RED HILDE - A FANATIC WHO OUTLIVED HER USEFULNESS

By Dr Emery Barcs 1967-7-20

WITH only a hurried and offhand acknowledgment of her services to the East German Communist regime, Hilde Benjamin, Minister of Justice of the German "Democratic" Republic since 1953, has been removed from office.  She has also lost her membership of the Central Committee of the East German Communist Party and her seat in the country's so-called "parliament."



Nobody is likely to shed tears over the sudden eclipse of this 66-Year-old plump little woman with the unaffectionate nickname of "Red Hilde" who has served the cause of Communism with cruel fanaticism for the past 22 years.

For as the supreme inquisitor of the regime she has earned the fear and hatred of not only the non-Communist majority of the 17 million East Germans but also of most of the 1,650,000 members of her own Socialist Unity Party (SED)

Hilde Benjamin did not formulate the policy of terror of the Ulbricht regime. But because she carried out this policy with such uncompromising and ferocious zeal she became the symbol of ruthless opression.

First as Chairman of the East German Supreme Court and later as Minister of Justice she was directly responsible for 148 death sentences, some 400 life imprisonments and more than 25,000 shorter jailings all for "political crimes" against the SED rulers.  Reputedly she never wavered in meting out the maximum sentence.

She also established an organisation, with herself as chairman, which functions as a watchdog over socialist justice.  The duty of the members of this Organisation of Instructors of Judicial Administration is to instruct law courts in what sort of verdict they must bring against a person charged with a political crime. So far these orders have invariably provided for stiff sentences.

Hilde Benjamin's life story explains the development of this bitter and cruel woman.  She comes from an old and prosperous Protestant family named Lange. After obtaining her law degree with top honors she married Dr. George Benjamin, a Jewish physician and a Communist.

The young couple lived in Wedding, one of the dreariest and poorest districts of Berlin where Hilda Benjamin obtained first - hand experience of the misery caused by the depression in which some eight million Germans were permanently unemployed.

In 1932 her only child, Micha, son, was born.

A year later when the Nazis came to power her husband was arrested. He died in a concentration camp in 1942. Allegedly he committed suicide by touching a high tension electricity line.

Hilde and her son somehow survived the Nazi regime. Until Hitler's attack on Russia in mid-1961 she had a job with the Soviet Trade Mission in Berlin.  How she managed to keep herself and her son alive after that is not known.

When the war was over she first obtained a job with the newly established Public Prosecutor's office where she worked with the Americans.  In late 1945, however, she went to the Soviet occupation zone to serve the Communists.

The few men and women who had known her in East Germany and who have escaped to the West to tell the story, have described Hilde Benjamin as a bitter, lonely and unhappy person.

She is allegedly a great music lover. Her favorites are Mozart and Beethoven.  She is also a voracious reader of fiction and, ironically, she prefers the writers of the West to those of the East.

Reports about her personal life differ. Some say she lives simply in an East Berlin apartment, others that she has a huge villa with a large staff at her disposal and that she enjoys good food and choice wines.

But there seems to be a general agreement about her fear for her life and for that of her adored son. Micha, now 35, who lives with her. Hilde Benjamin is said to be the most closely guarded East German Red potentate after Ulbricht himself.  She has every reason to be afraid.

And it seems, that because of her past record she has become an embarrassment to the Ulbricht regime which is now trying to make itself popular with the East German masses by relucantly liberalising some aspects of everyday life.  Hence her removal from positions of power and influence.

SOVIET'S FOOD PLAN FLOPS BADLY

Dr Emery Barcs 1961-1-19

NIKITA KRUSHCHEV'S acid comments at the present session of the Communist Party's Central Committee in Moscow on the mismanagement of Soviet agriculture have clearly ended another Soviet propaganda fable.

Two years ago Mr. Krushchev boasted that by 1965 Soviet agriculture would catch up with United States output, then gallop away from Uncle Sam at a staggering speed producing unprecedented quantities of foodstuffs for the benefit of the hungry and underfed peoples of the world.

Cautious and sceptical Western experts who doubted the feasibility of such rapid growths were derided as "hostile fools." "Of course," the true-believers argued, "only under the rationally organised. centrally planned and controlled system of Socialist farming is such a spectacular development possible. Russia will prove this."

So far not only Russia but also all other Communist-governed Eastern European countries have proved exactly the opposite.
In 1958 the world average of agricultural production was between 37 and 38 per cent higher than in 1938. But in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe the increase was only between 15 and 18 per cent compared with prewar levels, despite huge investments to make socialised agriculture work.

