorite methods Wolfe has un covered include the planting of agents in sensitive jobs, the purchase of employees already on the payroll, the use of listening and record ing devices, the liberal ex ploitation of sex and, in some extreme cases, the blackmailing of executives. The Sex Trap Planning a coup, IE agents study minutely the executive dossier of their target. Wolfe says: "They find out whe ther he likes blondes or bru nettes. What kind of liquor the man drinks. And the agent — blonde or brunette — is told to be sure she has plenty of it when she enter tains him. She’s told to be friendly — make herself at tractive, and develop this man.” One oil company execut ive, thoroughly scouted in this fashion, fell all unsus pecting trap. The setting was a lonely road; the props, a racy sports car, a flat tire — and a beautiful girl, fas hioned and tailored to the executive’s taste, standing helplessly beside it. Before the executive had stopped playing gentleman by chang ing the tire, he was hooked — and his company’s secrets were ready to take wing in to the ears of a competitor. Of all Wolfe’s cases, one stands out unforgettably in his mind. The head of a large construction firm was being constantly underbid by a competitor. If he bid P300.000 on a project, his rival bid $285,000; if his figure was $100,000 on a job, his rival bid $95,000 — and got the contract. This happened so often that the construction executive real ized there must be a leak. Wolfe assigned one of his best agents to the case. The 53 investigator worked diligent ly for weeks. Every suspect person and situation in the construction firm’s setup was checked and cleared. Baffled, the investigator reported to Wolfe: “We’ve investigated everybody but our client.” Reluctant though he was, Wolfe decided they had no choice but to bug his own client’s . home. “The client had a beautiful two-story Tudor-type home,” Wolfe recalls. “We managed to get four of our miniature broadcasting stations into the house. We found what we wanted.” The electronic eavesdrop pers revealed that before every job on which he bid, the construction man’s wife asked him, just casually of course, what his bid was go ing' to be. Naturally, he told her. “We had recording of five such instances, but we want ed more before going to the client,” Wolfe says. "We put a'tail on the wife — twentyfour hours a day.” It wasn’t long before the husband left town on a busi ness trip. The wife dutifully drove him to the airport, kissed him goodbye. Then she drove to a hotel and'met a man — her husband's com petitor. Watching the pair, Wolfe’s detectives established that every time the husband left home, his wife and his competitor spent the time playing house together. Wolfe hesitated to tell the husband of his sordid dis covery, but of course he had to. "We showed him the movies and played the re cordings,” Wolfe says. He was, he recalls, prepar ed for almost any reaction but the one he got. The husband merely watched, grunted and said: "Well, I guess we plugged that leak, didn’t we?” Then he wrote out a check for Wolfe, with a fat bonus. — Fred J. Gook in the Cor rupt Society, The Nation, June 1-8, 1963. 54 Panorama ■ The bird known as tabon in the Philippines lays its eggs under earth mounds. A RARE PHILIPPINE BIRD Valentin C. Loyoja The tabon is an inscru table creature. This bird would rather walk than fly. It considers building aerial nests impractical. Yet, this non-conformist denizen of the avian kingdom has been heaped with honors. A cave in Quezon, Palawan, where a skull cap of a proto-Malay was found has been named after this megapode (big feet). The tabon’s unconvention al ways were obviously re membered in the scientific investigation of the cave, hence the name Tabon cave. The tabon belongs to the family megapodiidae. It is otherwise known as mound builder because instead of building nests of twigs,leaves and other common nest building materials it buries its eggs deep in the ground and covers it with a mound of sand. Taking its heat from the ground, tabon eggs hatch by themselves. Some how, the young emerges from the mound of earth all the way from its deep hole, a ponderous and uncanny ac complishment for a creature that had just broken out of its shell. Under a special permit, anyone can be allowed to gather tabon eggs from May 16 to June 30 every year. The bag limit is 300 eggs per licensed hunter per sea son. The whole tabon mound is literally a heap of fun. Covered by the heap of soil, dead leaves and twigs in a small area are the eggs. They are so cleverly conceal ed, each egg in a hole of its own, that the location is any body’s guess. Whereas in an Easter egg hunt a wide area of ground and a variety of hiding places are used, look Septembbr 1963 55 ing for a tabon egg is con fined to one tiny spot. The search, however, could be more laborious and difficult. There are no leads to fol low in finding the eggs once the tabon mound is found. One has just to start digging, taking care that the eggs do not get broken by the dig ging instrument. Sometimes an egg hunter would work for an hour without finding an egg. If he is lucky, he may find up to 10 in that time, each find punctuated by loud exclamations for a tabon egg is indeed a trophy worth its weight in fun and delicacy. One mound may yield up to 20 eggs. A tabon egg is about three inches long, bigger than a goose egg. The size of the egg is a parody, for the tabon egg layer is no bigger than a native hen, sometimes smaller. The tabon is both a clever and a stupid bird. It is cle ver in that it can hide its egg skillfully in the sand. But even if its mound has been thoroughly searched by egg hunters it still has no sense enough to look for an other hiding spot; it insists, maybe for convenience, in laying its eggs in the same mound. Asked the best time for tabon-egg | hunting, a native of Samar observed that the tabon usually lays its egg dur ing the taguil-aw or low morning tides. Why this is so is a reason best known only to nature which hides most of its top secrets. At any rate, natives of places where the tabon bird is found experience more fruit ful hunts during the low morning tides. Apparently, there are nu merous islands in the whole Philippine archipelago where the tabon is found. Consi dering the fact that this now venerated bird is not much of a flyer (it is heavy for its wings) it is surprising why it inhabits even tiny isolat ed islands. On islets of Pa lawan that are so tiny they are not even indicated on most maps, I found tabon mounds — and diggings by egg hunters. On an islet of the Polillo group of east ern Quezon province, the geograhical opposite of Par lawan, I also found tabon mounds and diggings by egg hunters. 