Germs of Untruth

Across the world, Communism waged germ warfare against the mind of man. In Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, in almost every city, town, village and collective farm in the U.S.S.R., workers and farmers were pulled from their jobs for mass inoculations of the fiction that the U.S. is deluging the Korean and Chinese Communists with bacteriological weapons. Peking newspapers printed photographic "proof" of weird insects and rotting food. So did London's Daily Worker. The editors of the New York Daily Worker joined in the cry against their own countrymen. In Italy, in France, in Belgium, Holland and West Germany there were Communist protest parades. And in Teheran last week Communist youths, shouting "Germ warfare," touched off a riot of 10,000; it left twelve dead and 250 injured.

In the United Nations, deadpan grim despite the ludicrousness of his charges, Russia's Jacob A. Malik accused the U.S. of raining down on the enemy a horrible array of germ-laden objects: pork, crackers, spiders, crows, ants, yellow leaves, crickets, flies, fleas and death-dealing goose feathers. Malik's colleagues on the U.N. Disarmament Commission could take it no longer. "My right ear," complained Britain's Sir Gladwyn Jebb, who sits at Malik's left, "has become seriously infected by the perpetual dissemination of verbal bacilli." The commission, eleven against Malik, ruled the Russian out of order.

Russia's accusations were hard to take seriously, but they had to be. Solemnly the U.N. urged an International Red Cross investigation on both sides in Korea; Russia flatly refused to have anything to do with the Red Cross, and its refusal was echoed by Peking.

Target: At Home. Nervously querying its embassies abroad, the State Department was told that Communism's refusal to let the outside world see for itself had discredited the Communist campaign everywhere this side of the Iron Curtain. But that did not mean it was a flop. Previous Communist propaganda maneuvers --the disarmament campaign of 1946, the warmonger cry of 1947, the phony Stockholm Peace Appeal of 1949--had at least a semblance of plausibility, and were designed to arouse and divide nations outside the Communist orbit.

The latest maneuver, more violent than any before, appears to be aimed chiefly at Communism's own subjects. Evidence: mass meetings, which cut into precious farm and factory production, are rare in Communist countries. Last week there were meetings from the Elbe to the Kuriles.

What is behind it? The West could only speculate. Some of the guesses:

P: Springtime is the usual epidemic time in Korea and China, and the propaganda is designed to prepare the people for plagues which the Red government, with its medicines, nurses and doctors diverted to Korea, cannot handle. But this spring no widespread plague has yet been reported. And though such a campaign might be shrewd in a plague area, why spread it so vigorously in areas where there is no plague?

P: It is an effort to whip up support in China, and the Communist countries which supply her armies, for a breakoff of truce talks at Panmunjom and a resumption of the war in Korea. tj Russia, now that it is itself making atom bombs (and thus can no longer accuse Western "warmongers" of being the only ones to make the dread weapon), had to create some other dastardly form of warfare which it could say was a Western monopoly. This is a British Foreign Office theory.

Evil Glow. There was another possibility, unpleasant to contemplate but impossible to disregard. U.S. intelligence sources reported last week that Soviet Russia's civil defense preparations are now just about complete. As recently as a year ago the Russians seemed to be paying little attention to civil defense; Western officials read this as one sign that Russia was not prepared to go to war. In the light of the latest intelligence assessment, the bacteriological warfare propaganda took on an evil glow. It is just the kind of campaign which a totalitarian state might be expected to use to whip its inhabitants into a war.

This too was but a hypothesis. General Gruenther, Ike's chief of staff, went on record last week that SHAPE does not expect a Russian attack this year. Even if the hypothesis were wrong (as everybody hoped it was), Russia's germ warfare was the kind of tactic that could only poison the wells of international relations for years to come.

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