News in Review: Collapse at The Summit (1960)

The News in Review column from the July 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Collapse at The Summit

The assembling of the Big Four for the Summit meeting in Paris contained all the essentials for great tragi-comedy, except the happy ending. Summit meetings may yet replace the circus as “the greatest show on earth.” Publicity arrangements on a world scale preceded the actual meeting for some years. The “ Summit ” has dominated the headlines of the world’s press. Millions of words have poured out from lengthy articles under banner headlines, speculating on the date and interpreting the significance of statements made by politicians and Government officials. And so at last three thousand journalists congregated in Paris to report the discussions of four individuals who, it is said, between them can and will adjust the barometer of world tension. With the stage set and the audience breathless, the principal actors took the stage. The so-called “main problems” of disarmament, Berlin and the continued division of Germany were now, it was said, to be seriously tackled. But unfortunately the final curtain came down on the overture. By the old. process of mutual abuse, charge and counter-charge, the meeting quickly degenerated. Suddenly nothing had happened.

There will never be anything so futile in the tackling of social problems as the holding of summit meetings. Such meetings only serve to increase the personal prestige of the politicians who attend them and persuade ordinary working people that honest attempts are being made to stem the threat of war. From any government's point of view, there is nothing that a summit meeting could accomplish that the regularised channels of diplomacy could not accomplish equally as well. All such conferences, even where politicians do succeed in getting together, entirely by-pass the everyday problems of working people. Their whole scope and function is irrelevant to the real and pressing issues of modern society, issues that the working class itself must come to grips with.

Turkey

When Menderes, the Turkish Prime Minister, survived the air disaster at Gatwick, he was acclaimed by the faithful as a saint and a prophet. From the recent events in Turkey, it would appear that the legend is taking some hard knocks. For more than ten years this dictator has used every known method to maintain power. He is himself a big landowner in the west of Turkey — an area in which indescribable poverty is the lot of the Anatolian peasants. We can wonder how is it that the dictatorial regime has survived for ten years. Part of the answer is that the majority of Turks, who are still attached to the Muslim faith worshipped Menderes because of his religious fervour. One interpretation of the cause of the crisis was that it was the work of a small clique inflamed by grudges and ambition. Menderes himself blamed “a handful of youths exploited by certain groups for their selfish political aims.”

Crises are not caused by the evil machinations of individuals; they have their root cause in the way a society is organised. The importance of Turkey in world politics rests partly on the control of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. Astronomical amounts of American dollars have been spent in building up Turkey as another “Western bastion of democracy”! Half the Turkish budget is devoted to defence. These measures, coupled with large agricultural credits, have produced the inevitable economic crises which are part and parcel of the capitalist system everywhere. The new Head of State, General Gursel, is described as a Turkish Neguib in search of a Nasser. He has announced that it would be for the next Government to decide whether to put Menderes and his Cabinet on trial. Whatever the outcome, the Turkish working class can look forward to another round of capitalist intrigue and unfulfilled promises.

Eichmann

The news that Adolf Eichmann, a former Gestapo chief, has been captured by Israeli agents, was splashed across the front pages with all the gusto of editors recognizing the sales power of cheap sensationalism. A man-hunt successfully concluded after 15 years, with the quarry a miserable survivor of the Nazi regime, is the sort of titbit that the profit-seeking press can dress up to satisfy the appetites of those who seek cheap thrills in their reading.

To Socialists, the capture of Eichmann in itself is of no importance. The inhumanities which man indicts upon man are not the actions of people who were born monsters, but rather the consequence of inhuman policies and doctrines which a monstrous system conditions human beings into accepting as answers to its economic and political problems. Eichmann was a product of German capitalism which made a scapegoat of the Jews for the failure of Germany to win the 1914-18 war and for the mass unemployment which followed. The massacre of the six million attributed to him was not the work of one “evil genius.” History cannot be so simply explained. But there is significance in the fact that Eichmann is to be given a mockery of a “trial.” What a perversion of the name justice it is which allows the victors in the 1939-45 bloodbath, in which mass murder was committed by both sides, to condemn the leaders of the conquered for the same crimes they perpetrated themselves.

Red Blood

The South African Government has recently published regulations to come into force on 1st September under which “white” and “non-white” blood will be segregated to ensure that as far as possible whites and non-whites will receive blood from white and non-white donors respectively. This segregation of blood has in fact been in practice in South Africa for some years, although blood plasma imported from America was not segregated. The exponents of apartheid claim that the Africans are biologically different to the whites in being “ inherently backward ” and it seems that they think Africans’ blood is different too. Blood from human beings cannot, of course, be identified as to the colour of skin of its donor, but only by its various groupings, A, O, Rhesus, etc. Some biologists have even stated that the blood of some types of gorilla and human beings is interchangeable. This new regulation is another example of the blind prejudice of the South African Government in its policy of apartheid.

Misdirected Energy

On May 21st, sixteen cannibals were sentenced to death in Wewak, New Guinea, for killing, cooking and eating three men, and kidnapping eight women. After lecturing the men, who spent most of the time dozing on the courtroom floor, the judge said that because the raid was a “social and economic one with the dual purpose of providing wives and flesh,” he would make strong recommendations for mercy, and suggested a training programme for the convicted men. In prison they will no doubt be put through a rigorous rehabilitation programme. They will be lectured on the error of their ways and taught how to conform to the moral standards of modern civilisation. Perhaps they might even become so civilised they may be allowed to join the army and do the capitalists’ dirty work for them. Queens Regulations will not, of course, permit them to consume their victims, but they will be able to kill with the approval of the law, the blessing of the church, and if they do really well, they may even become national heroes.

Wyatt Sees the Light

Everything happens finally, if only one can wait long enough for it. This is one reflection that springs to mind after the attack made by Mr. Woodrow Wyatt, right-wing Labour M.P., on the big unions’ block vote as undemocratic. This has been obvious for years, of course — to all except Mr. Wyatt and his right- wing Labour friends. No complaint was ever heard from them about the block vote, so long as the big unions with doglike devotion regularly swung all their millions of votes behind the Labour leadership. But now that the man who wields the block vote of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, Mr. Frank Cousins, has clashed with Mr. Gaitskell over defence policy, a great light has broken in on Mr. Wyatt’s mind. With cries of astonishment, he announces as a new discovery what everyone else had been pointing out for years. Still, one must be grateful that Mr. Wyatt has seen the obvious, even at this late stage.

But Mr. Wyatt's revelations only extend so far as Mr. Cousins. Not a word has come from him about the second largest of the giant unions, whose leader, Sir Thomas Williamson, is a supporter of Mr. Gaitskell, and who recalled the annual conference of his union because they had voted the wrong way the first time. But we must wait. If Sir Thomas is replaced by a leader who disagrees with Mr. Gaitskell, Mr. Wyatt may discover another “arrogant bully with a block vote” (which is the way he now describes Mr. Cousins).

As for the left-wing of the Labour Party, who have been denouncing the block vote of the unions throughout the time it was automatically used against them, they have become strangely silent. The block vote used against them, and the block vote used by Mr. Cousins in their favour, are apparently two quite different things. How circumstances alter cases, even to the extent of turning democracy into bullying, or bullying into democracy!