Mr. Krushchev's boundless optimism in 1958 was perhaps based on that year's bumper grain harvest in the Soviet Union and on reports of collective-farm managers who were anxious to please the men in the Kremlin. The Soviet leader has now called these managers "liars and cheats."

In 1958 the Soviet Government reported to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (F.A.O.) that agricultural production in the U.S.S.R. rose by nine per cent that year-an increase which was more than double the world average of four percent.

Mr. Krushchev (or whoever had supplied him with the relevant data) then added to this exceptional year the hoped-for yields from newly developed regions such as the so-called "virgin lands" project in Kazakhistan and the ploughing of some 20 million acres of former forests and steppe along the Volga, in the Urals, Siberia and the Far East.

All these results put together might have produced the figures which showed that by 1965 and especially after that date the Soviet Union would be the leading food-producer of the world.

Unfortunately, however, a wide discrepancy has arisen between theory and practice. 'The first signs that all was not well with the ambitious Soviet agricultural plans came from Mr. Krushchev himself in January, 1960, when he violently denounced the criminal incompetence" of the men whose task was to organise the Kazakh "virgin lands" scheme.

He complained that 18,000 tractors took no part in the sowing, 32,000 combines were idle during harvesting, and four million acres of sown grain were not harvested at all.

Krushchev made two of his closest friends and supporters in previous party-feuds the scapegoats for the alleged bungling.
They were Messrs. N. I. Belyaev, First Secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party, and Alexi Kirichenko, an agricultural expert and one of the mightiest men in the soviet Communist Party Secretariat.

"Friendship can't save people who fail to fulfil their duties," screamed Krushchev. A few days later both Kirichenko and Belyaev were sacked and have since disappeared completely from the lime-light.

With them, as usual, hundreds of minor aides to the two men lost their jobs or were demoted to less responsible tasks.

BUT Mr. Kruschev's violent attacks at the present session of the Central Committee on those Soviet agricultural leaders who remained at their places last year and against newly appointed men show that the situation has scarcely improved during the past 12 months.

For    instance, Soviet meat-production has remained stagnant at about 8.6 million tons since 1959. To "catch up with America" the country would have to produce another 12 million or 13 million tons of meat by 1965. Only incorrigible optimists believe that this target can be fulfilled.

Or take the question of wheat. At the Central Committee meeting Mr. Kruschev refused to believe Nikolai Podgorny, First Secretary of the Ukranian Communist Party, who reported that the Ukraine produced (the equivalent of) 13 bushels of wheat to the acre in 1960.

Krushchev thundered that the real amount must have been lower there and then Podgorny (who seems to be the next man marked for the axe) meekly admitted: "You are dead right, Comrade Krushchev..."

But the Ukraine is not only one of the best wheat growing regions of the Soviet Union but of the whole of Europe. Yet even in the best postwar years it hasn't grown more than 15 bushels of wheat to the acre, or less than one of the (agriculturally) most backward European countries, Spain (15.1 bushels to the acre).

In comparison during the four years between 1955 and 1958 (the latest figures available) the average number of bushels of wheat to the acre per year harvested in the West were: Australia, 17.5; U.S.A., 22.4; France, 33.1; West Germany, 44.3; Holland, 56.3; and (the world's best) Denmark, 58.7.

The overall picture of agricultural production is no better in the rest of Russian-dominated Eastern Europe which was once the granary of the Continent than it is in the Soviet Union.

None of the seven Soviet satellite countries (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania and East Germany) has been able to keep pace with the development in Western Europe or in the agriculturally more advanced parts of the world.

With the exception of East Germany (which provided much of the food-stuffs for West Germany) and of backward Albania, all of the other five Eastern European countries were food exporters before World War II. Now they can't even feed their own peoples properly.

Herr Walter Ulbricht East Germany's Red boss, has admitted that in his country agricultural production is "growing more slowly than consumption." The same is true throughout the entire satellite orbit. Not one of the seven states has been able to fulfill the modest plan of a four percent increase in food production each year.

The most obvious explanation for the failure of Communist-run agriculture is that Communist agrarian policy is based on a series of theoretical fallacies and political expediencies.

Probably the most glaring of these fallacies is that by increasing the size of farms, and by providing them with all sorts of machinery and scientific equipment, they can be turned into agricultural factories serviced by workers who are essentially no different from the staff of, say, an electric power-station or a steelworks.