56 Panorama The parent birds are not easily seen. An egg hunter may spend years at the sport without seeing the tabon that lays the great pinkish eggs, for, unlike the high flyers, the tabon with its brown color that easily blends with the ground and the dead leaves and the fall en twigs and branches are shy and, obviously, do not consider personal appear ances to humans a healthy activity. Catching an adult tabon is not as easy as it is thought to be. Some may be caught by traps, but according to trappers tabon catches are exceptions rather than the rule. The laws of this country frown at those who try to catch the tabon that lay the eggs. Catching adult tabon is prohibited. Besides the distinct honor given to the tabon by the an thropologists who worked in the now famous Tabon cave of Palawan, some honors have been bestowed on this unique bird \ in the past. Some barrios and sitios of the Philippines have, accord ing to travelers, been named Tabon. In the Cebu, Bohol and other Cebuan speaking regions, one who sports the color of a typical brown Fili pino is called tabonon (equi valent to kayumanggi in Ta galog). A woman referred to as tabonon is complimented, for she is not only the color of the typical Filipina but carries the grace and the Ma ria Clara shyness of the vener- able tabon bird. — Manila Bulletin. The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue, to sustain it. The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are more likely to in cur. Those who, while they disapprove of the char acter and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support, are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. — Thoreau. 57 ■ In Harlem, one is conscious not of color but of po verty, low wages, unemployment, the poorly fed. NEW YORK'S BERLIN WALL V. S. Pritchett East of Fifth Avenue at 96th Sreet is New York’s Ber lin Wall. In one block one steps north from the7 money ed quiet of the Upper East Side, the Belgravia and Mayfair of the city, and from the crest of the small hill at Park Avenue or Madison one looks down on ’the vale of Harlem, jumping in the pure flame of the August heat or sunk like a mud flat in the intolerable damp days of hot cloud. For the first time in Ney York one sees expanses of sky; no skycrapers slice it into strips; for the first time the city looks spacious. Even the phalanxes of newish, high red-brick apartment blocks that stand for a mile or more between the littered streets and proletarian play grounds along Madison, ris ing like -fortfications and model prisons, have broad sky betweeen them. At the Park Avenue hill the railway tracks shoot out from under the flower-beds of the res pectable quarters, and the miles of blatant steel blind the eye, as they cut their way through the rusting fire-es capes of the tenements. For bidden country. Most of my American friends said: ‘Don’t go there now. There is too much tension. And it is worse in the heat.' Just as they tell you not to go in Central Park at night. My European friends, not hav ing the built-in American instinct for drama, said 'Ali nonsense’. The European who crosses 96th Street at once feels at home. The foreignness does it — we are all foreigners in Europe — and also the live liness of the streets. Activtiy is the principle of white New York; living is the business of Harlem. Strictly one is not immediately in Harlem but in Puerto Rico. The 58 Panorama coffee faces at the crowded slum windows, the huge fa mily groups sitting thin-leg ged and tattered on door steps, the men playing domi noes on the pavements, the barber who looks like a large fly in his grubby shop, shout Spanish. The ads on the walls are Spanish; South Am erican music prances out of doorways. And no one can keep his fingers still. Half asleep at the door the old man or the young drums on a tin oi; on his knee. The empty hours of life are filled with drum staps on imagin ary drums. In the corner of a playground where youths are playing baseball, four others are huddled se cretively in a corner over a man who actually has a real drum and deftly palms and knuckles. it. They are so close to one another that their faces nearly touch, their eyes glance at one another recording exquisite recogni tions as they listen. Nearby someone fields the ball in the game and as he does so two or three of those drum notes catch his ear. He throws the ball in and then turns and buckles his knees into a grotesque dance that seizes him like some unvoidable locomotor ataxia. Under the arches at Park Avenue one arrives in the middle of the raucous Puer to Rican market. A madman goes screaming through the crowd of women who are tearing at cotton dresses on the stalls: 'Cristo vivo; muerto No!' he shouts. No one notices him. There are Italian, even Spanish and Jewish Harlems — the big shops on 125th Street are Jewish and there is anti-semitism among, the Ne groes — ‘They take their mo ney out the community’ — speaking as if Harlem were a nation; but so do many rich Negroes. The place is money-minded and has its class system. 125th Street is the Main Street of Negro Harlem. Few white faces, but every kind of Negro face; no one stares. Sudden ly blackness becomes your norm; you begin to feel the furnace heat has burned your face off and that you too are black. In a quarter of an hour you do not notice co lour at all. You notice indi viduals, whereas in the rest of the city people look the same. You notice gait and September 1963 59 stance, for some Negroes walk superbly and stand in a jnanner that suggests stand* ing is an art in itself. They are people in their pride, not going any where, but hang ing about, forever restless on their feet, skipping along cir cling, idle. Children play round your legs. An au dience on very fire-escape is part of the show in the street below. Every other shop is blaring out radio tunes; in every doorway, arguments, small dramas. Transistors everywhere. A Cadillac full of men and girls crawls by; they are all lajighing. In a way the adults seem to be at play, like the children racing round the playgrounds. A white taxidriver who drop ped me it 135th Street one day said angrily ‘ haven’t got anything' against them but they're not regular people’ and said he wanted to head for the East Side Highway and ‘get out of it’. One sees his point; he had seen not colour but poverty, unem ployment, low wages, the poorly fed; he yvas afraid and he had cringed before gaiety. The unpleasant sight is the white cops. They stand in pairs, flexing their arms. twirling their batons as if getting ready for a crack, talking to each other but to no one else — and, by Har lem standards, overfed. The well-fed are policing those who do not feed so well. One recognizes them too, not by colour, but by the innate stillness of bullies. James Baldwin, who has said some thing like this, does not exaggerate. After Birming ham the cops know even more how they are hated. They have their troubles. For there u that mysterious thing called tension. One night when the heat sat on one’s chest like an elephant I went up to 125th Street and, at various places, someone had turned on the fire hydrants which were spout ing water onto the cars and buses. At one comer several hundred Negros were sitting on doorsteps, looking out of windows, grinning with hap piness at a lonely cop who was trying to turn the water off. He failed. Three hours later buses were still being soaked. At the terminal when I got on the bus a Ne gro girl got on too, but got off at once when she saw the driver closing the windows 60 Panorama and mopping his seat. One saw a moment of fear which the Negro easily conveys by his quick eyes, quickly cover ed by politeness. She got off. She smelt trouble. She said nervously: 'I’ll wait for my husband.* There is a group writers called the Harlem Writers Workshop. The organizer, John H. Clarke, edits a monthly review called Free domways, which has just produced an interesting Har lem number. He invited me to a writer's meeting in one of the huge apartment forts for middle-income people. They are modern; and once you are out of the lift into the long corridors where people are slotted, the noise of television is violent. The walls are thin and there is no air-conditioning. About 16 of us sat sweating in a pretty book-lined room, talk ing about Rhodesia, Kenya South Africa and Notting Hill Gate. One or two of the writers had been published in England and asked whe ther the English boom in the Negro novel was over. They suspected it was. They knew the race question was an eco nomic one: lower wages than white people, higher rents, poor schools kept poor — the Negro is the permanent, sweated immigrant. But the mood of the group was dan gerously elated. ‘This year everything will be settled,’ they insisted (except the ju dicious Mr. Clarke who comes from Alabama and does not think things are goin^ to be as simple as that: Freedomways is warning them that their struggle will be long). ‘Or else,’ shouted one laughing young man who hopped to his feet and danc ed about shooting an ima ginary gun like a child play ing cops and robbers. Every one laughed at him but no one approved. Black Mus lim racism, the notion of the Negro state and the return to Africa arc rejected — otherwise their diagnosis is considered acceptable. They are the best-organized Negro group. The Workshop included John O’Killens whose novels Young Blood and Then We Heard the Thunder have been published in this coun try, a dramatist and an esta blished Jamaican writer; and the tendency is broadly one of the commitment to the 61 Negroes’ social struggle. They are not by any means the only Harlem writers. Ralph Ellison is aloof from them — he lives just outside Harlem in an apartment looking down on the Hud son and he believes a writer needs a discipline more exacting than loyalty to a rar rial group and that there is more to Negro humanity than can be seen by limiting it to its political and social situation. In the present ex citement the view is unfas hionable, but Ellison is the most impressive Negro writer I have met. Harlem is a city in itself and contains all that a city has. It has a third Of New York’s million Negroes; it is the capital of the race. It has.its rich, it middling peo ple, its sedate streets where the well-off professional peo ple live, its fantastic pro perty speculators, its money making churches run like businesses — like a good ma ny church organizations in white New York. The chur ches bought real estate to house their congregations. ‘Differences between white and black do not touch the fundamental American traits: there is chiefly the grim dif ference of status. And then, the Negro has escaped stand ardization by living below the surface of American life. The Negro is proud to have moved into what, 60 years ago, was a comfortable white suburb, against all the oppo sition and chicanery of the established. Grave, acade mically inclined Mr. Clarke took me to see the vast Schomberg collection of books on Africa and the Afri can Negro in the public libra ry where students were work ing late. It has a fine bust of the first Negro actor to play Othello. There are a couple of blocks on Seventh Avenue which are historic for the Harlem Negro. They are the first propery bought by a group who slaved to pay off the high-rate mort gages. These heroes of the ethnic property war — which has been basic in New York life in every generation, as one national group pushes another out, in pursuit of the thoroughly American desire for self-improvement — were known by the formidable moral name of The Strivers. The street is called Strivers’ Row and is one of the most Panorama sedate in the whole city arid has some of the best brown stones — the top status sym bol of all. The small bookshops of Harlem, stacked in disorder ly fashion from floor to ceil ing with new and second hand books, are centres of local agitation. They have a natural connection with the street-corner meeting outside where the speakers range from the cranks and peculiars to the serious poli ticians. Go into a shop and in two minutes you are asked for your views on Rhodesia and Kenya; all the sensation al and serious literature of the Negro revolt in the whole world is there. The Negro loves talk. There is always a group, perhaps be hind a curtain or a door, talking politics. One might be among pre-revolutionary Russian exiles, but without Marx. 