CHINA CELEBRATES MAO'S SWIM
July 16 marked the first anniversary of Mao Tse-tung's celebrated ninemile swim in the Yangtze River at age 72.
Among many accomplishments since last July, king recently noted that "more than 29 million sets of [Mao's] Selected Works...came off the press in the first five months of this year."
This was more than twice the total published in the 15 preceding years.
TITO—~KREMLIN DISPUTE REPORTED ON MIDEAST WAR
By Les Evans
A bitter assessment of the withering away of Soviet support for the Arabs at the height of the war with Israel appears to be taking place among the Soviet and Eastern European Communist parties.
K.S.Karol, writing in the June 16 New Statesman, claims inside information on the discussions that took place June 9 between Soviet and East European Communist party chiefs.
"A group of 18 angry men," says Karol, "met secretly last Friday [June 9] in the Kremlin. All the leaders of the European communist countries, except Albania, were there. Even President Tito... was present."
One of the major points at issue was how the Arabs had been caught by surprise by the Israeli air strike. Tito reportedly presented Nasser's case:
"Nasser claimed that he had foreseen this attack, and to forestall it had planned a preemptive strike on Israeli airfields; but that first the Americans and then, in the middle of the night, the Russians had dissuaded him; from this joint intervention he had concluded that the Israeli attack would not take place."
Karol indicates that there is some reason to question whether the Russian advice to Nasser was inspired by naiveté as to Israeli intentions:
"The Poles reported that their Washington embassy had forecast an Israeli attack 24 hours before it took place, and that this information had been promptly passed on to the Russians."
How, then, were the Russians taken by surprise?
"The Russians," says Karol, "thenselves astounded by the turn of events, had no reply to make: they had foreseen nothing....They...felt that all they had to do was to restrain the Egyptians, while the U.S. put similar pressure on the Israelis. But, they complained, President Johnson had not carried out his part of the bargain by doing all in his power to stop the Israeli hawks."
_ This show of collusion with Johnson, compounded by the Soviets plumping for the cease-fire, seems to have set some bureaucratic teeth on edge:
"Faced with such apparent treachery, the other communist states thought Moscow had struck a secret bargain; but in the two days which followed it became
clear they had got nothing in return. The
Americans had asked nothing more from
the Israelis than to stop fighting; it
was this which led the other communist
leaders to insist on a full collective
discussion of the debacle, to take place
in the Kremlin. It was extremely bitter,
lasted over 12 hours and covered the
whole range of communist-bloc foreign
policy."
According to Karol's information,
it was the Yugoslavs who emerged as the
critics of Soviet conciliationism:
"The Yugoslavs say that Tito took
the role of public prosecutor. He told
the Soviet leaders, in effect: ‘Your
policy of secret dialogue with the Amer-
icans has led to the liquidation of the
concept of the uncommitted world. It
has led to the overthrow of Third World
leaders like Nkrumah, Sukarno and today
(Friday, June 9] Nasser. It has strength-
ened the US grip on India, which sooner
or later will move entirely into the
Western camp.'"
If this report of the well-known
commentator in the New Statesman is cor-
rect it still marks no fundamental shift
on the part of the Yugoslavs. Their con-
cern is for the preservation of the "“un-
committed world," that is, those bour-
geois regimes in the underdeveloped world
which have taken an anti-imperialist
stance.
While such regimes certainly de-
serve to be defended from the depredations
of imperialism, they are inherently un-
stable and repressive toward their own
working class; incapable of solving the
fundamental problems confronting the under-
developed countries.
The Kremlin bureaucrats have made
no small contribution to the series of
imperialist victories in the colonial
world. The support of the Sukarnos, how-
ever, was precisely the road to defeat for
the working class. The real alternative,
that does not occur to the bureaucrats,
is that pointed out by the Cuban revolu-
tion -- of a socialist revolution.
The attempt to take up the cudgels
of defense against imperialism, even from
the standpoint of the bureaucrats, seems
to have yielded very little: Following
the Kremlin gathering came Kosygin's
visit to Johnson.
Rather than a break with their
policy of accommodation with imperialisn,
the "spirit of Glassboro" spelled out the
promise of more of the same to come.