We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think

by Shirley Hazzard

  Far from displaying humility over his misstatements and failures in the Iranian crisis, Kurt Waldheim “expressed scorn,” according to the New York Times, “for critics who, in his view, had not devised any other approach. ‘Nobody has offered me any alternative.’”8 This critic has in fact been proposing, for a decade, specific measures by which the UN Secretariat could set about acquiring, however tardily, the stature and credibility needed for effective mediation. Every thinking member of the UN staff is aware that proper alternatives to UN debility propose themselves daily and are repudiated by the UN administration as incompatible with the corrupt forms in which the organization has established itself.

  The UN has set itself against recognizing, let alone profiting from, the context in which the Iranian experience is taking place. Just as, at a recent press conference, Jimmy Carter dismissed as “ancient history” a question as to whether current events demonstrated past errors in American policy in Iran, so the UN cultivates amnesia toward its own responsibility.9 “Responsibility” is not a word in use at the UN.

  Over the past year or two, deputations of concerned UN employees have approached the “more serious” member governments, through their UN mission, in an attempt to gain support for essential reforms. The response of these governments may be summarized as follows: we are aware of the deplorable condition of the UN Secretariat, and of its adverse effect on the organization’s under taking: but we are not disposed to make—in the words of one representative—“the expenditure of political capital necessary to effect the required reforms.”10 In other words, the United Nations’ ineffectuality, so deeply the product of governmental intentions, will continue to satisfy even its “more serious” members until global violence passes the bounds of any conceivable form of international mediation. This attitude, however, assumes that UN services can be allowed to deteriorate indefinitely without attracting public attention, and that the UN staff body will continue to tolerate a degree of maladministration and injustice scarcely definable as civilized. In fact, the government of Belgium is transferring its contribution for Cambodian relief from the UN to effective private agencies, such as Oxfam.11

  Analogous to the Iranian hostage crisis is the case of a UN international employee, Alicja Wesolowska, a secretary of Polish nationality arrested last August at Warsaw en route to a UN assignment. Deprived of her elementary rights, as well as those due her as an international civil servant, Wesolowska was held in solitary confinement until her trial in March, when she was sentenced to seven year’s imprisonment for “espionage,” a charge for which there is no concrete evidence. Wesolowska’s captivity and trial have taken place in flagrant violation of international conventions to which the Polish government is a signatory. In her case, however, the UN administration has shown itself not only helpless but reluctant to respond with any public assertion of a principle vital to its own survival. And a staff appeal for initiation of procedures to take the case to the World Court has so far received no action.

  Concern among UN staff over the Wesolowska matter has brought to light a number of other cases of UN employees who have been arbitrarily arrested while performing UN duties; and who, in some cases, are presumed to have died in prison. No visible effort has been made by the UN administration on their behalf. As a UN official explained to a concerned inquirer, “They are all junior employees.”12 And no powerful government is exercised over their fate.

  No significant reform of the UN can occur without a profound change in the quality of UN press coverage. Reporting on the UN is traditionally indulgent to the point of infantilism, and sometimes indistinguishable from the vast propaganda apparatus maintained at public expense by the UN itself. In the case of Iran in particular, there is apparently no attempt by the press to relate UN failures to their larger context, nor any evidence of independent research. Waldheim’s discomfiture at Tehran in January was connected, by the UN press, to nothing more substantial than his once having kissed Princess Ashraf’s hand.13

  While the UN commission of inquiry was being formed, portentous UN bulletins were prominent in each day’s newspapers. On an evident assumption that Iranians cannot read, reassurances emanated from the UN to the press to the effect that the UN inquiry would be merely “cosmetic,” and “would enable Iran’s new government to tell its people that their complaints have received international sanction and thus permit the authorities to free the captives.”14 The New York Times relayed that “United Nations officials are making little pretense that they have suddenly been overcome with shock and remorse over the shah’s regime; rather, the Commission’s investigation is seen as a device to get the hostages released.”15

  Waldheim was described—presumably according to a UN definition of intrepidity—as having “taken a great risk”; and a timeworn UN formula of strength through incompetence was exhumed in the claim, solemnly relayed, that “the United Nations’ very lack of precision, its fuzzy improvisation, are precisely the qualities needed to fit the complex politics and unsettled internal power struggles in Iran.”16

  As realities obtruded, front-page assertions gave way to more obscurely placed references to “delicate negotiations.”17 With the collapse of the commission’s effort, reporting dwindled to uncritical reflections on the confused and inscrutable factions competing for power in Iran; with still no attempt to explore the confusions of the distinctly scrutable UN.

  It seems probable, at this time, that the hostages at Tehran eventually will be released. Iran has pressing reasons, internal and external, to settle the matter. The journalist who brings the true condition of the UN before the public will make history. He will also pave the way for revision of international organizations. Jimmy Carter and Kurt Waldheim [d. 2007] are facing their respective reelections and, in their urgent need for political capital, can be expected to exert their utmost efforts to resolve the impasse at Tehran. It is idle, however, to pretend that Waldheim—insofar as he retains a role—has a humanitarian stake in the fate of the hostages. Nothing in the past conduct of his office, particularly as it refers to Iran, suggests such a concern.