But a farm, however big and however highly mechanised is still not a factory and 43 years of Communist rule in the Soviet Union has still failed to transform the Russian, Ukrainian or Kazakh men and women who work on the land into factory workers.

By taking away their land (or by not giving them any) Communist rulers can reduce peasants to wage-earners for the sake of eliminating a politically"dangerous" class of people with independent means.

Past experience, however, has proved that the landless farm-worker who has no, or very little, personal stake in his labors is a very careless and inefficient producer. And huge estates worked by such wage-earners have always been notoriously inefficient.

The highest efficiency in agricultural production has been achieved in Western countries and by medium or small independent farmers -- often voluntarily associated in co-operatives.

Under Communist rule the landless farm-worker might have a better deal than he had in Russia before 1917, or in some parts of Eastern Europe before 1945 when he sweated for often shockingly low wages for feudal landlords.  But despite his improved treatment he has still no personal interest in his labors and the land is the ideal place for the determined loafer.

But all this doesn't mean that Communists will abandon their agrarian policy in the forseeable future. For under Communism if theory clashes with facts then it's just too bad for the facts.

THE KREMLIN'S NEW MASTER: KRUSHCHEV OUTSMARTS THE OLD BOLSHEVIKS

By Dr Emery Barcs 1957-7-5

THE LATEST purge in the Kremlin probably means the end of four years of "team-dictatorship" in Russia, and the emergence of Nikita Krushchev as the new, all-powerful master of the Soviet Union.

With a single stroke Krushchev and his associates have eliminated from the Soviet Communist Party hierarchy:

Vyachislav Molotov, 67, former Soviet Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and a top man in the Communist Party since the 1917 revolution. Between 1917 and Stalin's death in 1953 Molotov was one of the closest collaborators of the late dictator.

Lazar Kaganovich, 64, a Communist since the age of 20, a fighting leader of the Petrograd  Soviet in 1917, reorganiser of Russia's communication system and heavy industry, Stalin's brother-in-law and intimate friend, a member of the highest party organs for 40 years.

Georgi Malenkov, 54, Stalin's former secretary and heir-apparent until his first demotion from Russia's leadership in February, 1955.

The 133-member Central Executive of the Communist Party has unanimously dismissed these three men for "anti-party activities."

At the same session the Central Committee also dismissed a lesser light, former Pravda editor and Foreign Minister Dimitri Shepilov, as a secretary of the Communist Party.  His crime was that he sided with the three big-shots in the faction fight for power which the Krushchev-Bulganin duo has won, and the Molotov-Kaganovich-Malenkov triumvirate has lost.

THIS struggle for power has gone on incessantly within the walls of the Kremlin since Lenin's death in January, 1924.

Stalin himself set the pattern of such fights.  Stalin's method was to team up with a couple of second-raters in the Bolshevik hierarchy to eliminate the strongest contestant for the dictator's mantle -- Trotsky.

When Trotsky was out Stalin schemed Trotsky's two former allies, Zinoviev and Kamenev, out of power. The progress went on until Stalin remained sole ruler, with a team of cowed yes-men around himself.

After Stalin's death the process was repeated among the heirs of the "great dictator." First, a group teamed up against Lavrenti Beria, boss of the Secret Police, and the most likely person to attempt to grab absolute power with the aid of his 1,000,000-strong political police force. He was shot in December, 1953.

The second victim of the process of elimination was Stalin's ex-secretary, Malenkov, who became too popular for his advocacy of less guns and more butter for the Soviet peoples. He had to relinquish his Premiership in February, 1955, under pressure from  the clique in the top hierarchy led by Krushchev and Bulganin.

But Krushchev and Bulganin were not yet strong enough to order the same fate for Malenkov as for Beria.

In 1955 Malenkov still had the backing of the three Old Bolshevik members of the Communist Party Presidium who had survived Stalin's' purges of the 1930s -- Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov.

Gradually, however, the Krushchev Bulganin alliance has whittled away the influence of the Old Bolshevik team by replacing lesser Stalinists in the Presidium of the Communist Party with their own followers.

There can he no doubt that the Communist Party has been the whole life of the four fallen men. Kaganovich and Molotov were in the thick of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Both Malenkov and Shepilov have been Communists from earliest childhood.

Politicians also fall in the democracies. But they are not accused of vile crimes when their ideas no longer tally with those of the majority and they temporarily or finally retire from the political arena.

