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.

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?