  A WRITER’S REFLECTIONS ON THE NUCLEAR AGE

  The first news of the atomic bomb reached Australia on a winter morning—I suppose it was the day following the event. I was dressing to go to school and heard the announcement on the radio. I hardly know why the moment was immediately understood to be important—anesthetized as we were by six years of information on mass bombing throughout Europe and in Asia. Even then, in the brute climate of war, there were persons who began to ponder the consequences—material, ethical, psychological, self-evident, or subtle. I was not close to such people, but the debate opened quickly and was already a global preoccupation by the time the tests took place at Bikini Atoll.

  Twenty months after the bomb was dropped, I was at Hiroshima. I was en route to Hong Kong, where my father was taking a government job. We had traveled from Sydney to Japan in a tiny ship, taking over a month on the way and stopping only once, briefly, for water in New Guinea. The ship was carrying about fifty wives of Australian officers in the occupation force in Japan. Some of these women had been parted from their husbands for the duration of the war. We arrived at the port of Kure, which was a shambles from the bombardment, and spent the next day at Hiroshima, a short drive distant. The city center was still a wasteland, quite empty apart from the mangled dome and blitzed shreds even then familiar to us from photographs. On the outskirts, a lot of rebuilding was taking place: new houses swiftly assembled from light timber and plywood. Men and women were engaged in this busy scene, while the cast central area of the bombing remained still and empty, like a gray lake. The attitude of my family and of the officers accompanying us was the conventional one: that the bomb was an inevitable and justified—and even merciful—outcome of the total war. Yet among these generally unreflective people there was some uneasiness in discussing it. No one could explain why the bomb had not, in the first instance at least, been dropped in an unpopulated place.
That was the extent of objection.

  A recurrent theme at the time was that such a weapon would come to be “like gas” in the First World War—impossible to deploy from fear of retaliation in kind. No one I knew had yet envisaged the immensely more destructive hydrogen bomb, or the stockpiling of thousands of such devices. In other words, we had not then recognized that self-destructive tendencies in world leadership—and, by extension, in mankind—would prove stronger than rational fear or instincts of self-preservation.

  I was, by my generation, part of the new world. But I had been raised in the climate of war, not only from having passed my late childhood and early adolescence in years of world war but from being born—as were all my contemporaries, British or Australian—into consciousness of “the Great War.” The lingering pity and horror of the 1914–18 war pervaded and in some measure dominated our lives, along with the visible misery of the Depression. My father had been in the trenches in France at the age of seventeen. In a way, this led to our early acceptance of battle as, in Mussolini’s terrible words, “the natural condition of man,” and I had never heard either of the great wars discussed in anything other than a context of patriotism and righteousness. However, I think now that the immense presence of the First World War in the thought and life of the decades between wars was indicative of doubts already raised in the unconscious mind. I never heard that war discussed in a casual way by its veterans (as I have, for example, heard later veterans relate incidents of the war of 1939–45). The scale of horror had been too new, too vast. The next change of dimension came, I think, with the atom bomb. The intervening horrors, of the Second World War, had to some extent been anticipated by human imagination. But not the bomb.

  The world conditions in which the atomic bomb was dropped can hardly be re-created in the mind. In Australia, we had recently and narrowly escaped Japanese invasion. Japanese bombs had fallen on Australian soil. Japanese submarines had entered—and briefly bombarded—the harbor of Sydney. Like thousands of other schoolchildren, I had been an evacuee. Thousands of Australians had spent years in Japanese prison camps, and many had died there in atrocious conditions. Nearly every able-bodied man in the land had gone to war, and the casualty lists were long. The animus of revenge in war is powerful, and it is merged with the—more rational—sense of deliverance.

  Some weeks ago an Australian friend—a poet and entirely gentle person—visited us in New York. We spoke in despair of the neutron bomb, with which Reagan had just announced his intention to proceed. The poet mentioned his own “first memory” of the atomic bomb. He had been a soldier at the time and dying of wounds in a makeshift jungle hospital on a remote Pacific island. His unit had learned it was hopelessly outnumbered by Japanese troops a few miles away. With the news of the bomb, they were saved. He said, “I never knew how to handle this in my mind: I wish the bomb had never been invented, let alone dropped. But if it had not been, I would be a rotting skeleton these thirty-odd years.”

  The fallout of the bomb on our modern thought and life has been continuous and incalculable. And combined over the same period, with other destructive phenomena that exist on a new, incomparable scale: pollution of air, water, oceans, upper atmosphere; the death of forests, of species; the depletion of natural resources and essential minerals; overpopulation and threat of world famine; dislocation of entire peoples; and the apparent disintegration of structures of civilized order. It is impossible to be confident of “posterity.” Even were we assured of the survival of the race, we could not prefigure to ourselves the forms of future human existence or its qualities of mind. In our present uncertainty, not the least danger lies, too, in self-dramatization: our state of suspense is exploited, on the one hand, to excuse inertia; and, on the other, to justify violence.