One would have thought that at least Molotov and Kaganovich, who have done an enormous amount of work for the Communists, would be allowed to retire as honored elder statesmen. But under the Communist dictatorship no such quiet retirement seems to be possible.  One is either an exalted hero or a despised criminal.

The Central Committee's communique announcing the dismissal of the four men accuses them of "anti-party activities." A charge which needs no comment...

Naturally, there has always been some sort of ideological or political background to the struggle for power in the Kremlin.

Stalin never said he was afraid of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, or Tukachevsky. He justified his bloody purges with the argument that these (and millions of others) had to be eliminated because they betrayed Communism by opposing the only true Communist policy

Krushchev and Co are using the same argument. And those who tune in next Tuesday night to television station Channel 9, TCN, for the American interview with Krushchev will see how persuasive Kruschev can be.

For the televised interview by two American Journalists is a masterpiece of superbly delivered Communist double-talk. He never retreats from the hackneyed, orthodox, anti-Western line. Yet he sounds as if the West has only to ask for brotherly love and the Russians would pull down the Iron Curtain which (as Kruschev puts it) the West has built against the Soviet Union and its allies.

The Central Committee's communique which "explains" the dismissal of the four leaders is a similar cynical double-talk. The three former Presidium-members are now accused of such crimes as opposing peaceful co-existence, de-Stalinisation, the super-experiment of using virgin lands for increasing food production and of an "overbearing attitude" (whatever that means).

I shed no tears over the fall of the anti-Krushchev trio. Like Krushchev, Bulganin, Mikoyan, and all the present purgers. they have helped to make the world an unsafe place.

But wasn't it Malenkov, only a week after Stalin's death who first talked about "peaceful co-existence" and the need to give the Russians more consumer goods?

Wasn't it Kaganovich who, about the same time, talked about the need of "pushing, our frontiers past and present limits, right into the wastelands to produce more food and to discover. the hidden treasures of the subsoil"?

On the other hand, wasn't it the Krushchev-Bulganin clique which suppressed the Hungarian revolution and put into power the Kadar puppet regime (which, in his TV interview, Krushchev has the effrontery to call "a regime of the Hungarian people").

And wasn't it Marshal Zhukov --now full member of the Presidium -- who fought tooth and nail against Malenkov's plan to scale down Russia's heavy industry, including the most prosperous of all Soviet industries, the manufacturing of armaments?

IN reorganising the Communist Party Presidium the winning side has raised membership from 11 to 15 and for the first time it includes a representative of the Red armed forces -- Marshal Zhukov

At the moment unity seems complete in the Kremlin hierarchy. But in due course the fight for power will flare up again, until one man is strong enough to eliminate all the contenders for the dictator's mantle, and wrap this most coveted piece of clothing around his own body. Nikita Krushchev seems the most likely man to do the trick.

One can hardly expect any spectacular change in Soviet policy towards the West.  Since February, 1953, Krushchev and Bulganin have designed and carried out this policy, which basically aims at reaching a sort of armistice between the Free World and the Communist orbit.

The Communist world -- from Czechoslovakia to Manchuria-- is in the throes of serious economic troubles and political uncertainties. Communist leaders now probably want peace -- for the time being. Marxist theory almost compels them to conclude such temporary peace. which alone may guarantee their survival.

Besides, Krushchev and Co represent that second generation of the Bolshevik elite which now has a vested interest in the Soviet State.

Its wellbeing and prosperity depends on the successful completion of the grandiose schemes which the leaders have put forward. For failure of these schemes may mean the beginning of their own end.

The Krushchev-set is now firmly in the saddle. It has all the opportunity it wants to solve the greatest problem of the communist world-- the rising demand of the masses for a better life.

PALS WHO DISAPPEARED BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN

Dr EMERY BARCS - 1954-7-28

We may not learn for some time the full story of the disappearance behind the Iron Curtain of Dr. Otto John (pronounced Yawn) with his bosom friend, Dr. Wolfgang Wohlgemuth

But whether the Russians kidnapped  Dr. John, or whether he went voluntarily, his departure for East Germany is a major calamity for the West.  As Chief of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Dr. John was really head of the West German intelligence service.

This office has its headquarters in No. 2 Ludwigstrasse, Cologne.  Its official task is to protect the Federal (West German) Republic from subversive elements - Communists and neo-Nazis.

