News in Review: Vietnam, Algeria
Quick look around
To those who find the headlines depressing, and who prefer to look for the news in the newspapers’ smaller columns (“Vicar, 73, Weds Secretary, 21”) we can offer little comfort.
Events which are considered of minor importance reflect the same drab image as the big news.
Nearly two million people are receiving National Assistance in this country, which shows that many more than two million are not sharing in whatever the Tories meant when they talked about our rising prosperity. About three quarters of those on National Assistance are pensioners, which shows again that although the shadow of want may have been lifted from some people (for example the judges who are soon going to get a twenty-live per cent rise in their already big wages) it still hangs over the retired worker.
We have been promised that the report of the government’s Study Group on the North West will shortly be published. The Group found that parts of the North West have the highest mortality rate in the country, due to the fact that so many of its people live in towns and cities, under squalid conditions. It also discovered a fact which some other people had known for a long time; that there are still plenty of slums in this country, and that they are increasing fast. The Group concluded, in fact, that it will take fifty years, at the present rates of clearance, to get rid of the North West’s slums.
In Geneva, United Nations Secretary General U Thant said that on present showing there will be more unemployment, more hunger, more malnutrition, in 1970 than there is today. “The misery of the developing world,” he said, “is a progressive misery. It threatens to grow worse in the second half of the decade.” The only comment to make here is that this gloomy opinion comes from someone who, with the job which he has, must obviously be one of the world’s top optimists.
There is no reason to hope that the news will get any better. It is apparent that there was something seriously lacking in the perceptive powers of the man who first said that every day, in every way, things are getting better and better.
Vietnam mission
It is fairly safe to assume that Mr. Wilson was not heedless of the political advantages to be gained from the publicity which was bound to accompany the suggested peace mission on Vietnam.
Perhaps it was even hoped that in the excitement few people would have realised that the mission had not actually done anything, or gone anywhere and that indeed most of its members had split up and gone home.
The mission was the same sort of empty gesture—like Chamberlain’s trip to Munich, like the Locarno Treaty in 1924 — which convince workers that capitalism’s leaders are about to solve the problem of war.
This conviction rests upon a delusion; that wars are caused by international statesmen omitting to talk before they start shooting—or rather, before they tell their workers to start shooting for them. (At one time there was a popular theory that Stalin’s intransigence could be dealt with by getting him to raise a Kremlin cricket team to play an XI from Westminster.)
In fact, there is no lack of opportunity for capitalism’s leaders to confer. And, as the Vietnam mission has shown, there are also plenty of informal channels through which they can communicate, even if they do not recognise each other’s existence. It is clear .that they fail to do so only when they think there are other ways of settling their differences.
It is also clear that wars are not caused by a failure of communication. They are caused by conditions which cannot be affected by any conference, and they start when further talking is pointless.
The Western powers are now trying to get the Vietcong to negotiate, when they are convinced that they are close to victory. This is something like Hitler trying to impose his terms on the Allies as his empire was collapsing in April 1945. Like any other war, the one in Vietnam has its own momentum of ruthlessness and it will be played out to its bitter end.
That will not be the end of the matter; Vietnam is only the latest of the small wars in the greater struggle between the world powers over which shall control and exploit South East Asia. There is no sense, no reason, no humanity, in such conflicts—and no “right” either on any side.
It is typical of Labour Party hypocrisy that they should pretend that normal human standards can be applied to the war in Vietnam. They are among the supporters of the social system which produces the war there and which could make it (to use the current ugly jargon) escalate into something which even Mr. Wilson does not pretend to be able to control.
Algerian conflict
During the long war for Algerian independence, the people who suffered in the nationalist cause were comforted by the thought that out of their tribulations freedom would be born in Algeria.
At that time, as the French forces were daily committing the most brutal of excesses, it was easy to represent the FLN as fighters for liberty.
One of the heroes of the rebellion, who quickly emerged as the effective ruler of Algeria after independence, was Ben Bella. He was supposed to be the man who, once the French had been banished, would lead the poor Algerian peasant to freedom and prosperity.
One of Ben Bella’s closest associates, the man who stood by him and did so much to help him root out opposition after the rebellion, was Colonel Boumedienne. If anyone bears a load of respon¬sibility for selling Ben Bella as Freedom’s Messiah, it is Boumedienne.
Yet now, according to the Colonel, the whole thing was a mistake. Ben Bella does not stand for freedom—he is a despot, a demagogue. He squandered Algeria’s resources, he frightened off investors. (We should remind ourselves here that the Colonel, who has pledged himself to encourage investment in Algeria, calls himself a Socialist.)
It is too late, now, to discover that the Algerian rebellion was to result in replacing one despotism by another; it would have saved some lives if at the lime Boumedienne had reminded his followers that nationalist risings often have that effect.
All nationalist movements claim that they are fighting for freedom, and not a few of them also claim to be Socialist as well. But when they get power, and the moment of truth arrives, they frequently impose dictatorships.
Algeria is only the latest of several countries in which this has happened recently, and in which the leaders of the rebellion, after they have won, have split and denounced each other as despots. In one after another of the new African states this has happened—sometimes until the imposition of a one-party slate has silenced the opposition and left only one side to put over its point of view.
These are the fruits of nationalist rebellion. There can be few causes which have induced so many people to waste so much time, energy and blood.
Gaolbreak
One fact is often overlooked by the man-in-the-street advocate of the deterrent effect of heavy sentences. The more severe the sentence, the greater the incentiv to escape.
Heavy sentences are often imposed on members of big and well-organised mobs like the Train Robbers, who are well enough equipped, in daring and organi¬sation, to bring off a rescue from gaol.
The prison authorities are of course aware of this; if rumours are true they have thwarted plans to free two of the Train gang. But the criminals have the same sort of advantages as guerilla lighters—they can move freely in the world outside, they can watch and wait and pounce when they think the moment has come.
The rescue of Ronald Biggs has confirmed what the escape of Charles Wilson showed—that big time crime is now refined and organised enough not to reject any job. Perhaps some criminals with a sense of humour might reflect that they at any rate are responding to the Labour government’s appeal for greater technical expertise in our work.
It has been often said that men like the Great Train Robbers would make excellent soldiers or big business men. It is apparent that they do have the required amount of ruthlessness to succeed in these fields.
At the moment, however, they prefer to rob people in ways which capitalism says are illegal, and to ignore other methods which are likely to bring (hem a place in the Honours List.
One thing the robbers fear above everything else, above imprisonment, above the nervous stress of their work, and that is to be a normal member of the working class. They cannot face the prospect of the daily journey to the factory or office, the clocking on and off, the monotonous routine jobs, the kowtowing to the boss, the leisure time spent in visiting or cutting the lawn.
This is one of the influences which persuade them to be criminals. It is also one of the influences which persuade the capitalist class to hang on to their privi¬leged situation, and to the rights it brings them to be legalised robbers.