a preview by owen gager

When the leaders speak of peace
The common folk know
That war is coming
When the leaders curse war
The mobilisation order is already written out.

—Bertolt Brecht

As conference confronts counter-conference, the leaders speaking of peace will live for a week in the same city as their political enemies.

On one side will be the men of power, and too their confident generals promising quick victories to ensure more guns, and planes are bought and more troops sent (not for much longer, now they promise); on the other side, the intellectuals, academics, novelists, philosophers with their two established styles of protest, the teach-in and the demonstration, to be fused in yet another combination, to the same cry that war cannot bring peace and our leaders are misleaders.

The SEATO conference will, literally, have the big battalions. It will take over, symbolically, Parliament, secure from infiltration, subversion and protest as never before, and there consult about a new war, plan reinforcements, escalation, perhaps a new treaty.

It will issue communiques affirming its will, for peace, praise collective security, and announce that South Vietnam is being saved from aggression horn the North.

At the other conference, less affluent and more disorganised convenors will bring the spokesmen of distinguished intellectual overseas spokesmen for protest to guess what the other conference is doing and to denounce it with eloquent

From one conference will come communiques and the rumour of bombs, from the other rhetoric and news of books to be published and new theories of the Asian balance of power.

In both conferences there will be divisions.

France will be absent from the SEATO conference, Pakistan perhaps will make a token appearance. President Marcos will be indiscreet (as he was alter Harold Holt's funeral). Any new treaty to link the "allies" in the Vietnam war (prophesised in the August. 1967 Vietnam Quote and Comment, the Committee on Vietnam newspaper) will meet with difficulty. Malaysia and Indonesia being afraid either to ally or confront with one another alter the strained relationships of the last few years, Singapore fearing an anti-Chinese alliance directed against her as a predominantly Chinese-populated state.

All that may be done is to regularise, diplomatically, the present level of participation in the Vietnam war.

The SEATO conference will have lew public sessions. It will be secret.

The newspapers and the Returned Servicemens' Association will tell us it is keeping us secure—that it is better to be fighting our enemies in Vietnam than fighting them at Makara. The United States and the corrupt Asian states it is linked with will be assiduous in warning us of the aggressive strategies of international communism.

Most people, perhaps will yawn through the tedious exegeses of Mao's and Lin Piao's alleged plans for world conquest that will find their way into the papers. Remembering the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Cuba, and Greece, remember that it is not only communist regimes that export their own social systems and forms of government. The real dupes will be those dazzled by the secrecy, the talk of the security of the nation, the dark hints of sinister Oriental conspiracies.

The military are still winning the battle for the average man, alarmed by the prospect of a military threat to his country, and ignored by the Vietnam Committees who are too honourable to suggest any country could replace Peking or Hanoi as the repository of the "yellow peril" (though Indonesia, for example, might well be a good candidate).

China, being a nation whose style and history bears almost no resemblance to those of New Zealand, by virtue of its very strangeness is cast as enemy, no matter how weak it is militarily. (As we all know—or should—it has no effective navy). After all, the argument will go, if there's a chance China will attack us, shouldn't we provide against this possibility? And if it is difficult, in fact impossible, except for some of the odder species of Marxist, to claim that China could not under any circumstances commit aggression.

It is not likely it would attack Australasia; but it is possible. This being so the average man will take it seriously. Not so much for any of the conventional reasons—that Chinese communism is "messianic", or that "aggression" must be "contained"—as from what he knows of communist China he would hate to live there. In the heart of the average man, and more particularly the average Labour voter, the "yellow peril', the menace from without and the nation in danger, all live in the party.

Yet the world the Committees on Vietnam would like to invite him into—a world where there are no fixed enemies, where international differences are settled quietly at conference tables, where diplomatic initiatives taken at the right time avert wars—is not only totally alien to him, but has no place for him.

The nationalist right wing slogans, the unofficial "yellow peril", the official "collective security" at least have acquired political meaning over the years. Convince him that, somehow he is done down by believing in this, convince him that people are pulling the wool over his eyes over China to divert him from what is happening at home, and he will respond.