In reality, however, the Office is the centre of West German intelligence. Its work (as far as as one can penetrate the secrecy which surrounds such organisations) includes the collection of information about East Germany, as well as counter espionage.

This means that the Office has had contacts with anti-Communists in East Germany, and that Dr, John, as head of the Office, probably knows everything about the organisation, members, and work of the Western intelligence service in the Communist-dominated part of Germany

SO whatever the reasons for Dr. John's disappearance behind the Iron Curtain, the fact that he is in Communist hands is enough to suppose that by now the Reds know the innermost secrets of the Western intelligence organisation in the "Democratic" Republic of East Germany. For if he doesn't want to talk the Communists have well-developed techniques to persuade him to talk.

There are Germans in Sydney who knew both John and Wohlgemuth at home. The picture they draw of the two men suggests that the Reds may find Dr. John a willing collaborationist.

Dr. John (his former acquaintances say) is a tall, smartly dressed, sharp-witted lawyer. Until the attempt on Hitler's life in July, 1944, he was syndicus (legal adviser) to the German civilian airline, the Lufthansa.

On the night of July 20, 1944, when John heard that the bomb plot against Hitler (in which his brother was involved) had failed. he used the permanent seat-reservation of Lufthansa big-shots to escape to Spain, whence he eventually went to Britain.

In Britain he worked for the Intelligence Service and the B.B.C. After the war he returned to Germany as a trusted friend of the British occupation forces.

It was this trust which procured him the job of Chief of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. But neither Chancellor Adenauer nor other leaders of the West German Federal Republic liked him. He was also unpopular with his colleagues in the West German public service.

This aversion of Germans for him perhaps only assured the Western authorities that he was the right man in the right place. For he ascribed his unpopularity to the enmity and machinations of former nazisa who had wormed themselves into the West German Administration.

Whether this was true or not is difficult to know. Recently, however, many reliable German democrats have criticised Dr. John.  The Premier of the West German State of Baden-Wurttemberg, Dr. Reinhold Meier, for example, attacked him in an open letter addressed to Chancellor Adenauer.

Dr. Meier wrote that the hostility of Chancellor Adenauer towards him was based on false reports of Dr. John. The usually reliable West German weekly Die Zeit (The Time) also attacked Dr. John and questioned his reliability.

Possibly this hostility changed Dr. John's attitude towards the Communists. But it is equally possible that (unless he was kidnapped, which now seems unlikely) he has had intimate contacts with the Reds for some time.

Dr. Wolfgang Wohlgemuth, who accompanied Dr. John on his trip to the Eastern sector of Berlin, is a well-known personality in the former capital of the Reich.

His Sydney acquaintances describe him as a brilliant physician with an enormous gusto for night life, always spending much more than he earned, and constantly in debt.

He, like Dr. John, is In his late 40s. As a young man he was one of the most promising doctors at the famous Berlin hospital the Charite. For some time he was first assistant to the world-famous German physician, Professor Sauerbruch.

In the early '30s he developed a close friendship with one of the greatest stars of the silent films, Pola Negri. He also became a great jazz fan, and an accomplished jazz trumpeter.

Wowo (as his friends called him) was the darling of Berlin's film and theatre world. In 1939 he married a well-known Berlin actress, Charlotte Thiele. They stayed together three years.

During the war he became an assistant to Hitler's personal physician, professor Morell. This association with Morell saved Wohlgemuth from milltary service.

He remained in Berlin where he had a prosperous practice in the fashionable Kurfurstendamm.

In 1939 he married lovely film actress Ingrid Lutz who, however, left him after six months. Later he married a girl half his age, and abandoned her within a year.

DR. WOHLGEMUTH'S Sydney acquaintances say it is difficult to imagine that this excellent doctor-cum-nightclub-regular has become a Communist. He has always been cynical about politics, and never believed in anything "except pretty women, good champagne, and hot jazz music."

And he would do anything for a sizable bundle of banknotes. It is not impossible that when Dr. John met his old pal, "Wowo," the doctor made the Intelligence Chief thoroughly drunk and delivered him to East Berlin.  Police reports say that tho two were extremely "merry" when they crossed from West Berlin to East Berlin in Dr. Wohlgernuth's car.

But it is equally possible that both of them were hopelessly drunk, or that Dr. John had chosen this gay exit of his overt free will. The riddle may be explained some day.