'A white commnuist is a liar/ someone said, ‘and a black one is a fool.' In one shop-you see the painted banners that are carried in protest meetings — lurid pic tures of police dogs jumping at the throats of children in Birmingham or comic draw ings of Southern Gentlemen. The word is everything in Harlem. The long word or the book word beautifully uttered by the man driving his cab or talking in his shop; the rambling or the inciting word of the street meeting; the Biblical or inflaming word of the unctuous ranting preacher. These people have the gift of tongues which is scarcer among American whites; indeed conversation is commoner there than in white New York. On Sun day mornings in Harlem the word rules. Roars as of mur der come from upper rooms over the cleaner’s or the gro cer’s: it is a preacher in a one-room chapel creaming the name of Jesus, in paro xysms about Emmanuel. I found myself one wet Sunday at the notorious Abyssinian Baptist church which has a sweet-machine and a Credit Funeral Office in its en trance, swinging hand in hand with my two neighbors, singing ‘Down by the River side’. Their hats were like gardens. They put the Com munion crumb neatly on a little handkerchief on their knees. They drank the cock tail glass of red liquid which September 1963 63 tasted of vaseline and red currant. And several women in the congregation screamed ‘Emmanuel’ and *Oh, Jesus’ and fell into convulsions. Groans came from the men. Sobs and sighs from the quieter women. And when we came to sing ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’, chorus after chorus, the emotion did not seem too much and expressed some thing fundamental about the race, its loneliness and suf fering. I don’t know how many men and women I shook hands with at the end; no one seemed to notice that I was the only white person in the church. But I bet they did. — New Statesman, Aug ust 16, 1963. Why a University? The justification for 4 university is that it pre serves the connection between knowledge and the zest for life, by uniting the young and the Old in the imaginative consideration of learning. The uni versity imparts information, but it imparts it ima ginatively. At least, this is the function which it should perform for society. A university which fails in this respect has no reason for existence. — Alfred North Whitehead. Panorama ■ Famed Hollywood actor reports on his impressions after a visit to Moscow film festival. RUSSIAN LOVE-HATE Peter Ustinov It is impossible not to have pre-conceived ideas about Russia. The literature swarms with extraordinary characters; a lady in black proclaiming to a roomful of deaf ears that she is in mourning for her life; an aged man reflecting with wonder on a rumour that they have stretched a string from Moscow to some provincal town, although igno rant of the reasons behind such a remarkable technical feat,; a mystic illuminated by some inner radiance freely confessing to a crime-he did not commit. The picture is further clouded by the images of the cosmonauts proudly striding down an endless red carpet on an air-strip flecked with puddles, to embrace event ually the jubilant Mr. Khrushchev amid a sea of flowers and enough rhythmic clapping to gratify a batallion of flamenco dancers. I was conscious of all this before I went, and yet it seems to me in retrospect that the apparently massive contradictions do form a fairly convincing equation. First of all, those aspects of Soviet society which tend to irritate or even scare the vi sitor — the complicated bu reaucracy governing meal tickets, travel permits and those ladies who sit like sentinenls on every floor of your hotel checking the go ings out and comings in, meeting your smile with a challenging, penetrating stare — all these, far from being sinister inventions of the So viet State to ensure its inter nal security, are in fact as pects of the Tsarist regime which the Revolution never succeeded in sweeping away. It was1 the Russian Empire September 1963 65 which, to its eternal discredit, invented the visa. The idea of withdrawing a passport to prevent the free movement of a suspect character ema nated from St. Petersburg, and has since been endorsed by countries boasting of their freedom. The patience of the Russian, his seeming pas sivity, and his discipline in a queue are qualities formed by a sense of immensity in which time has no meaning, and in which travel only leads to. further horizons. The love-hate relationship of the Soviet State with its own history is, ■ I am sure, a more compelling emotional engagement than mere dis trust of Capitalism or fear of the West Not far from the anti-God museums are labo ratories painstakingly restor ing* ancient Russian icons. The atheist guide at the Her mitage will tell you in the greatest detail the biblical stories illustrated by some Italian master. The hail of St. George in the Kremlin, where the Soviet hosts are in the habit of entertaining guests of the Government, is still adorned with proud two-headed eagles, and the walls are covered with battle honours dedicated to those regiments who found terres trial glory in the service of a now hated Tsar against a a more hated enemy. Russia, any Russia, has a pervading perfume from which there is no escape for those who were born to re cognize it. The lady on Le ningrad Airport comes to mind, a lady with a State less passport, emotionally telling me that she found it almost impossible to leave. "It is my country, and yet it is not.” The old lady en countered casually in a dacha who had come home after forty-six years of tidy exile in Geneva with the express in tention of ending her days on this demanding soil. In an swer to the official question naire, "What is the purpose of your visit to the Soviet Union?” she had replied, "To die.” The taxi driver, engaged in a heated argu ment with a client, who play ed his trump card, "ya, RUsski cholavek” ("I’m a Rus sian man”), which expressed everything and nothing, but which silenced the client. Naturally there are certain evident results of the fear of the West which are manifest 66 Panorama in a curious imbalance of the economy. There are Sputniks galore, and yet no adequate tooth paste. Air transport is efficient and com fortable, and yet the most hardened party fanatic will counsel against the purchase of a Soviet fountain pen. "Buy one in Helsinki," I was told. Yet, face to face with this gigantic experiment, I felt it was inelegant to carp about the' lack of creature comforts to which we have become accustomed. It is perhaps our way to concentrate on the well-being of the individual even to the