Cleavage

Vyacheslav M. Molotov habitually lectures the world as though he held an invisible birch rod in his hand, and his Western colleagues are often so irked by his unflagging self-righteousness that they pay little heed to what he actually says.

But in Paris last week they paid attention, for never before had "The Hammer" so plainly and openly charted the cleavage between East and West. Molotov made it clear that the "iron curtain" is not a mere physical barrier, impeding free movement and free information; it is a partition between two world views, two kinds of morality, so that words, ideas, ideals, logic and precedents lose their meaning when they pass from one side to the other.

What Molotov had to say was logical and moral by the Soviet terms of reference. To Western ears it sounded like the elaborate logical structures of a paranoiac delusion.

Lexicography. The matter under discussion was the crucial Danube clause, Article XXXIV, of the Rumanian treaty. As they had since Potsdam, the U.S. and Britain were pressing for free trade on Europe's second longest river, now cut off along the Soviet line at Linz. Britain's Bevin used such words as "equal treatment for all" and "nondiscrimination." In Molotov's lexicon, these were not good words but bad. They meant "imperialism" and "dollar diplomacy."

Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg reminded the peacemakers that the river had been internationalized since 1815, controlled by an international commission since 1856. Immaterial, said Molotov. In 1856 the U.S. still had "slavery" and Britain was riding the crest of imperialism. It doubtless never occurred to Molotov that any mention of slavery nowadays makes a Western mind think of the modern totalitarian brand.

Vandenberg said that the U.S. has "no direct commercial interest of its own" in Danubia, but wants the river opened as a contribution to world unity. Words, said Molotov, who looks at the U.S. in the context of Marxist philosophy (developed in the dog-eat-dog phase of the 19th Century railroad barons and merchant colonizers). Molotov clearly would not be surprised if a modern Jay Gould turned up on the Danube with a full bag of tricks. "I believe," said Molotov, "private capitalists can become the veritable owners of whole states ... as a result of the power their dollars give to them." To prove U.S. infiltration power, Molotov cited the ubiquity of U.S. movies and radio.

So much for "one world." So much for "equality of treatment." Such phrases sound as hypocritical to Russia as Russian "democracy" sounds to the West.

Isolationism. On the other side of the Atlantic the Slav bloc in U.N.'s Economic & Social Council has made abundantly clear Russia's deep-seated opposition to free multilateral trade, which is the economic side of the one-world concept.

"The Danube to the Danubian people," cried Yugoslavia's Krasovec, with a strident isolationism reminiscent of U.S. Midwest Senators in 1915. Russia's Nikolai Feonov generalized the anti-trade point into a principle in his criticism of an ECOSOC report calling for the economic coordination of Europe. He found that it "tends to favor the still greater development of highly developed countries." He presaged Molotov's warning that free trade destroyed the independence of weaker countries, adding: "I, for instance, believe that bilateral agreements are for the time being the best."

All this was especially important because a school of thought has recently bobbed up in London and Washington which holds that even if we cannot now get along with Russia politically we could successfully make economic arrangements with her and her stooge states which would lead to political accord. Apparently Molotov, Feonov & friends do not agree.

As the New York Times's brilliant Anne O'Hare McCormick put it: "Somehow it remained for the discussion of the Balkan treaties to bring home how much physical and intellectual unity war has disrupted."

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