REDS TRY FOR A FIRMER FOOTHOLD IN AMERICA

By Dr Emery Barcs 1954-5-27

INTERNATIONAL Communism is making a determined bid to extend the area of Red attack to the American continent

Reports published in the U.S. on Monday say war between Guatemala and Honduras seems imminent. Last week the pro-Communist government of Guatemala received 2000 tons of ammunition from behind the Iron Curtain.

The exact source of this arms shipment is a mystery. It came from the former German port of Stettin, which now belongs to Communist-dominated Poland.  United States Intelligence reports said it consisted of unused lend-lease war material which the U.S. had given to Russia to fight the Nazis in World War II.

With typical Communist cynicism the Russians now boomerang the left-overs back to Guatemala to stir up trouble in the Americas.

EXCEPT in Guatemala, Communism has been unable to secure a firm foot-hold in the 19 independent Latin-American Republics.

The area has a total population of about 165,000,000. Estimated Communist Party membership in the 19 countries is about 242,000 -- or 0.15 per cent.  In five of them -- Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, and Uruguay -- the Party is allowed to work in the open. In the other 14 it is illegal, but survives underground.

Until 1946 the most influential Communist group in Latin-America was the Communist Party of Mexico, which operated (and still operates) under the name of the Popular Party.

For many years Vicente Lombardo Toledano has been leader of Mexican Communism and, until about eight years ago, the Kremlin had great hopes that he would revolutionise his own country first, and the rest of Latin-America later. But when Miguel Aleman, a progressive reformer, was elected President in 1946, he began to squeeze the Communists out.

Today Mexico is further from Communism than it has been at any time since the Party's foundation in the early twenties.  Mexico's Communists are undoubtedly fighting to make a comeback. But the leaders of international Communism are realists. They know when they are licked, and when they must change their tactics or their battleground, or both.

The rise of Communist influence in Guatemala (the southern neighbor of Mexico) is the result of such a change in tactics and scene.

Until 1944 Guatemala was a typical Latin-American Republic suffering from the traditions of Spanish colonialism. The rich were very few and very rich. The poor -- probably 90 percent of the country's 2,787,030 inhabitants -- were many, and very poor.  They were hardly more than illiterate serfs of big estate owners, or grossly underpaid chattels of rapacious industrialists.

Between 1930 and 1944 General Jorge Ubico's dictatorship barred every attempt to carry out social and economic reforms, especially land reform. But with the slow development of an intelligentsia --   poor and ambitious -- the pressure for a change increased.

By June, 1944, the new intelligentsia, allied with the under-paid officers of Ubico's army and police force, carried out a bloodless revolt. They removed the President, and in 1945 installed a political refugee, Professor Juan Jose Arevalo, to the Presidency.

At the beginning Arevalo was only a middle-of-the-road reformer. His closest collaborators were a civilian progressive, Jorge Toriello, and two officers -- Major Francisco Arena, leader of the moderate army group and Captain Jaeobo Arbenz Guzman, head of the extreme Left.

By the time the Guatemalan revolutionaries had established themselves, the Mexican Communists had begun to feel the pinch of the Aleman regime.  Therefore they decided that it was worth trying to establish the new Latin-American Communist headquarters in Guatemala.

Under the guidance of Toledano (who frequently flew to Guatemala),  an old Guatemalan Party member, Jose Manuel Fortuny, was entrusted to carry out the task.

Fortuny founded a party called the Liberty Front, which kept its true colors secret until May, 1950, when it openly became the Communist Party of Guatemala.

The Liberty Front supported Arevalo and Arbenz Guzman against Arana and his moderates (Toriello had dropped out of politics in the meantime). Within three years, Front members occupies the most important positions in the country.

In July 18, 1949, Arena was murdered near Lake Amatitlan, leaving the road open for the extremists.

In 1950 Arbenz Guzman followed Arevalo in the Presidency. Under his regime the Communists have decisively increased their power and influence.

Officially the government is not a Communist organisation. And at the 10th Inter-American Conference in Caracas last March, the Guatemalan representative protested against the stigma of Communism.

But Guatemala was the only American country which voted against a resolution condemning international Communists as a "threat to peace" and calling for joint action against Red subversion as well as aggression.

For good reasons. Investigations have established a direct link between Communist activities in British Guiana (which led to the suspension of the colony's Constitution last October) and the Reds of Guatemala.

Similar activities have kept authorities on their toes in British Honduras (the eastern neighbor of Guatemala), and in the Republic of Honduras which has outlawed Communism, and which recently reported large scale gun-running from Guatemala.

