Rolling & Controlling Events

In a week of violent happenings, in Algiers, in Paris, in Caracas and in Beirut, the news had the bewildering quality of rockets going off at once in different directions. Up went a new Sputnik. On the streets of cities thousands of miles apart angry youthful throngs rioted, bent on demonstration and destruction; whatever else they were mad about, they usually found their way to the U.S. Information library to sack and burn it. Was it all coincidence?

Crises have a way of reverberating; Suez and Hungary occurred in the same week, and eruptions in the West frequently accompany rumblings in the East. Those who looked for linkings last week, including those prepared to believe that the Russians were at the bottom of most everything, could begin by separating what was spontaneous combustion in the week's news and what was prepared.

Matter of Timing. Launching of Sputnik III was something whose timing Moscow could control -and probably did -to impress the visiting Nasser with Russian might. And obviously timed to follow Sputnik was Khrushchev's new offer of a "radical solution" of the disarmament problem, to offset the developing impression that Russia was not eager for a summit meeting it could not dominate.

In the Middle East, the swelling force of Arab nationalism was bound to burst at some moment in Lebanon after Nasser spread his United Arab Republic to the tiny country's very border. It was the murder of a pro-Nasser editor, assassin unknown, that set off the mob against Lebanon's pro-Western government. There was no clear evidence that Nasser wanted the outbreak at that moment or had decreed its timing. He had merely fanned existing discontent beforehand, and his agents were prepared to ride it afterward. As Cairo, Damascus and Moscow radios dinned encouragement of the insurrection, a message crossed the Syrian border, on the person of an eccentric Belgian diplomat, addressed to persons unknown, in Beirut: "Fire at police, disarm agents. Continue shooting all day. Blow up the presidential palace. Kill whenever necessary; throw bombs from roofs and in streets. Burn a few cars during nights: this is indispensable. Take Tripoli as an example and do the same." Agitators need not invent events to profit by them.

Waiting for Trouble. In similar fashion, the dates of Vice President Nixon's visit to Latin America were well known in advance, and skilled agitators had only to direct a directionless mob to appropriate targets (see THE HEMISPHERE). In France, quite a different set of ambitious men (not Communist at all) anxiously watched the discontent that had long been fermenting in the exasperations of a 20-year recessional of unwon wars, in an army's disgust at political restrictions on all-out colonial defense, in a paratrooper mentality that blamed all military frustrations on the cynical surrenders of reprobate politicians in Paris. These watching men leaped in swiftly in Algiers to guide events their way, but if they could impel events they could not with certainty control them. France settled down to an uneasy testing time of men in action and in reaction. Men eager to exploit the situation were fearful that a misstep might bring to power those they opposed, or a continuing irresolution might bring on what no true Frenchman wanted, the trials of a civil war.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.