We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think

by Shirley Hazzard

  Things said or done long years ago,

  Or things I did not do or say

  …

  Weigh me down, and not a day

  But something is recalled,

  My conscience or my vanity appalled.4

  In his last extraordinary year of life, while Emily Maxwell was slowly dying with a grace, a philosophy, and, I would say, a beauty that remains indescribable, Bill Maxwell reread War and Peace. His solace and pleasure in the book were an event in those rooms. He said, “It is so comforting.” We rejoiced together over certain scenes, not “discussing” or dissecting them but paying, simply, the tribute of our delight. He would speak of these episodes shedding his silent tears—not in grief but for the grandeur of common humanity. Bill was steadily eating less, and when the book became too heavy for him to hold, a friend—Annabel Davis-Goff—came each afternoon and read it for him.

  Five days before Emmy’s death, the Maxwells, in wheelchairs, went to the Chardin exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. Two days before Emmy’s death, and ten days before his own, Bill finished reading Tolstoy’s novel. The events encompassed in that last month of their lives, the tenderness quietly exchanged among the friends who visited them were entirely consonant with the qualities of that departing pair: unforgettable, unforgotten.

  Bill Maxwell said that he did not fear death but that he would miss reading novels. In his own novel The Château, the American protagonist walking in autumnal light through streets and public gardens: “‘I cannot leave!’ he cried out silently to the old buildings and the brightness in the air, to the yellow leaves on the trees. ‘I cannot bear that all this will be here and I will not be.’”5

  PART 3

  Public Themes

  THE PATRON SAINT OF THE UN IS PONTIUS PILATE

  The UN Secretariat marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by a last-minute withdrawal of promised facilities for Amnesty International’s conference against torture—for fear of offending governments engaged in that activity from Saigon to Santiago.1

  There was no outcry from accredited internationalists. Secretary-General Waldheim declined to condemn torture in his commemorative address, and opposition to torture was interred in yet another United Nations resolution of predetermined uselessness. Of thousands of documented cases of persecution submitted by Amnesty to the UN, not one has ever been forwarded for action to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

  Soviet dissidents have marked Human Rights Day with placards in Red Square and hunger strikes in prison. Their appeals to the secretary-general receive no acknowledgment, nor does Mr. Waldheim utter one word for Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, or for Andrei D. Sakharov or Roy A. Medvedev, whose supreme moral examples may cost their lives. The secretary-general has “no authority” to respond to Austria’s appeal for United Nations assistance with emigrating Soviet Jews.2

  A senior UN official informs a deeply demoralized staff that “the United Nations deals in the realm of what is possible, not of what is right or wrong.” Extolling the United Nations’ “moral impact,”3 the secretary-general calls on history to bear witness—as it will—that he took no position on Vietnam.

  There is no such thing as official cowardice. All cowardice—like all true courage—is personal.

  I know of no setting where idealism is ridiculed as at the UN, where “realism” and “the possible” are so often equated with conformity and fearfulness, where the personal initiative and public engagement from which all human advancement proceeds are less nurtured or esteemed, no place more remote from acts of intellectual and moral courage, more incapable of distinguishing between discretion and poltroonery. The patron saint of the UN is Pontius Pilate.

  With lip service to other values, UN authorities conspired with the State Department in the 1940s and with McCarthyism in the 1950s, and ignored the antiwar movement of the sixties.

  In the 1970s, UN leaders preside over a system incapacitated by gross mismanagement, malpractice, discrimination, and illicit government pressures. Performance and principle flagrantly diverge—as when, amid UN proclamations for women’s rights, an internal study warns that “nothing can explain away the massive facts” of virulent UN discrimination against its own female staff.4 I recently spoke at the UN at the invitation of thoughtful senior officers who, like many of their colleagues, have appealed in vain to authority against the corruption and wasteful chaos in which opportunity is daily cast away.

  No amount of such evidence here will arouse UN leadership—except against myself. Nor, far more significantly, will it bring inquiry from professional UN well-wishers, the elders among whom are sometimes as eager as the UN officialdom to deride idealism and deny the public any UN role beyond financing.

  The UN is not a private philanthropic enterprise staffed by volunteers, but a world institution where tens of billions in public money have been disbursed by highly paid administrators. A full-scale citizens investigation, of the Nader type, is imperative if, from this shambles, the concept of world authority is to be reconstituted in contemporary, responsive forms.

  “The great hopes of all mankind”—which, as Mr. Solzhenitsyn reminds us, were betrayed at the United Nations’ birth5—not only envisioned publicly an accountable UN instrument but also, necessarily, the vigilance of international jurists, humanists, the responsible journalists acting as agents of stimulus and exposure in order to counter adverse national government pressures. Greatly to the relief of governments, this high potential was quickly broken on a wheel of seminars, social events, academicism, and Establishment contacts totally removed from perspective and actualities; and diverted to indulging, instead of denouncing, an institution where nationalism reigns supreme—just as earlier internationalists, ignoring the urgings of John Maynard Keynes and H. G. Wells, were seduced into promoting the tragic sham of the League of Nations to its hideous conclusion.