  I have written, briefly, in fiction, on Hiroshima and the bomb. In my own life, the event was a confused beginning of pacifism. And also of an awareness that immense evils are impossible to hold in the mind. One’s own contemplation of them can carry dangers of posturing, of easy vehemence, and of claims of unearned morality. By contrast, acts of goodness—even of “public” goodness—can only be properly discussed or understood in their individual manifestations. The dominant proposition of the atomic age—that humankind is doomed by its own evil—cannot be refuted with any single sweeping show of virtue analogous to the bomb. To counter the implications of the bomb, humanity can only offer its history of individual gestures—the proofs of decency, pity, integrity, and independent courage. I suppose this touches the central premise of the Christian ideal, and the very meaning of the word Redeemer. However, the sense of it as a reality was formed in me long before I realized that and was developed by a few great living spirits I have been lucky enough to know.

  I cannot prevent the making of the bomb—although, like others, I may make my protest. I cannot prevent the use of it. My faith is, merely, that the world against which the bomb may be used has not entirely deserved it.

  PART 4

  The Great Occasion

  CANTON MORE FAR

  The hotel at the corner of Des Voeux Road and Pedder Street in Hong Kong used to be called the Gloucester. (It has now been remodeled, I believe, and is no longer a hotel.) From the terraces of its higher floors, in the years immediately after the Second World War, one overlooked the busiest intersection in the city, for it was at this crossroads that the trams of Des Voeux Road joined battle with the traffic of Pedder Street and Chater Road, and no detail of the ensuing holocaust was lost on the patrons of the Gloucester. Little black English cars, outnumbered, fought for their rights with bright new American ones. (Studebakers, which formed the taxi population, were a great joke to the British colony, being as long in back as in front and giving the appearance of going both ways.) Rickshaws and pedicabs swerved in and out of the struggle, the rickshaw coolies sending up urgent cries for room to maintain the rhythm of their stride. The tram bells clanged, the small black cars snorted, the big bright ones gave screams of delight, and every so often an expressionless colonial policeman—a Chinese in white tropical uniform and black Sam Brown belt—would rise up in the middle and give the signal for the pedestrians to charge. Into the melee then surged an excited crowd in which every known nationality and profession was represented—colonial Englishwomen in linen dresses and wedge heels, Chinese women in silk sheaths and platform soles, British soldiers, American sailors, businessmen in white duck, tourists from the American President Lines upholstered in seersucker and cameras, White Russians looking tragic, Indians looking vague, amahs in pajamas, beggars in fearful states of disintegration, and an endless stream of coolies at a trot carrying an endless variety of heavy weights on poles.

  Because of the placing of the hotel at a crossroads, a number of vistas opened up to the eye thankfully lifted from the dizzy scene below. On the Pedder Street side, the hotel looked across to peeling gray stucco on the arcades and pilasters of Jardine Matheson & Co.—a business establishment of long history and large influence in the East. The upper verandahs of Jardine’s, which were glassed in the following year to provide more offices, were still open in 1947, and many a pleasant and promising young imperialist was to be seen strolling there in the early afternoon—after tiffin, as lunch was sometimes called—across the cracked tiles and fallen plaster that showed the effects of recent war.

  The lower part of Des Voeux Road, below the Pedder Street crossing, soon became almost exclusively Chinese, a welter of shops, stalls, restaurants, and warrenlike businesses, so that this view of the street was a forest of colorful signs in Chinese characters, rising from the dust-clouded traffic of the road. Above the crossing, on the other hand, Des Voeux Road was conventionality itself—a wide and well-paved avenue that curved for half a mile in an arc of pretty shops, cafes, offices, and banks, and eventually emptied itself into the Cricket Ground as surely as a great river must find its way to the sea.

  Back at the Gloucester, one looked diagonally across to the General Post Office. This remarkabl
e consummation of colonial architecture had been festooned by its creators with all manner of pinnacles, cornices, false buttresses, blank balconies, gargoyles, and goddesses—a triumph of matter over mind. Beyond the post office one glimpsed the sea, surmounted by the busy Praya. (In Hong Kong one cannot turn one’s head without seeing either the harbor or the green mountain along whose foot the city lies.) In Des Voeux Road—that is, in its respectable direction—was the prow of yet another arcaded and stuccoed colonial building. This prow, although it went by the cozy name of Watson’s Corner, was in fact rounded and glazed, its principal monument being the chemist’s shop for which it was named. As one approached Watson’s Corner from the Gloucester, its convex semicircle of glassed-in arches gave the building a cheerful effect of grinning from ear to ear.

  If you were sixteen at that time and living in an Eastern city with your parents, your main sensation would probably have been, as mine was, one of enforced detachment, for, while encouraged to observe, you were forbidden to participate. Though constantly enjoined to appreciate your opportunity, you were forbidden to seize it. I spent a great deal of time leaning on the rail of our hotel balcony. If I descended, it was en route to a tennis or tea party, or to decorous dances on board reassuringly British ships of war in the harbor where I learned the difference between a sloop and a destroyer. The Gloucester intersection was my first sight of what is called the real world (that is, the world you imagine to exist rather than the one you actually inhabit), and, having for many months no more profitable occupation, I was set beside it in a way that an invalid is put by a window—to enjoy a spectacle in which he may play no part.