Another voice
The owl and the pussycat
Auberon Waugh This week Mr Callaghan takes his clean, blue-eyed Foreign Secretary to Washington for a meeting with President Carter. Those few of us who still follow foreign affairs with any interest may have noticed that the first— and only—major policy speech from the appetising Dr Owen so far has been on the vexed matter of human rights in the Soviet Union and the extent to which these should be allowed to influence our attitude to détente, if at all. The speech was in fact prepared for Mr Crosland to deliver, but Dr Owen is thought to have added a few delightful, boyish touches of his own. By whatever process it emerged, however, the most amazing thing about it was how exactly it echoed President Carter's recent stand on the same subject.
Now we must all agree that President Carter is performing rather well on this topic at the moment. Alarmed as we may have been to find a leader of the free world— and a man on whom we must all rely for our physical safety as well as our freedom and prosperity—who looks more like a cat than a human being, he nevertheless seems to have recovered from a shaky start. His first credit mark came with the sacking of Henry Kissinger, architect of Nixon's murderously stupid and unprincipled policy of détente with the Soviet Union. But that was an election promise and he had no choice in the matter. Even the American electorate could not quite stomach the idea of an Owl and Pussycat show at the White House. Then came an ugly moment when it looked as if détente was his Boy Scout task of the year, and everybody knows a Scout can't get his Pathfinder Badge without roasting a hedgehog or two. Now it seems he's had a chat with the Great Pack Leader and come to the conclusion that the Eagle Patrol can't make friends with the nasty town lads until the nasty town lads have stopped maltreating our dumb chums, leaving litter, lighting fires in dangerous places and generally behaving like irresponsible baddies.
Perhaps his good example will shame the Russians into mending their ways. I hope so, don't you ? Will you write and tell him so? Of course, he will already know that the Lion Cubs are behind him. Little Brown Owen has announced that Britain will attack the maltreatment of dissidents in Russia.
Coo. If that doesn't make them mend their ways, nothing will. But it is typical of the unreal world in which we live to suppose that dissidents are the problem. As Soviet spokesmen never tire of pointing out, they number about a thousandth part of one per cent of the Soviet population. Most of them are concerned with ancient, ethnic grievances which can easily be confused with those of the Quebec or Breton separatists, even the Cornish National Party. Many of them are eccentrics, a few undoubtedly mad. The main problem in dealing with the Soviet Union is not the 2,500-odd people who dissent, but the 250 million-odd who do not dissent, who have been brutalised into a malleable, uninformed, unthinking, subhuman lump. Another problem is that when one discusses the Soviet leadership, one is not talking about the amorphous collection of power-seeking boobies whom we recognise as politicians and leaders of the West. One is talking about a system, a whole apparatus of brutal, cynical men and women bound together by the tightest imaginable bond of a shared interest in the oppression of.everyone else and recognisable as human beings only by their individual terror of falling out of step.
I do not know whether Kissinger knew that the Soviet system was incapable of reform from within itself and chose to pretend otherwise for the purpose of sugarcoating still further the tray of candies he offered to the American people; or whether he convinced himself that human nature is the same everywhere and it stands to reason that common sense will one day prevail in the Soviet Union. In either case he was a fool, and in the former case he was also a villain, but the distinction does not seem to me an important one. The important thing about Kissinger is not whether he was a villain or not, or exactly how deep his cynicism ran. It is that in his high-powered decision-making way he was also a dangerous fool, unable or unwilling to perceive the whole reality of the scene over which he took half a dozen major decisions every day, and totally unable to think it through to its logical conclusion. When one grasps this, one begins to understand the tough-talking pseudo-realism which impressed such unreflective power-struck men as Denis Healey as little more than the saloon bar braggings Of a drunken businessman as he threatens to close down his factories if the workers press their demands.
If Kissinger's philosophy of detente was only half thought out, there is little sign that Carter's Boy Scout Code has received this amount of attention. Even the cold logic of deterrence was open to the objection that there is no logic in its final application: that the destruction of the other half of our planet is neither a logical nor a useful response to the information that one's own half is about to be destroyed in four minutes' time. But it
was the fear of this irrational response which made the philosophy of deterrence work, and it is surely a fear of the irrational which offers an escape from our present predicament.
Where Britain is concerned, we have nothing to say and therefore need no voice. The last time we had anything to say was when we urged caution over the American blockade of Cuba in the early 1960s ineptly, as it turned out—and since then we have been content to echo our master's voice, whether mouthing the platitudes of détente, the platitudes of human rights or, sotto voce, the platitudes of deterrence. The same is true, to a greater or lesser extent, of our partners in the EEC. If the most criminally stupid of all the follies of recent history—apart from western collusion with the Russians over the suppression of Czechoslovakia in I968—was the decision to sell Russian grain and effectively rescue the system from the consequences of its own ineptitude, then this year's decision by the EEC to sell them butter for their American bread merely puts a cap and bells on the whole caper.
But if ever Britain wants to do something useful on the international scene, the time has surely come to discard the various absurd garments with which she has tried to cover her nakedness since the war. Nobody wants us as honest broker; nobody wants to benefit from our long experience of European diplomacy or dealing with nig-nogs in other parts. As a loyal or sycophantic partner to the Americans we have the weight of a fly on an elephant's back; as a disloyal or quarrelsome partner, we have all the firepower or 'clout' of an ant in the same situation.
If we want a world role—and I can't, in honesty, suppose that many people in England nowadays do want one—we should examine the stronger areas of our present situation. An advantage of being a small country is surely that we can say what we like. We should examine the present world roles of Gaddafi in Libya and Amin ill Uganda, not the earlier role of Halifax. We could be encouraging with arms and moneY and propaganda support the nationalist movements in the Ukraine, in Estonia, Latvia and Karelia, not to mention Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Where there is no nationalist movement, we could invent one. We could secretly infect grain exports to Russia from the United States with the fungus ergot which causes St Vitus's Dance, and EEC butter exports with botulism. We could proudly claim responsibility for every epidemic of German measles or murriPs the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, and hint at unimaginable diseases being cooked up for them in our chemical warfarie establishment at Porton Down. Above al , we could lose no opportunity to denounce the brutal absurdities of the Soviet system and pour scorn on Russians, Poles, Ukrainians and everybody else for accepting them.
But perhaps this is just what nice Dr Owen has in mind.
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