18. May I start by offering the President of the General Assembly the sincere congratulations of the Australian Government on her election. I think she knows of my special interest in and regard for her country, in which I have lived and worked. I am confident that her work as President of the Assembly will bring the highest credit both to her country and to herself.
19. I have noticed that she said, in connexion with her high appointment, that she did not wish the fact that she was a woman to be stressed; rather, she wished the fact that she was a citizen of India to be stressed. I remember that when her brother, the Prime Minister of India, had to meet some comment in his own country at having nominated a woman doctor for a certain post in India, he replied: “I have not sent a woman; I have sent an officer.” Notwithstanding this, I do not believe it will be possible to conceal the fact that the women of India — and, indeed, I believe, the women of the world — will be greatly encouraged by Mrs. Pandit’s election.
20. I should also like to give a sincere welcome to our new Secretary-General, Mr. Hammarskjold, who has come to us from his native Sweden with a high reputation and who, I have no doubt, will be a very able Secretary-General. To Mr. Lie, the first Secretary-General of the United Nations, Australia wishes every good fortune for the future.
21. This general debate in the United Nations General Assembly has, over the years, come to assume the character of an annual stock-taking by the peoples of the world. It is a unique opportunity for assessing the hopes and fears of the peoples of the world for their future.
22. At this time — and, indeed, at any time since 1945 — the problem of the world is, as it has been, the rivalry between international democracy and international communism. It would be only too easy for most of us here to make a bitter case against the Soviet Union for what we have suffered at its hands since 1945. In addition to the many well-known instances of overt military and political aggression, I expect that there is not one of the democratic countries that has not suffered by reason of the disruptive activities of the clandestine agents of the Soviet Union. We in Australia, among other countries, have bitter memories of this underground and covert warfare — because there is no other realistic way of describing it. The communist dictum, “The easiest way to take a fortress is from within”, has not been lost on us. We know very well what it means — and we are taking our own measures to protect ourselves.
23. However, I do not propose to dwell on these matters. We have, as I have said, some evidence in recent times of a tendency on the part of the Soviet Union to employ gestures of less malignancy, less hostility than formerly. We may be excused if we treat these gestures with some reserve, if we do not become too greatly impressed with their sincerity. We understand very well the tactics of retreat and of advance — indeed, the leaders of the Soviet Union have been frank enough to explain it to their followers, and to us, in published volumes. The turning on and off of international tension is a tactic to serve a purpose. Our minds have become quite sensitive to such manoeuvres.
24. However, for myself — and in spite of what I have said — I do not find it impossible to believe that these gestures may be genuine and that, if they are not thrown back in the face of the Soviet Union, they may possibly lead to a more civilized relationship between international communism and the democracies, even to the extent of the two systems living side by side in the world without dangerous friction. The possibility of bringing this about is vastly more in the hands of the Soviet Union than of our side. Suspicion and hostility are cumulative, as are goodwill and tolerance. For some years the Soviet Union held something close to a monopoly of suspicion and hostility, and our side, inherently, a near-monopoly of tolerance. But hostility breeds hostility, just as tolerance breeds tolerance. Every action has its equal and opposite reaction. The present situation is not very unlike that of the Roman leader who said to the Carthaginians: “I have in my toga peace or war. Choose which you will.”
25. The gestures made by the Soviet Union during this year may be important or unimportant. Nobody knows except the handful of men in Moscow who control Soviet policy. If they were designed to secure a response by the democracies, and so to lead to a genuine easing of world tension and to the eventual possibility of the two sides living together, then they have not yet succeeded — nor, indeed, have they yet failed.
26. If, in the course of, say, the coming year, the tentative approaches of the Soviet Union towards the easing of world tension are continued; if, perhaps, they gain momentum; if, in particular, we see signs that carry conviction to us that the Soviet ambitions to communize the world have given place to some less offensive and less all-embracing objective, then I believe that the Soviet Union is likely to get real reciprocity. We, for our part, have every right to remember that, while tactics may change, the repeatedly stated ultimate objective of communism is the communizing of the world. Perhaps I may be allowed to quote the old Biblical warning: “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
27. The Soviet Union, in framing its plans and its strategy, has taken a great many factors into account. It has shown great skill. It has made itself master of many techniques and much expertise; but I would believe that it has left almost completely out of account a matter on which we in the democracies vet great store and importance — and that is the human element in life and in politics. In communist circles it would appear that politics come from the head and not the heart, whereas with us it is, at any rate to a very great extent, the reverse. We believe that politics that leave the interests and the feelings of individual human beings out of account are doomed, and rightly so. They are to us the politics of the Middle Ages, from which we believe mankind has developed a very long way. I believe that, for this reason, if for no other, the theory of communism does not ring true.