point of permitting self-in dulgence in times of af fluence. It is their way to concentrate on things in which the community may take pride — space explora tion, the hydrofoils and wa ter skiers . on the Moscow canal, the extraordinary em phasis on the education of children in community cen tres. Their mistrust of the for eigner is far from being un natural. What is more re markable in the light of their history is the extrava gant hospitality they reserve for the visitor of goodwill. After a long history of in vasions, the Russian desire to pad her frontiers with buf fer States and satellites is in reality an almost landlocked nation’s, historical equivalent of Britan’s island complex about far-flung naval bases and the ruling of the waves. Communism may be an in ternational creed, but no mere letter of. the law has ever succeeded in changing the character of a people. Communism in Russia is essentially Russian, and whereas it may share its mo notonous slogans with other Communist Parties and in fluence them as regards po licy, it, in its turn, cannot remain entirely impervious to the influences of Polish, Czech or even French and Italian thought and art. Just as any deviation in the Western bloc brings an Am erican ambassador-at-large or even Mr. Kennedy hurrying to the scene to mend the rift, so any flutter in the Eastern heart-beat has Mr. Khrush chev rushing hither and thither with the flowers and handclaps. It is not easy to be a Great Power, locked for September 1963 67 better or for worse in a position of extremity. The British can afford to be avuncular in their advice, the French can afford their almost daily declarations of independence, the Cubans can afford to yell cold-blood* edly in a public, place like a calculating child: the Am ericans cannot afford to slap it for fear of being thought cruel by the passers-by, nor can they be too stern with us in Western Europe because of our geographical position and our somewhat frayed sensibilities. The position of the Russians is very similar: Mr. Gomulka may speak some peremptory words about the need for realism in the arts, but the Polish mind is too tempted by ex periment and adventure to pay much heed. Others like wise go their indepedent ways, and Russian artists watch with fascination. Now that the Chinese have reached about the year 1919 in their revolutionary deveopment, with far more dan gerous toys at their immi nent disposal than were avail able then, and with the hope of war as the only solution to their desperate birth con trol problem, even the eman cipation of the Soviet artist is assured within the loosen ing corset of Socialist theory. The victory of Fellini's film “8 1/2” at the Moscow film festival at the very mo ment of the breakdown of the Sino-Russian talks is more significant than may be imagined. It had already been violently attacked by several Soviet critics. Khrush chev himself had recently spoken out against any hint of the unrealistic. And yet ”8 1/2” had won the Grand Prix. This victory was interpret ed by certain organs of the Western Press as an attempt to encourage Italy’s large Communist Party, but I be lieve the truth to be much more exciting and much less devious. The best man won, as he was bound to against the kind of opposition he had. Russian intellectuals will be arguing about the decision for months to come So much the better. Many people think they are not allowed to argue. At a banquet I had cause to say that in my opinion we all have far more to learn from one another than we 68 Panorama have to teach one another. After a momentary pause, this remark was greeted with rapturous applause by the Soviet guests. It was not just politeness. The world is shrinking by the minute, and with the improvement, in communications, they are slowly losing their sense of immensity and of timeless ness, just as we are adapting ourselves to the fact that a few miles of sea is less of a barrier today than was a moat in the Middle Ages. I suspect men of goodwill already recognize that their well-being is our well-being, and vice versa. As to those whose positions of authority preclude the exercise of mere goodwill, it will take the Chinese to bring the lesson home. — The London Times, July 28, 1963. KNOWLEDGE FOR ITS OWN SAKE Cicero, in enumerating the various heads of mental excellence, lays down the pursuit of know ledge for its own sake, as the first of them. “This pertains most of all to human nature,” he says “for we are all of us drawn to the pursuit of knowledge; in which to excel we consider excellent, whereas to mistake, to err, to be ignorant, to be deceived, is both an evil and a disgrace.” 69 ■ It took 35 years for a university degree, but this disabled man says it was well worth it. DOING IT THE HARD WAY As a boy in London, Cana da, in the 1920s, I often look ed across the River Thames at the buildings of the Uni versity of Western Ontario, and watched the comings and goings of the young people who were fortunate enough to spend several years of their lives studying within its walls. You lucky students, I thought; I would have giv en half of any years of life remaining to me to be able to go to university and study for a degree in geography or history. Later, in my home town of Manchester, the same pat tern repeated itself. . This time it was the students at tending lectures at Manches ter University at whom I gazed enviously. I never got to university. Instead, I started work at a greengrocer’s shop and spent my time delivering orders, cleaning fish, and scrubbing floors. My wage rose to 15 shillings a week. Other young men who were not so lucky spent their time wait ing for work at the labour exchange. These were the 1930s with over 2m. men un employed. Maybe the Black shirts marching along Ox ford Road were right, and one should exclaim with them — to Hell with culture! • • • How to get a better edu cation? That question puz zled me for years. Books could be borrowed from the public library. Newspapers given by customers to wrap up fish could be read first. Free Saturday lectures were available at Manchester Uni versity. On a borrowed bi cycle one could ride along Kingsway or Stockport Road to study geology in Derby shire or archaeology in Ches hire. It got you away from the stifling wilderness of the housing estates. But it was not enough! It seemed to me that if one could not get an education 70 Panorama by going to university and studying for a