  While the archaic pattern of nationalism is convulsed in unprecedented physical and social transformations, global power has passed, undisciplined, to technology and the multinational corporations.

  It is ludicrous to suggest that the present important UN, conclusively reduced to abject servility in its current Middle East “role,” could regulate such forces. Only direct, unsparing public pressure, soon to be released by drastic events and expressed by an indignant new generation, can now initiate human systems as global as our emergencies. There is no reason, however, why the present travesty of the United Nations—unable even to denounce torturers, or praise the brave—should meantime continue unchallenged, unscrutinized, and unreformed.

  “GULAG” AND THE MEN OF PEACE

  Last winter Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was published in Paris in Russian, and appeared in the bookshops of the West—including two Swiss bookshops long licensed to sell on United Nations premises in the Palais des Nations at Geneva. The director-general of the UN Geneva office, clandestinely acting at the instigation of the Soviet government, promptly caused the book to be removed from the Palais shelves, along with Solzhenitsyn’s other works. Shortly thereafter, one of the bookshops—Messrs. Payot—closed. At the surviving establishment, that of Naville & Co., the subsequent English and French editions of The Gulag Archipelago likewise briefly surfaced and submerged.

  Under the UN Charter, the organization’s international staff are sworn not to “seek or receive instructions from any government”;1 under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights they are bound to uphold the free circulation of ideas and information “through any media and regardless of frontiers.”2

  United Nations censorship of Solzhenitsyn’s works aroused comment in the European press, which reported a courageous protest by 250 of the several thousand UN employees at Geneva. On July 4, during a press conference at Geneva conducted jointly by the UN secretary-general Kurt Waldheim, and his subordinate, Vittorio Winspeare-Guicciardi, director-general of the Geneva office, the latter revealed that UN “guidance” had been at w
ork in the Palais bookshops over many years.

  Speaking of his “responsibility” and even “duty to inform Payot orally and confidentially” of the displeasure felt by “certain delegates” at finding Solzhenitsyn’s book displayed, Mr. Winspeare-Guicciardi ignored the fact that his duty and responsibility are explicitly to the contrary. The bookshops too had “their duty,” in his view, to avoid “publications à caractère outrageant pour un Etat Membre.” The furtive means by which pressure was applied to the bookshops—“my, should I say, discreet way of dealing with the matter”—was emphasized; and Mr. Winspeare-Guiccardi concluded, “These are the facts of February.”3

  Mr. Waldheim himself introduced his elucidation with an affirmation of adherence to “the long-standing principle of freedom of information.”4 Indeed, in 1972, when Solzhenitsyn in his Nobel address condemned the UN as “immoral” for betraying its obligations under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Mr. Waldheim had stated that he “would be the first to welcome any initiative” toward honoring that covenant.5

  “Doublethink,” wrote George Orwell, “means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”6

  There were, it will be recalled, other “facts of February.” In that month Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn prepared, in unexampled challenge to the forces of organized inhumanity, to lay down his life for those causes to which the UN is nominally dedicated. His hostages to fortune were his wife and children. The immediate issue was the publication outside Russia of his The Gulag Archipelago, the ultimate issue those liberties enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unfortified in his long struggle by any word from UN sources, Solzhenitsyn, in his own words, “was upheld by the unseen, unheard thread of popular sympathy…and the world brotherhood of writers.”7 On the afternoon of February 12, Solzhenitsyn was dragged from his home by the Soviet police, and on February 13, deported into permanent exile.

  During these great and terrible events, UN leaders could find no better occupation than to arrange, by stealth, for removal of Solzhenitsyn’s works from international territory.

  The Gulag Archipelago is a firsthand account of the most prolonged and extensive violation of human rights in recorded history—furnishing the very substance with which the UN was created to deal, and with which it has pitilessly declined to concern itself. Had a comparable chronicle been smuggled to the world from Dachau in the 1930s, it would—being offensive to the fascist membership of the League of Nations—have met an identical reception at the Palais. (The secretary-general of the League, Sir Eric Drummond, who permitted his Italian staff to wear the fascist emblem, had similar antennae for the “outrageant.”) Mr. Waldheim himself, who served as an officer in Hitler’s army on the Russian front described in The Gulag Archipelago, should be no stranger to the context in which such evils occur.

