The News in Review
Berlin again
Berlin seems to be developing into one of capitalism’s nastier perennials.
With each year’s squabbles over the divided city — some of the more minor ones being prime examples of the ridiculous lengths to which capitalist powers go in the risky game of international tit-for-tat–the Russians advance their cause in Germany a little further.
Last year’s wall, a temporary-seeming structure then, is now solider and more permanent. The East German police range their guns along it. This year the Russians have withdrawn their commandant in East Berlin, leaving the Western powers to negotiate with the civilian administration there, or else with nobody.
In retaliation the Western powers have forced the Russians to use a more direct route when taking the guard to their war memorial which stands in West Berlin.
This petty and undignified bickering is only the detail of a more serious situation.
The Soviet object, it seems, is to force the Western powers to acknowledge that Berlin — and indeed Germany — is permanently divided. (Permanently, that is, until another European war draws out the frontiers again, creating new zones of dispute and tension.) If they can do this, the Russians will have won a new foothold in Europe and another buffer state will be between her and any threat of a re-emergent German capitalism.
There was a lot of indignant sob-stuff in the press about Peter Fechter, the 18 year old who was shot down by the East Berlin police and left by them to bleed to death beneath the Wall.
None of the papers recalled that when Fechter was born they were all busily telling us that it was heroic and laudable to kill Germans. At that time the Allied air offensive against Germany was at its height; the persistent bombers killed thousands of Germans quite indiscriminately. It was not their fault that the infant Fechter survived, to die so horribly later.
Berlin is typical of capitalism’s international rivalries. It is fought out over apparently minor details. But its potential is frighteningly dangerous.
And it is all sustained by cynical lies.
Chinese Bomb
Although they were quick to retract it, the statement from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in Washington that China would be able to set off a nuclear explosion in a few months was enough to send a shiver down our spines.
More bombs. More tests. More fallout. More suffering. More death.
That is the immediate prospect. For the longer run, China’s bomb will mean a fiercer arms race and an increase in the tension in any dispute between her and the other great powers. And perhaps in the end a bigger and more destructive war.
China, like any aspirant capitalist power, has long been determined to make nuclear weapons. And, just like the others, she will excuse them with any sort of lying propaganda.
Last year, the general manager of Reuters persuaded the Chinese Foreign Secretary to talk on this subject. Marshall Chen Yi said that China’s having the bomb would actually decrease the chance of a war, because when only a few powers had it they were more tempted to throw their weight about.
We may permit ourselves a grim smile at this, for it is the very reverse of the deterrent theory which the nuclear powers now use to justify their having the bomb. These countries have always claimed that what stops a war is the fact that they have an almost exclusive possession of the biggest of all sticks.
Who should we believe in this? London, Washington and Moscow? Or Peking? In fact, nobody need worry about the answer to that question.
For what will China do when she has got the bomb? Will she follow the logic of Chen Yi’s argument and give the secret to the world? To India, for example? To Japan? If all the other nuclear powers are anything to go by China will forget her big-talk and keep her secrets to herself.
And perhaps we may permit ourselves a grim smile at this, too.
Capitalism will always have its ghastly weapons and it will always have its paid liars to excuse them. While they are spinning their lies the weapons get bigger and more horrifying and the conflicts grow more agonising.
Still feel like smiling?
Farnborough
Apart from the little-boy excitements of the machines themselves, what was the interesting and significant thing about this year’s Air Show at Farnborough?
Not so long ago it was a popular working-class idea that the aircraft industry was bound to expand into the future and that nobody who made his career in it could fail. This was the reason for many workers—among them graduates from universities—taking jobs with the aeroplane manufacturers.
But like many working-class assumptions, this one took no account of the nature of the beast called capitalism.
There were no turbo-prop aircraft on show this year. Yet the British aircraft industry once calculated that these would be more economical to run than the big jets and would therefore sell better to the airlines which, for all their superficial glamour, must have a sordid capitalist interest in cheap operating costs. Boeing, Douglas and Sud-Aviation in France proved this calculation wrong. So the turbo-prop is a dead-end and all the money tied up in it has gone down the drain. BOAC has its last Britannias up for sale for next to nothing.
Now the British industry is gambling on the future success of the VC10 and the de Havilland Trident. For neither of these are the prospects golden. If the fears which are expressed for them come to reality there will probably be another big cut-back in the aircraft industry and a lot more of its workers unemployed.
The airlines, too, are facing their problems. To stay in the race, each of them is forced to buy the latest, biggest, fastest (which usually also means the noisiest) machines on offer. The result up to now is that the number of seats available far exceeds the passengers who want them. So there is fierce competition, especially on the Trans-Atlantic runs.
This has caused most airlines in the world to fail to make a profit. Last month BEA one of the few profitable lines up to the present—announced that interest payments had turned a working profit of £550,000 into a loss of a million and a half pounds.
