How to Live with the Reds

Faced by the difficult and dangerous decisions of the cold war, some of the Western world's statesmen--notably Prime Minister Winston Churchill--have spoken wishfully on occasion of the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the Communists. Canada's External Affairs Chief Lester B. Pearson has often veered off in the same direction. But as his nation's chief delegate to the Geneva conference he has had a bellyful of Communist negotiators. Last week he took a realistic look at the problems of sharing a planet with the Reds; in a speech at a meeting of Canadian mayors in Windsor, he said:

"A strange new word has lately been insistently and cleverly pushed by the Communists--'coexistence' . . . [It] has acquired a special and narrow significance . . . It has become a promise by the men in the Kremlin that their world, their system can live, and desires to live, peacefully and amicably with ours ..."

From Coexistence to Nonexistence. "A first point to notice about this question of coexistence is that we have, in fact, been coexisting with Communism for the past 35 years. But another and more significant point is that a good many countries such as the Baltic States. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ... which coexisted with the U.S.S.R. for some years, now have ceased to exist at all as free nations. Coexistence is no problem for them. It has become the coexistence of Jonah and the whale that swallowed him . . .

"The moral of this is plain that adequate defensive strength and eternal vigilance is the price to be paid for coexistence . . . There is, I think, because of our growing collective strength, less danger at this time of a deliberate frontal aggression than two years ago. The Soviet leaders are realists. They know that such an attack would be met by ... atomic retaliation from the U.S., which would leave their great cities in ruins ..."

Conditions of Survival. "We of the free world should avoid panic and provocation . . . We should be 'trigger-ready' without being 'trigger-happy' . . . The kind of coexistence with Communism which I have been describing is not. of course, 'peaceful,' in the sense that it is founded on friendship and cooperation. It is hardly more than mutual toleration . . .

"As I see it, the answer to the question whether coexistence with Communism is possible lies basically in recognition of the simple fact that we have to share a planet, not with abstractions, but with fellow human beings, who have now learned the secret of destroying life itself on that planet. The real question, in fact, is not whether we can 'coexist' but whether we can prevent the unspeakable catastrophe of atomic war, and ultimately find ways not merely of coexisting, but of cooperating with the peoples of Russia and China without at the same time betraying our own principles, weakening our values, or sacrificing our security."

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