  The secretary-general has received protests from PEN, and myself; I should be glad to hear of others. The world has heard nothing from those agencies and publications, those jurists, academics, and public persons who have attached themselves to an institution rather than to a set of principles, nor from the huge, and hugely timid, preponderance of UN officials. For failing to denounce inhumanities, Solzhenitsyn reminds us, “every man has at hand a dozen glib little reasons.”8

  Thus the embargo imposed upon Solzhenitsyn’s writings in his native land has been, with exquisitely indicative irony, reproduced on the international territory of the UN—the organization charged with defending the free expression for which Solzhenitsyn was ready to give his life. Is there a writer among us who would not, in these circumstances, prefer to be considered “outrageant” at the UN? We may assume that Confucius long since vanished from the Palais bookshop; and that Aristophanes was, until last month, as unwelcome there as in his homeland. Some “discreet way” will perhaps be found of eliminating books on Watergate or ITT. Naville & Co. may eventually wish to proceed into exile from UN territory and seek literary asylum in the free world.

  * * *

  Editorial comment: In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, published October 6, 1974, the UN spokesman André Lewin responded to what he called Shirley Hazzard’s accusation that Secretary-General Waldheim had “censored” Solzhenitsyn “by prohibiting the sale of his books in the bookshop located at UN European headquarters in Geneva,” insisting that “there is no ban or censorship whatsoever in the bookshop of the United Nations” and that Solzhenitsyn’s books “are sold there.”

  Hazzard was granted a response to Lewin, also published October 6, 1974:

  I do not accuse the United Nations of censoring Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s works at bookshops under its influence: I state it as an incontrovertible fact.

  Readers of Mr. Lewin’s deceitful and injudicious letter may obtain United Nations press release SG/SM/2033 of July 5 giving the UN’s own account of its policy of censorship and the clandestine UN interventions at Geneva that resulted in commercial book sellers on international territory “referring their customer to shops in town” for purchase of works by Solzhenitsyn.

  Exclusion of Solzhenitsyn’s works from UN premises, at UN and Soviet instigation, began last winter and was maintained—as the unfortunate Mr. Lewin reveals with his reference to “settling the matter”—into the summer. Mr. Waldheim’s farcical invocation of the principle of freedom of information was in fact made during this ban and, as Mr. Jerzy Kosinski pointed out in his PEN protest of August 1, with no indication of lifting it. All this was reflected with perfect accuracy in my “Guest Word” of August 25.9

  On August 28, three days after publication of my article, the director of the UN Geneva office informed Mr. Kosinski, in a letter of two sentences, that Solzhenitsyn’s works had at last made their reappearance on UN premises.

  Mr. Lewin’s shameless misrepresentation intensifies the ominous light shed by these events. What matters is not, of course, that Solzhenitsyn’s work has finally been admitted to UN premises as a result of cumulative public pressure, but that it was ever removed and for months proscribed by our custodians of free expression. Mr. Waldheim and his subordinates have now compounded their dishonor with a mendacious, blustering attempt to conceal it.

  Mr. Lewin has most unwisely called my statements “unfounded.” I am more than ready to substantiate these matters at law. That my own role here is simply to illuminate abuses of public trust does not mean I will tolerate libels.

  In my article of August 25, I conjectured that Confucius would find himself among the victims of UN servility to totalitarian decrees. I now learn that a quotation from Confucius was removed from the walls of the UN headquarters in New York on September 17, on instructions from the government of China10—and no doubt in pursuance of Mr. Waldheim’s concept of “the long-standing principle of freedom of information.”

  THE UNITED NATIONS

  Where Governments Go to Church

  In that rarest of official documents, a moving statement, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees performed, in 1935, that rarest of diplomatic acts: a resignation on principle. Denouncing the league’s evasion of the desperate plight of German Jewry and appealing for prevention of “an even more terrible human calamity,” James McDonald told the league: “I cannot remain silent…. When domestic policies threaten the demoralization and exile of hundreds of thousands of human beings, considerations of diplomatic corrections must yield to those of common humanity.”1

  A person holding such views could no more remain at the league than, subsequently, at the UN. It was the very function of the league to maintain silence on governmental crimes against humanity; and of its permanent officials to rationalize this silence as necessary to some never analyzed but paramount objective. The league was as unlikely to address itself to Nazism as was the UN, later, even to debate the destruction of Southeast Asia.

  Current Third World activism at the UN is merely shedding intensified light on this fundamentally national nature of the UN e
nterprise. The UNESCO action against Israel, for example,2 is new only in the measure of public indignation it has attracted: analogous violations have long taken place within the UN system, and the UNESCO episode in fact dramatically exemplifies a general condition.

  Why governments should twice in our century have constructed an elaborate and costly “international” enterprise for the apparent purpose of incapacitation and perverting it—deliberately creating, as John Maynard Keynes observed of the League of Nations in 1919, “an unequalled instrument for obstruction and delay”—becomes clearer with the accelerating globalism against which it is paradoxically set.3 Both international organizations were a channeling off, by national and economic power, not only of corrective reactions by populations to successive world wars but of growing efforts to adapt public institutions to the irresistibly planetary nature of the age.

  As each world war drew to its close, it stood to reason that a responsible segment of enfranchised society would challenge governmental conduct of international relations; and that this challenge, heightened by nuclear terror, would in turn be recognized by governments, be nominally appeased, and rendered harmless or even profitable to national objectives.