The alternative

But at the moment the average man is being asked by what he sees as pacifists to deny the reality of real social differences in the world which may explode into war. Instead he is offered secret diplomacy as a cure-all—diplomacy which excludes him. SEATO may he secret, but it takes the trouble to keep him inside. And the Ross Committee on Taxation has just told him he enjoys one of the lowest rates of taxation in the Western world because of New Zealand's comparatively low spending on defence, So how is he being hurt by the war?

The average man will place his trust in the SEATO conference, because nobody is interested in him except the people who may ship him to light in the last jungle battles of America's Dien Bien phu.

At the counter-conference the intellectuals will come up against their necessary but unfriendly audience, the non-intellectuals. The academics do have friends, though not always for the right reasons, and usually for the wrong ones. The intellectual audiences are not the would-be traitors and dupes the right uisually associate with counter conferences but neither are they the disinterested friends of truth every academic hopes hang on his lips. Very few people, apart from university students, expect to hear the truth from academics these days.

A good part of the counter-conference's audience will consist of people who distrust New Zealand's foreign policy aims for reasons other than foreign policy—some variety of pacifism, vulgar Marxism or a mixture of the two.

Foreign policy, in our country, is the area in which protest against the kind of society we live in is ventilated.

To be "left" in New Zealand today is to have certain specifiable views on foreign policy—but this is an effect of leftwingery, not its cause. In part, one can attribute this to the genuine and quite arguable position that foreign policy issues are the most important and (more suspiciously) dramatic issues of our time. On the other hand foreign policy issues are issues you grasp only second-hand unless you are lucky enough to have travelled. They are issues one can do least about. It is always most difficult, also, to change an electorate's mind on foreign policy issues because the entire issue is remote from the average man's immediate field of experience.

It suits the right to have a left preoccupied by foreign policy because then cries of disloyalty and foreign influence can more easily be raised.

These things being so, the support the counter-conference has gained, from church, academic and political groups, is astonishingly wide—the bases of the conference by no means sectarian or dogmatic. The swing of public feeling in its favour after its clashes with Mr. Muldoon is very positive.

All one can say, to moderate enthusiasm or warn, is that that what Conor Cruise O'Brien, or Jean Lancouture, or C. P. Fitzgerald say will appeal not because their audience are capable of understanding any particular refiliation of the domino theory, but because their audience suspects the New Zealand Government of bad faith.

Such suspicion, so far from being bad is very health; but it will leave the academics the Vietnam Committee has imported in something of a vacuum. They will encounter sympathy, but not necessarily comprehension.

Dramatic as the brief history of the Peace, Power and Politics conference has already been, it will need to produce more than fireworks to have succeeded. To do so it will have to understand why so many New Zealanders are concerned with world affairs at this particular time—a concern determined by the evaluation of New Zealand society internally as much as by the discover) that Spain was not the last rallying cry of the searches for good causes.

The effects of the two conferences? The SEATO confcrence cannot retrieve its two lost members, Pakistan and France—ironically, only the breakdown in Chinese diplomacy SEATO was intended to engineer could solder together again the original allies of 1953.

Nor can any diplomatic agreements win the war. The war will be won with reinforcements which can only come from the United States.

The conference might do something in the longer term, bringing Japan more closely into the American pattern of alliances, and bringing Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore a little closer together though in spite of their formally similar foreign policies this is a very long-term job. Of all Americas Asian allies only South Korea is contributing a large contingent to Vietnam and there is little prospect of any other counry doing as much (or of South Korea doing more alter the Pueblo incident)

The cracks in this alliance cannot be papered over. But, then, the counter-SEATO conference will herald no new configuration of strength opposed to the war.

While SEATO's general stall count (in privacy) their troops, the counter SEATO conferences top brass will all too publicy, its publicists. But there are not many more now than there were last year, unless Bobbly Kennedy arrives in Wellington at the last minute. Both are brave shows—-but are they worth the money?