We all know what capitalism says must happen to an industry which does not make a profit. Aircraft are something of a special case; there are elements of national prestige and strategy to take into account. But in the end, in one way or another, the rule will apply.
For a lot of aircraft workers it looks like being a very bumpy ride.
Fasten your safety belts, please.
Nkrumah strikes
Doctor Nkrumah has succeeded in battling many people with his latest round of deportations and imprisonments.
It is simple enough to discern the reason for his expelling the Bishops Roseveare and Patterson. Both of them were involved in criticising the Young Pioneers, a nationalistic youth organisation whose members are required to chant, among other nonsense, that “Nkrumah never dies.”
Nobody who knows anything about Ghana under Nkrumah expected the Bishops to get away with suggesting that in the country’s youngsters should spend less time in worshipping the god in Accra and more in the (equally futile) worship of the god who they say is in a place called heaven.
But it is harder to explain the detention of Mr. Adamafio, Mr. Cofie Crabbe and Mr. Ako Adjei. The first two of these men were up to the hilt in Nkrumah’s campaign against the churches. We might have thought them safe in their jobs.
Perhaps they were involved in the bomb-throwing which has been going on in Ghana of late. Or perhaps they were just becoming too great rivals to Nkrumah’s supremacy.
Now they have gone and Krobo Edusei, famous for his wife’s £3,000 bed, is back in the government after his dismissal six months ago. Nkrumah, already overloaded with jobs (among others, he controls the Convention People’s Party, the Ghana Civil Service and the Volta Dam project) has taken on the Foreign Secretaryship.
These moves may be difficult to explain to our entire satisfaction, but one or two things can be said for sure.
Nkrumah is a dictator. His Young Pioneers are a copy, albeit a weak one, of the Hitler Youth movement. In taking on totalitarian powers, Nkrumah has betrayed the promises he made when he was fighting the British for Ghana’s independence.
There is nothing new in this. Postwar history is full of examples of nationalist dictators who ousted their country’s occupiers and came to power themselves with slogans of eternal liberty.
Many people outside Ghana were taken in by Nkrumah’s propaganda in the old days. Shocked though they may now be, they still lend their ears to the nationalists who are currently banging the independence drum.
Let Nkrumah’s Ghana stand as a warning that national independence has nothing to offer the ordinary people who are misled into supporting it and who end up by being oppressed and exploited by it.
Dr. Soblen
The death of Doctor Soblen brought to a close another of capitalism’s nasty little episodes.
Soblen killed himelf because, above everything else, he did not want to go back to the United States to serve his sentence for spying for Russia. The British government, perhaps at the insistence of Washington, were determined that he should be sent back. To get their way, they were prepared to break some of the legalities which at other times they hypocritically defend.
Great Britain has signed a treaty of extradition with, among others, the United States. This treaty means that if, say, a murderer escapes to America the government there will catch him and end him to this country for trial.
This treaty expressly excludes spies. The reasons are obvious, all countries have their network of espionage and it would be embarrassing for all of them if, should one of their agents flee, he could be extradited by the country he had been spying on.
Soblen should have been covered by this provision; in a sense, he was. The government never fought his case on the grounds that he was to be extradited. They only insisted that he should be deported.
But deportation only means that a person is sent out of a country—it does not mean that he must be sent to any particular other country. He can choose, in fact, the frontier by which he leaves, if Soblen had been deported he might have chosen to go to one of the Iron Curtain countries where, no doubt, he would have been welcomed as a hero.
The government were, of course, aware of this. In the name of the Anglo-American alliance they ignored the laws which they themselves have made to make their system run more smoothly.
Soblen was a tragic dupe to the illusion that Russian capitalism is worth working and dying for. This does not obscure the fact that he was a victim of the callous cynicism which all capitalist powers—including Russia fall back on when it suits them.
South Africa
At the time of the Sharpeville shootings and the “Boycott South African” campaign many anti-apartheid spokesmen went to great lengths to show how South Africa’s economy would suffer as a result of world opinion and moral indignation.
Up to the present the owners of the means of life in South Africa are no more or less affected by trials and tribulations than their brothers in less race-prejudiced countries. In fact, some foreign industrialists think the place has some attraction?.
Textile chief Mr. Cyril Lord intends to move the contents of two cotton mills from Lancashire to the Bantu areas of the Union. He says the British Government has failed to protect textile interests against cheap Asian competition. Some 100 key men are offered jobs abroad; the rest face the sack.
A South African official in London said: “Mr. Lord will have the advantages of cheap labour among others.” (Daily Herald, September 12th, 1962.)
Will Mr. Lord continue to demand that the British Government protect their textile interests by keeping out his cheap South African cotton goods? Boycotters and “Ban this and that” mongers may note that, while workers may be threatened with ills such as unemployment, propertied groups do not suffer economically, even though they sanction or commit acts which are quite antisocial.