THE WARNING OF 1954 FROM GENEVA

SIX summers ago at Geneva, the Great Powers presided over a cease-fire agreement between French imperialism and the Indo-Chinese Communist Party of Viet-Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh.

General elections were to be held by July, 1956, in both North and South Indo-China. They have not yet taken place, at any rate in the South. The U'S.backed French rulers there say that the Communists cannot meet the stipulated standards of free baHoting, but they are in no position to face free elections.

The New York Times wrote in 1954 of the French puppet regime of Bao Dai (saved by the Geneva agreement), ‘a barren dictatorship—barren because there is no effective dictator. . . . Bao is an evil venial man... an imperial abomination.’ Just like Franco, Chiang Kai-shek and Syngman Rhee, in fact.

This Geneva meeting of 1954 did produce other results. It found U.S. imperialism in a tight spot. Soviet Russia had recovered from the war-time destruction. Two-thirds of the world’s population was already moving into anti-imperialist struggles. The U.S. ‘police-action’ in Korea had broken down and U.S. was hated as an aggressor throughout the colonial world. China was defending her southern border by massing forces to help Viet Minh, whose peasant army had stormed the French stronghold of Dien Bien Phu.

World-wide revulsion followed the Pentagon’s threat to use the H-bomb, but at Geneva Eisenhower beamed his ‘peace’ smile and Bulganin proclaimed the smile to. be genuine. Indo-China was divided up and the Asian Revolution embodied in the Viet Minh armies was halted in its tracks. U.S. imperialism received absolutions for its sins, ten years of nuclear war preparations. At Geneva Bulganin enabled Eisenhower to parry the anti-imperialist onslaught.

The Bandung Conference The Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian states in spring, 1955, showed what the Russian and Chinese leaders paid for the Geneva ‘deal’. The Conference represented leaders claiming to represent no more than 35 millions of the 200 millions of Africa. No invitations were sent to Kenyatta or the African National Congress.

The Conference itself bore witness to the forces bearing down on imperialism, but the symptoms of these forces are not the same as their effective action. The delegations of the Philippines, Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey, Iran and Liberia represented regimes directly subsidized by Wall Street. They were without doubt briefed how to act by State Department officials.

In a speech Chou En-Lai said that he was against such Western imperialist military alliances as NATO and SEATO, but in the voting he went along with a clause giving ambiguous approval to these alliances which Wall Street has been building since 1945 for the attack on the Soviet bloc.

The New York Times, voice of Wall Street, commented on the day after the Conference: ‘it was an experiment to begin with. In our judgment the experiment succeeded beyond what we had a right to hope.’ That newspaper welcomed the statement of the Conference condemning colonialism, since it proposed no action to end colonialism.

Filled with the ‘Geneva spirit’, the New York Daily Worker wrote on April 26, 1955, ‘The Bandung Conference proved that countries with differing economic: systems and political ideas can achieve peaceful co-existence.’ It quoted with approval Premier U Nu of Burma: ‘The Chinese played their part well at Bandung. They refrained from making disparaging remarks against theUnited States. They could have engaged in them if they had wanted to, just as some Western nations attacked Communism.’

Bandung paraded forces under leaders who refused to. prepare for battle. The Geneva spirit was only a tempor-. ary stalemate in the epoch of wars and revolutions. Nothing at Geneva obliged the Russians or Chinese: leaders to be silent about the crimes of imperialism. Nothing forced them to make a virtue of the necessity to. draw back in face of the Pentagon’s H-bomb threats.. - Nothing had, or still has, changed in the underlying an-. tagonism between the imperialists 1nd those whom they have made or hope to make their victims.

Later in 1955 the 10th Assembly of the United Nations found the facial expressions and deportment of Dulles. and Molotov quite ‘correct’, much more replete with ‘Geneva spirit’ than those of Eisenhower and Khrushchev in Paris this year.

Delegates of 14 Afro-Asian states, headed by India,,. tried to get discussed the appeal >»f France’s oppressed. colony, Algeria. The majority of delegates, from USA, Britain, France, Holland and the stooge votes they con-. trolled, voted to rule the appeal off the agenda. So much. for the ‘Geneva spirit’.

These experiences show that the aims and interests of imperialism cannot be reconciled with those of their colonial slaves. On ‘neaceful co-existence’, Lenin wrote: in November, 1920: ‘We have now passed from the arena. of war to the arena of peace, and we have not forgotten that war will come again. As long as capitalism andsocialism remain side by side we canaot live peacefully—. the one or the other will be the victim in the end.’

This does not at all mean that war is inevitable. It means that lasting peace can be obtained by the socialist programme of organizing and strengthening the working-. class and the anti-imperialist forces throughout the world. in the struggle against imperialism. There need be no, question of ‘waiting for the war’.

But preaching ‘peaceful co-existence’ disarms the op-. pressed peoples and classes in the world, without satisfying the imperialists. They need concrete performance, they require, as their side of the bargain, that the preachers of ‘peaceful co-existence’ can bring it about, by getting the oppressed colonial peoples to co-exist peacefully with their oppressors. This is the real reason why it cannot work.

SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE BIRMINGHAM BRANCH announces ....

A series of Four Public Lectures and Discussions to be held in the ‘HOPE AND ANCHOR’ (Edmund St.), upstairs room Second Talk—WEDNESDAY, JULY 5, at 7.45 p.m.

The Apprentice Movement; Labour Youth Organization; Youth’s Place in the Fight for Socialism Speaker: BARRY JONES (an active Young Socialist)

ALL NEWSLETTER READERS INVITED