Page:Minority of One February 1961.pdf/3

The Global Consistency

The Laotian state of affairs was allowed to deteriorate as a calculated risk on the part of the American Government.

The background against which we have accept encouraged and financed the usurpation of power by a minority in Laos could hardly be more unmistakable. Here is a classic instance of a flagrant violation of an international agreement, not by our antagonists, but by forces acting upon our advice, encouragement and sponsorship. Only American backing allowed the Government at Vietiane to tear to shreds each provision of the Convention of Geneva signed in 1954. Not only was the Laotian army illegally armed and augmented but the Pathet Lao movement which had gained official recognition in that Convention was treated as an illegal insurrection. So flagrant have the violations of the Geneva Convention been that no manipulative interpretation of its provisions could provide a camouflage; instead the Convention itself was repudiated and the International Supervisory Commission defied, sabotaged and forced out of action. All this amounted to preparatory steps for turning Laos, in flagrant violation of the letter and spirit of the Geneva Convention, into a SEATO protectorate.

The Pathet Lao movement has been depicted by our State Department as a foreign communist force in obvious contradiction to the truth; all other-than-American observers have perceived it to be a genuine, popular movement of the local population. While with respect to foreign policy the Pathet Lao never demanded anything but the neutrality of Laos, a policy also backed by the Geneva Convention, our State Department was overtly laboring to include the country in SEATO's belt and calling any opposition an attempt to deliver Laos to the communist block.

When finally the reins of government were taken over by Prince Souvanna Phouma in 1960, the hope of pacifying the country became real. Souvanna Phouma held out the promise of Laos returning to the provisions of the Convention of Geneva and ending the domestic hostilities. His attempts to broaden the political base of his government seemed destined for success; through the inclusion of the Pathet Lao as well as rightist elements a balance would be gained against Laos aligning itself with either of the two hostile blocks of nations. A neutralist Laos provided the only solution compatible with the Convention of Geneva and expressive of popular local sentiment. So compelling were these reasons that both France and Great Britain supported Souvanna Phouma unequivocally. Even our State Department did not quickly come up with an opposition to the planned coalition government. Then, however, our policy makers experienced an obvious change of heart.

Suddenly, they decided that here was an opportunity to find out how much illegality and aggressiveness American policy could get away with. They started financing, supporting and encouraging a group of militaristic adventurers without popular roots in an all out bid to control the country against its own population, against international legal instruments and against the judgment of America's allies. While our diplomats have been sounding warnings that the Soviet Union and its allies might try to take advantage of the inertia of the presidential interregnum in Washington, they themselves attempted to capitalize on that interregnum. The calculated risk was based on the theory that the Soviet Government, eager to prepare the grounds for negotiations with the Kennedy administration, would refrain from reacting lest it prejudice such negotiations. This was, as seen from Washington, a "safe" bet in any case. If the assessment of the Soviet mood should prove correct, the State Department would succeed in collecting Laos into the Western "defense" pocket. If, however, the assessment of the Soviet mood should prove erroneous and a determined Soviet reaction should follow, then the en- suing repetition of Korean type events would provide a similar and badly needed stimulant for the American economy.

The Soviet Union and its allies may indeed be dissuaded from accepting the challenge by a fear that their response would prejudice their peace overtures to the Kennedy Administration. This is the more plausible because the American-caused military victory of Gen. Phoumi Nosovan is anything but the final chapter in the Laotian tragedy. The new regime is so out of step with the Laotian people, amounting to an artificial import "made in U.S.A." that the Soviets may quite unconcernedly watch it rule the country for as long as this may seem prudent; any time they or their friends feel like challenging the artificial regime, the popular elements of revolt will be present. What we may consider a victory of our arrogance may indeed be our adversaries' patient tolerance due to a well justified confidence in our eventual defeat in the Laotian situation.

In the meantime, the Asian and African nations are not going to judge us by the hypocritical euphemisms of our propagandistic spokesmen but by our imperial behavior in Laos and elsewhere. Laos is an especially sobering experience for two reasons: first, because there we and the forces we have been backing found them- selves in the position of being the only assailants of international legal instruments; secondly, because at no time were our compelling interests at stake but only our insistence on Lao's unequivocally aligning itself with us against its own sentiments and commitments.

They will also judge us, and correctly so, by such manifestations of our official political character as our recent abstention from voting on the anti-colonialism resolution in the United Nations. Coming as that resolution did as a substitute for the Soviet draft, wholly deprived of the latter's teeth and time limitations and turned into no more than an abstract, unenforceable declaration of conscience, the vote on it provided a demarcation line between the forces that stubbornly cling to history's passing nightmare and those varied and diversified forces that have tied their success to the dawning light of the future. Our abstention from that vote provided an implicit commentary on many of our policies. It displayed a psychological consistency that sheds light on why we find ourselves inadvertently supporting latifundists in Latin America, militarists in Germany and Japan, Fascists in Spain and corrupt agents in Laos.

Considering the psychological preconditioning of our American diplomats, they are charged with an impossible task: impressed as they are by the popular "science" of image creating, they fail to realize that the public image of a political situation depends directly on that situation. To them image and truth are independent of each other, and each time they are faced with a situation of having the false image dispelled by the naked truth they are at a loss to appreciate the limitations of their art.

What is "wrong" with the peoples of Asia and Africa is that they have not been brought up by Madison Avenue. It is this "backwardness" that prevents them from accepting us as world benefactors and instead "misleads" them into judging us by such "irrelevant" standards as our actual role in Laos, Cuba, the Congo or in the U.N. vote on colonialism. They are "naive" and "unsophisticated" people who insist that a bayonet is a bayonet instead of accepting our superior teaching that only a Russian bayonet is a bayonet while an American bayonet is a magic container of divine blessings.

There is at least one slightly consoling aspect in the consistency we have been displaying in Cuba, the Congo, Laos and the United Nations. The less legitimate our illegitimate policies are made to look, the smaller the margin of error that will feed well intentioned people's gullibility. In Laos and elsewhere we keep shedding ideological and legal rationalizations ever more openly and cynically, and soon enough our diplomats will play their power politics in blunt nakedness, openly declaring that whatever is expedient for one American business lobby or another is right and just. This will be no more than a repetitious application of the position we took when the U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union. It will be an international adaptation of Charles Wilson's immortal words: "What is good for General Motors is good for America."