INTERNATIONAL DAY
725
II
The International Day consisted of two meetings-an after–
noon meeting in the Grand Amphitheater of the Sorbonne, and an
evening mass meeting at the Velodrome d'Hiver, the Madison Square
Garden of Paris. The first was jammed full to the rafters, the second
was attended by about 12,000. Both meetings revealed that the organ–
izers were woefully inexperienced. They did not know how to space
speakers, and when to conclude the meeting.
In the evening both organizers and the audience let themselves
be
intimidated by a handful of noisy anarchists and Trotskyists who had
shrewdly appraised the extent to which pacifist sentiment was a disguise
for moral irresoluteness. Seizing on the remarks of the innocent Karl
Compton, who was as much at home in this environment as a Yankee
in Tibet, they tried to snatch "the mike," and were pacified only when
they were given the rostrum to denounce the organizers, delegates and
the whole conception of the International Day. Some of the Americans
seemed appalled by the interruptions, but the Frenchmen, and the
French press generally, seemed to shrug it off as
«une affaire Parisienne."
Incidentally, the anarchists and Trotskyists, who between them
numbered no more than a hundred, had refused to participate in the
organization of the Day. But they demanded the right to attack it
despite the fact that their points of view had been amply presented at
the Sorbonne meeting by speakers from the Congress of Peoples and
other participating organizations. Perhaps the wildest speech of the day
was made by a Trotskyist from Ceylon who was given the floor because
he claimed he had come all the way from Ceylon to attend the meeting.
It
later turned out he had come to attend the Communist Congress
of Partisans for World Peace at the Salle Pleye! but had been barred.
Neither he nor his fellows tried to snatch the mike
there.
His main
theme at the Sorbonne, as expressed in his concluding sentence, was:
"The only way to insure peace is to turn the cold war against the
Soviet Union into a civil war against the West!"
There would have been nothing· objectionable in giving the psy–
chopathic ward on the left a place on the program. After all, the Inter–
national Day was a cross between a political fair and a political bedlam.
But it was cowardice to yield to a show of force. Everyone knew, and
none better than the anarchists and Trotskyists, that if they had at–
tempted to disrupt a Communist meeting or a De Gaullist meeting
they would have been carried out dead. That is why they carefully
stayed away from the six day Communist talk fest at the Partisans