degree in geo graphy, then one could learn something about the subject by starting off with a pack on one’s back and a few pounds in one’s pockets, to tramp and work one’s way across foreign countries. Let th? world be your university. So I started off. In five years I made two trips to the Arctic and two to Africa, visited most of Europe. I worked as deck hand on the Finnish fourmasted barque Hcrzogin Cecilie, witnessed the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, stowed away on a ship bound for Spitzbergen, walked to the Oasis of Tafilet in the Sahara, to study the architec ture of desert castles. I work ed as seaman, cook, gold miner, clerk, guide. Some times I feasted, sometimes I starved. I learned some geo graphy. I came back from Africa to spend a year at Fircroft College, Bournville, studying economics, philosophy, geograhy. and history. This col lege’s function is to provide men who left school at an early age with the opportu nity of improving their edu cation. My year at Fircroft opened new horizons, for as well as learning subjects I mixed with men of my own kind. Afterwards, lectures organized by the Workers Educational Association help ed to fill in gaps in my know ledge. • • # During the Second World War I worked on farms in various parts of England and Wales. I had been born crip pled and the Army did not want a lame man. Archaeo logy became my chief study. The war over, I studied for the Diploma in Archaeology, attending lectures at London Unversity by Professor Gor don Childe, Dr. Kathleen Kenyon, and others. I felt I was getting somewhere at last, but my money ran out and I had to quit. Married now, with a wife and small daughter to care for, my am bition revived to go to uni versity and study for a de gree. Interviewed by Profes sor A. V. Williamson, of the Department of Geography, Leeds University, I learnt that it was considered almost impossible for a man ap proaching 40, with a family 71 to maintain, to go to univer sity. While undergoing the twoyear courses for teachers at Sheffield Training College, I discovered several thirdyear students were studying for degrees by means of cor respondence courses. They could sit the examinations as external students of Lon don University. London was an examining university; at tendance at lectures was not compulsory, and students could study wherever they happened to be. London University students were to be found in isolated places thousands of miles from Eng land. Embarked upon my career as a teacher, my spare time was spent in preparing to pass the, university entrance examinations. I began by passing the examination for the Diploma in Geography. Correspondence courses got me through this. I had no G.C.E. passes to show (hav ing been educated in Canada years before), and the uni versity refused to recognize my Certficate in Education which teachers gained by two years’ study and passing examinations; they made me sit the G.C.E. examinatioi and pass at Advanced level. I was ill at examination time, so a year was wasted before I could sit the exam; I passed. The final examination for the degree of B.Sc. (Econo mics) was in two parts. Part One consisted of eight pa pers, all of which had to be taken on the same occasion, and the student was allowed to be weak in only one paper, otherwise he had to sit the whole eight papers again. Part Two consisted of five papers. Men who had gain ed this degree by part-time study estimated it could be accomplished in seven years. The weekly lessons provid ed by the correspondence school with which I enrolled varied in quality, but on the whole were very-good. They conisted of lesson notes — of ten very copious — a weekly test, and model answers to the previous week’s test. The answers to the weekly test were sent to one’s per sonal tutor to be corrected, and returned with his com ments. Some tutor skimped their corrections, but gen erally speaking the staff did appear to take an interest in 72 Panorama the student’s work. Some tutors proved to be the au thors of the textbooks one was studying. Some proved quite friendly, scribbling per sonal notes of encourage ment. • • • Another four years of parttime study caused me to des pair of ever gaining a degree by means of correspondence courses. The human con tact, the ability to ask ques tions and receive individual answers are lacking. To sit down at a pile of lessons and textbooks, evening after eve ning, after a tiring day’s work at school, becomes more - and more difficult as the years go by. The feeling that one is a fool to go on trying becomes more and more pro nounced. There is no time for social contact with one’s wife and family, or with friends. Eventually they be gin to lose patience with you. A second attempt to get a place as a student at Leeds University proved unsuccess ful. This time it was Prof. R. S. Dickenson who told me that a middle -aged man with a family to maintain* did not stand a chance. Was there no hope at all for men in my posiition? External students of London University could attend lectures for the B.Sc. (Economics) degree at the Institute of Technology, in Bradford. I decided to take a year off from teaching and attend lectures there three days a week. It meant a 20mile journey each way from the Yorkshire village ih which we lived, but it was worth it. The lecturers were first-class and very helpful. When I sat the examination for Part One I passed seven papers, and was referred in the eighth. This paper, Prin ciples of Economics, I had to sit three times before pass ing. Although I ** investigated every possible channel of of ficial assistance to students, for funds to maintain myself and my family during that year of study, no help was forthcoming. We had to re ly on savings and gifts from charitable organization; much of my success is due to the fact that I have the best wife in the world. Part Two was comparatively easy, by means of correspondence courses, and evening lectures at the College of Commerce, Manchester. 