The Communists have applied the familiar line of attack in British Guiana as well as in British and Republican Honduras.  Their agents work under the guise of "social-reformers," supporting local political parties which fight against -- often well-founded -- grievances.

They infiltrate the ranks of non-Communist, or even anti-Communist, groups which have large popular support, and try to occupy key positions in them. But, should they be successful, there is no doubt that they would do what Fortuny had done in Guatemala. They would come out into the open and take charge of the country.

THE INDONESIAN REDS DEMAND "DEMOCRACY"

By Dr Emery Barcs 1954-3-23

THE secretary of the Indonesian Communist Party assured Prime Minister Sasiroamidjojo last week that the party would support the Government as long as it carried out a "democratic" programme.

This Red reassurance has considerably increased Western misgivings and apprehensions about growing Communist strength and influence in Indonesia.

Recently the sober New York Times suggested that Indonesia was the next Red target in South-east Asia. And the equally un-hysterical Economist, of London, wrote that the shift towards the Left in Indonesian politics was "disturbing."

Australians are vitally interested in these reports. For Indonesia is not only our nearest neighbor. This sprawling republic of the "30,000 islands" which stretches from opposite Malaya to the vicinity of New Guinea, is also a mighty barrier between Australia and the mainland of South-east Asia.

Our direct air-routes to Britain, via the Middle East, pass over Indonesian territory. Darwin is only seven hours from the Indonesian capital of Djakarta, which, in turn, is two hours from Singapore. Indonesian islands flank our shipping lanes to Malaya.  If the Reds ever seized Indonesia, some of our most important communication lines would be cut.

A superficial glance at the political situation in Indonesia does not reveal alarming Communist strength. The party (PKI in brief) has only 16 members in the parliament of 212. With the five or six sympathisers who regularly support them, the Communists control only about 10 percent of parliamentary votes.

And there are no Communists in the Government of Dr. Sastroarnidjojo, a 50-year-old former Indonesian Ambassador to the United States, who has been in power since last August.

But if we look closer at the situation in Indonesia, the picture becomes much less reassuring. In September, 1948, when the Indonesian nationalists were still struggling with the Dutch on the issue of complete independence, the Communists made an attempt to grab power in Indonesia by force. The background of this abortive revolt is a revealing example of Communist plotting in Asia.

An Indonesian Communist. called Muso, who had spent 23 years in Moscow, returned to his country in 1947 and took immediate command of the Commirnist party machinery.

On the surface the PKI seemed to be weak and unimportant. It had only a few thousand members. No known Communist was among the leaders in the struggle for nationalist independence.

At that time the "Big Four" of Indonesian nationalism consisted of Soekarno (now President of the Republic); Sutan Shahrir, leader of the Socialists; Mohammed Hatta, a brilliant, Dutch-educated economist; and Amir Sharifuddin, a zealous Christian, and Prime Minister until the middle of 1948.

On the day Sharifuddin resigned he dropped a bomb-shell. He announced that he had been a member of the Communist Party since 1935.  Secretly he had worked for 13 years -- under the Dutch, under the Japanese, and in the Nationalist camp -- for the Communists.

After his resignation Sharifuddin openly made common cause with his party boss, Muso.  In September, 1948, the two Red leaders occupied with armed gangs the town of Madiun, and declared a Communist war on the Indonesian Republic.

Soekarno, and his associates sent all available men to fight the Reds.  Within a few days the "war" was over.  The Republicans captured both Muso and Sharifuddin.  They died in front of a firing squad.

In December, 1949, the sovereign United States of Indonesia was born.  The political parties agreed to appoint a parliament in which every party would be represented in proportion to its estimated following. The Communists were included in the list of 19 parties, and received 16 seats.

Even a strong and stable central government would have had a tremendous task to efficiently organising the 80,000,000 people of Indonesia, and in reviving the country's economy.

The people belong to dozens of national, racial and religious groups.  And World War II, the Japanese occupation and the struggle with the Dutch had ruined indonesia's economy.

But the five Indonesian governments which have tried to run the country in the last two and a half years have been weak and unstable.  They remained in power only as long as temporary alliances between some of the 19 parties secured them a working majority in Parliament.

These weak regimes have been unable to cope with the various scourges of the nation -- the separatist movements in Celebes and the Moluccas, the lunatics of the Darul Isiam, who want to establish a Moslem religious regime and whose cut-throat guerillas control large tracts of Java and Sumaira and truculent army bosses who do as they please with complete disregard for the wishes of Djakarta.