73 So I got my degree at the age of 50, or 35 years after the idea first came to me that I had a brain good enough for a university edu cation, if only I had the op portunity. How much did it cost? About £150, which includes fees for correspondence cour ses, books, maps, postage, tui tion at the various colleges, fees for courses in field-geo graphy. Plus the loss of a year’s salary as a teacher. Also, it would be ungenerous to omit mention of the assist ance given by such organiz-' ations as the West Riding County Library, Cheshire County Library, in loaning the expensive textbooks need ed; without their ready co operation the costs of one’s studies would be much in creased. My thanks go out to them. Was it worth it? Very de finitely Yes. As a disabled man I now possess a higher quailification to a different type of teaching post, should future circumstances require me to give up my present job. Also, there has been the sheer delight of learning, of following a group of close ly related subjects to a higher leveL And lastly, I have proved to my own satisfac tion that I could do it. — “J. H. L.”, The London Times, Educational Supple ment, May 24, 1963. GOOD GOVERNMENT A wise and frugal government (which) shall restrain men from injuring on another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. — Thomas Jefferson. 74 Panorama ■ Population explosion stirs ferment among U.S. Catholics on family planning. BIRTH CONTROL BATTLE George Barrett The subject of birth • con trol, long regarded by mem bers of the Roman Catholic Church as a dangerously sensitive issue to discuss, is today stirring a profound ferment in the Catholic com munity in the United States. Until fairly recently, pa rish approbation customarily has been reserved — for the big Catholic family. Mo thers with plans to limit the number of their children have often faced parish censur^. But new trends in living, new discoveries in medicine and science, and increased exchanges with non-Catholic groups have raised funda mental challenges to the tra-' ditional Catholic attitudes and customs; consequently, throughout the Catholic world, increasing numbers of theologians, demographers, moral philosophers and so ciologists are pursuing a close, and frequently bold, re-examination of many as pects of birth control. One development in this expand ing Catholic inquiry is the establishment of a popula tion study centre at George town University, a Catholic institution in Washington. The birth-control issue has been stirred by many forces, but the population explosion, probably more than any other single development, has focused widening Catho lic attention on the subject. There are other factors that have plunged areas of the Catholic world into ferment over birth control. For ex ample, in the Catholic Press, and in public and private dialogues, Catholics speak with candour these days of the membership "leakage from Church.” Cardinal Suenens, Primate of Belgiumwho is a leader of the "pro gressive” group in Rome’s September 1963 75 Sacred College of Cardinals, has bluntly, asked "whether many people, baptised as in fants, do not fall away from the Church because of birth control.” Birth control has become a problem for many Catho lics who faithfully attend Mass. Parish priests report that many Catholics have had to be denied the sacra ments because they insist on using artificial contracep tives. Parishioners who can not afford to have more children, who are afraid to rely on the present rhythm system, are making choices that disturb them and dis turb their- pastors. They continue to. go to church — but they .go in guilt. When the questioner tries to find out why there has been an apparent upsurge in the spirit of inquiry into birth control matters, the answer is always the same, and even , the words are very close: "It’s John.” "Credit John.” Or, simply and affection ately: "John.” While the late Pope John XXIII has not been identi fied with any strong position on the birth control and po pulation problem, his histo ric role as the most “tradi tion-shattering figure ever to occupy the Chair of Peter” (the description is by "The Pilot,” the Catholic newspa per in Boston) has inspired those in the Church who are seeking reforms, including re forms in Church attitudes on birth control. Some say that Pope John cleared the way for the re-examination of the sensitive issue when he con voked the Ecumenical Coun cil. A woman physician in Bel gium, a Catholic mother of five, has reported that she wrote to the'Vatican about her confusions over the Church's official insistence that it is moral to practice birth prevention through rhythm but sinful to use artificial contraceptives. In her appeal for clarification from the forthcoming Coun cil, she wrote that "in each case the intention is precise ly the same.” and commented that "God will not be de ceived.” She has quoted a reply from the Palace of the Holy Office stating that "the 76 Panorama question is under consider ation and will certainly be dealt with at the Council.” Many bishops were "well in formed of the difficulties,” according to the Vatican re ply, "so much so that the de cision of the Council will cer tainly be sought as a result.” In Puerto Rico, too, the birth control question is pa ramount. Behind the pastel walls of the Government of fices in San Juan, overlook ing the sun-baked court and the palm trees see-sawing in slow motion, the Health De partment spokesman talked guardedly about "Catholic doctors” who, he said, were still bitterly fighting birth control in Puerto Rico. He noted that the Caribbean Commonwealth had set up one of the most extensive systems ot public'and private birth control clinics in the world, to help reduce a ferti lity rate that has made Puer to Rico one of the most densely-packed areas on this globe. At one village clinic the medical director discusses the whole range of artificial con traceptives — all of them banned by the C a t h o li c Church — and says that they have been a boon for some of the poverty-ridden parents who wish desperately to have no more children. But the devices are not good enough, he adds; they are "too sophis ticated” for the uneducated and therefore too unreliable. He speaks of sterilization, a birth control measure parti cularly condemned by the Catholic Church but widely practiced in Puerto Rico. "Only sterilization really works,” he says. "After six or seven children these peo ple come in here and they agree that sterilization is what they really want.” "But what about the Catholic doc tors?” the director is asked. "Isn’t it true that the Catho lic doctors in Government health clinics discourage all these birth control services?” The medical director looks up. There is a quick frown and then a quick grin: "What do you mean. Catholic doc tors ? You’re in Puerto Rico. We’re all Catholic doctorsi” The. Government’s net