Besides, as the German financial wizard, Hjalmar Schacht (whom the Indonesian Government invited in 1951 to put the country's economy in order) warned: "Indonesians take the word freedom as a synonym for laziness."

Tea, coffee, quinine, tobacco, and sugar production has fallen seriously since 1939.  Instead of exporting rice, Indonesia now must import 600,000 tons a year.

The population of overcrowded Java is increasing by about 1,000,000 a year. There is plenty of room for settlements in the outer islands, but few volunteer to do the hard work of pioneering.  As President Soekarno said recently: "All round, we see lassitude. "It would appear almost as if we had no idealism left."

All this  -- terror, political dissension, and economic crisis --  has created the right atmosphere for the Communists to establish themselves in Indonesian politics.  They have gained control of the central organisation of the trade unions. And by associating themselves with the Nationalist Party, and by advocating a National Front Government (the type of regime which delivered the Eastern European satellites to the Russian yoke) the Communist have almost won the balance a power in Indonesia.

But they have not succeeded yet.  The largest party in the Indonesian Parliament, the Moslem Masjumi, and the Socialists of Sultan Shahrir (which are not represented in the present Leftist-coalition government) have declared war on the Communists.

Both parties, especially the Masjumi, are well organised and have large followings.  They demand general elections to replace the parliament-by-appointment) which have been postponed year after year since 1951. They hope that the people Will give them a clear majority to establish a stable government and to fight Communism.

Many of the 17 other parties, however, are afraid that general elections will put them out of business... Therefore they vote for postponing elections, which are now tentatively scheduled for 1955, The Communists are also against "premature elections."

TACTLESS LADY ASTOR

By DR. EMERY BARCS  1947-8-28

THE trouble with 68-year old "Nancy" Astor of Cliveden fame is thai she always blurts out aloud what her more discreet Tory friends think but keep to themselves. Her latest indiscretion is to tell Americans that she doesn't care how many Jews are killed in Palestine; her only interest is the number of innocent British who are slaughtered. For that, Representative Emanuel Celler wants to bar her entry into the United States. (Lady Astor has since returned to London.)

In August, 1942, she shocked even Right-wing Commons members by stating: "I'm grateful to the Russians, but they are not fighting for us. They are fighting for themselves." Which was, of course, perfectly true, but very unpolitical to say publicly five years ago.

Nancy Witcher Langhorne, as she was born 68 years ago in Virginia, U.S.A., has never troubled to sugar-coat her opinions, has always thought it beneath her dignity. As a girl and as the wife of a certain Robert Shaw, she was an American aristocrat. She divorced Shaw in 1906, and married Waldorf Astor, the great-grandson of a German pedlar, who made millions out of furs, and real estate in America. Then, like her husband, became an English aristocrat. Her father-in-law was made a peer during the war, and her husband inherited the title. Her brother-in-law, Colonel John Jacob Astor, is the chief proprietor of the London Times.

She was the first woman to become a member of the House of Commons. Back in 1919, Plymouth (where the Astors have large steel interests) sent her into Parliament with a Conservative programme. She held her seat uninterruptedly for 25 years, and retired from active politics before the 1945 elections, which gave Labour a landslide victory.

Lady Astor's name will be mainly remembered in association with the Cliveden Set, a circle of reactionary, ultra-conservative, pro-Hitler-Mussolini-Franco appeasers and red baiters. On March 28, 1938, Sir Stafford Cripps said in the Commons: "The Cliveden Set is driving the Prime Minister (Mr. Chamberlain) into an international Fascist alliance."

Cliveden is a huge Thames-side mansion. Viscount Astor's father gave it to his son as a wedding present when he married Nancy 31 years ago.  The place needs a domestic staff of 100 to look after it. In 1942, when manpower troubles became acute, the Astors presented it to the nation. Important people in British and Foreign politics were invited there for week-ends. Lady Astor has always indignantly denied that her "Set" had a sinister influence on pre-war politics. She said that Communists invented the term Cliveden Set.

She was even more indignant when von Ribbentrop asked at the Nuremberg trials that Lady Astor and several of her closest friends should give evidence in his defence. Personally she is charming, courageous. In 1941, when Nazi bombs showered Plymouth, she fought the fires with complete disregard of her personal safety. One of her greatest admirers and most astute political opponents is Bernard Shaw.   Although retired from active politics, she is still considered one of the major forces in the British Conservative Party.