work of health centres has long been the target of the Catholic hierarchy. One pa rish priest draped the belfry of his church in black strips for mourning when the birth Si 1963 77 control programme reached his community. An agree ment, however, has just been reached between Church and Government under which Catholics may now go to the centres without incurring condemnation by the Church. No formal pronouncement has been made, nor will it be made out of fear that an ofcial public declaration may jeopardize the programme, but the agreement calls for the Department of Health to disseminate full inform ation on the Church-approv ed rhythm system of birth control. (Up to now, most of the personnel in the is land’s health centres have been reluctant to prescribe the rhythm method, which they consider complicated and unreliable.) In exchange for offering a full and fair presentation of all methods of birth control, and leaving it to each appli cant to make the specific choice, the Department of Health understands that the Catholic hierarchy will cease blanket attacks against the Goverment’s programme. A few weeks ago an emi nent pries t-theologian of the Catholic Church directed some words of his own to an other “heretic” — Dr. John Rock, a pioneer in the dev elopment of the oral contra ceptive pill and Catholic au thor of the new book "The Time Has Come.” The book, published by Alfred A. Knopf, has shocked many Catholics by advocacy of birth control methods chal lenged by the Church and by insistence that the Catholic Church has changed major doctrines in the past and can do so now on the issue of birth control. Dr. Rock has been attacked as a "mave rick Catholic,” a "mischief maker,” a “Catholic rene gade.” "Tell John,” said the priest theologian softly, “that there are things I can’t put into my writing but please remind him of Cardinal Newmen; tell him, ’please, that when things get rough to take courage, to remember the Newmans of the Catholic Church; tell him to remem ber that there have been others before him in our Church who have also had to live sub luce maligna — for a while.” Lay Catholics have tradi tionally avoided debate on the 78 Panorama birth control question, but letters to Dr. Rock, most of them from readers who are sympathetic and many of them from grateful Catholics, give evidence of a new spirit of inquiry and challenge: Frorii a surgeon in Beverly Hills, California — "Your stand is the most heartening thing that has come out of our Roman Catholic faith for years." A terse note from Chattanooga. Tenn. — "Be assured that the hopes and prayers of many Catholic parents are behind you." And from a Catholic mother of four (a fifth expected), in Worcester, Mass. — “God forgive me, but I would ter minate this pregnancy if I could. 1 hope and pray that you are able to go ahead with your work. I can’t eat or sleep, and I cry all the time. I pray God to help us both." — This article has been ex tracted from a series which appeared in the New York Time?. KNOWLEDGE AND FISH Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You1 may be dealing with knowledge of the old spe cies; with some old truths; but somehow or other it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its imme diate importance. — Alfred North Whitehead. September 1963 79 MULL THIS OVER Vanity We have to have a devilist amount of vanity to believe that what comes out of our brain is more valuable than what we see around us. Imagination does not take us very far, whereas the world is so immense. — Renoir, the painter. Girls Every year the young girls come into flower on the beaches. They have only one season. The fol lowing year they are replaced by other flower-like faces, which, the previous season, still belonged to little girls. For the man who looks at them, they dre yearly waves whose weight and splendor break into foam over the yellow beach. — Albert Camus, the novelist. Superior man I tell my white friends: "You expect me to know more than you with less education, to survive 'with fewer political rights, to live better with less economic opportunity.” That’s not the specification for an inferior man. That’s the specification for a superior man. — Charles D. Saxon, American Negro. Beauty and fear The American author and editor Christian Bovee wrote: "There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear Half our fears are base less, and the other half discreditable.” If everyone in the world would suddenly stop being fearful, what peace and freedom there would be! Attention! All organization heads and members! Help pour club raise funds painlessly... Join the Panorama “Fund-Raising by Subscriptions” plan today! The Panorama Fund-Raising by Subscriptions plan will get you, your friends, and your relatives a year’s sub scription to Panorama. The Panorama is easy to sell. It practically sells itself, which means more money for your organization. The terms of the Panorama Fund-Raising by Sub scriptions plan are as follows: Cl) Any accredited organization in the Philippines can take advantage of the Plan. (2) The organization will use its facilities to sell sub scriptions to Panorama. (3) For every subscription sold the organization will get Pl.00. The more subscriptions the organization sells, the more money it gets. Contents We Fear The Wrong Things................................................... 1 Our Youth and the Unfinished Revolution Alfredo R. Roces ............................................. 2 Do Asians have an Inferiority Complex? Carmen Guerrero Nakpil ................................ II Heirs to the New Europe Aidan Crawley .................................................. 16 Inside Russia's Schools Kathleen Ollerenshaw ..................................... 26 The Shattered Monolith Edward CranshaW............................................. 35 Don't be Fooled by Labels ....................................................... 44 Business versus Business ............................................................. 49 A Rare Philippine Bird Valentin Loyola ............................ 55 New York's Berlin Wall V. S. Pritchett ................................................... 58 Russian Love«Hate . Peter Ustinov .................................................... 65 Doing ft the Hard Way ............................................................. 70 Birth Control Battle George Barrett .................................................. 75