28. These observations are commonplace truisms, blinding glimpses of the obvious, to us in the democracies. Maybe they have something of the charm of novelty to those who have not been brought up and lived their lives in democratic surroundings. I am led to believe that not much thinking has been done on these lines in Moscow by the fact that the Soviet Union representatives to the United Nations do not seem to have devoted more than a passing moment of their many hundreds of hours of speaking in the Assembly to the question of the welfare and the happiness of the individual human being. Perhaps it would be too much to believe that these simple, homely matters have begun to receive some attention in Moscow, and that they may have been responsible for the slight casing in the asperity of Soviet policy at home and abroad that has been noticeable during 1953.
29. At the sixth session of the General Assembly, in Paris, two years ago, I suggested that it would not be wise for the Soviet Union to provoke world tension beyond the point of no return — the point beyond which there could be no turning back along the road which appeared in 1951 to be leading inevitably to another world war. I am not one who suffers from the malady of folie des grandeurs, but I may be excused for believing that some such consideration as this must have influenced the minds of those in control of Soviet policy. Such changes in direction as we have seen during 1953 do not come about by simple chance, but rather by hard calculation of the probable results.
30. There are internal stresses and strains in every country — democratic and communist — by reason largely of the unfulfilled ambitions of the human beings who make up all our populations. In the democracies these stresses and strains can be resolved — or at any rate eased — through the operation of the well-known machinery of democracy. In the communist countries no such safety-valve exists. The condition of the people — of the ordinary common people — in a dictatorship can be altered for the better only by changes in high- level policy dictated by the person or the group in undisputed political control.
31. We, on our side, are not fools. We have had some experience in the drawing of inference from history and from events. From the experience of the last forty years we have learnt some lessons. One of them is that totalitarian regimes always look — always, in the nature of things, they have to look- — more durable than they are, until, as in two notable instances, they crack irrevocably. They seem, while they are viable, to present an impervious front; whereas, in democratic countries, every small difference is magnified and emphasized to the world. Mr. Vyshinsky has himself taken advantage of this from time to time by quoting from scraps of newspaper clippings from obscure journals in democratic countries.
32. It has been one of the shibboleths of communism that democracy, as we know it, contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Since this theory was first advanced over one hundred years ago, democracy has weathered many storms and crises — domestic and international — and it has survived and prospered, except where it has been overcome and stamped out by force of arms. I expect it may have occurred to the Soviet Union leaders — occurred only to be anxiously rejected — that it is not at all impossible that the thesis might more properly be true in reverse — that communism may hold within itself the seeds of its own destruction, particularly if the human element is to be left continuously and entirely out of account.
33. However, the incidence of these human observations — whether or not they have been taken into account and, if so, the weight given to them in Moscow — -is no more than speculation. Certainly the facts of the past provide but little hope that such matters have even been considered by the Soviet Union leaders — much less that their policy has been influenced by them. Rather would it seem that consideration for the individual has been regarded as a weak bourgeois conception which has no place in the armoury of those whose god is force and to whom domination of others is the only desirable aim.
34. Men’s minds develop, whatever the form of society. The Soviet Union has gone far in learning and applying the material facts of life. Maybe they are coming round to considering, if not the spiritual, then at least some of the social — or perhaps, rather, the sociological — lessons that the democratic world has learnt in many centuries of development, and that such lessons are now in the process of beginning to influence their minds, as practical considerations. Perhaps — we do not know — the great thaw may be starting in the Ice Age of Soviet politics. All this may be hopelessly wrong. One’s common sense tells one that it is, but there is just the hope that we may be seeing a gleam of light at the end of the tunnel, and this bare possibility is my excuse for taking up, for a short time, the time of the General Assembly in referring to it.
35. I am not blind to the fact that the Soviet leaders show all the signs of being intensely suspicious of us, the democracies. They profess to believe that we are plotting and working towards the downfall of the communist regime. It would be more true to say that we are devoting ourselves whole-heartedly to trying to stop the aggressive expansion of communist domination beyond its present borders. Those communist officials who know the democracies — and surely some of them do — can have no logical fear of aggression by the democracies. But I can appreciate the fact that it is impossibly dangerous for these few men to attempt to communicate their views to their leaders, and still more, of course, to get them accepted. The communist leaders either have an innate, ingrained and unreasoning suspicion of the democracies that no facts, no logic, no argument will dispel, or, alternatively, they may have decided to adopt an attitude of suspicion and to propagate it as a considered part of their policy and as a means of maintaining the offensive spirit in their peoples. The Iron Curtain enables the lack of knowledge of the rest of the world to be maintained and the suspicion of the democracies to be fostered.
36. Of the two alternatives — that the Soviet suspicion of the democracies is real or that it is synthetic — I would tend to believe that the latter is more likely to be the case. If thus is so, then it is capable of change. The Soviet leaders have never been afraid of a radical change of policy. They explain it away or, more often still, they do not bother to explain it at all.
37. Now it seems to me that all this adds up to this, that if the policy-makers of the Soviet Union have genuinely decided to try a more human and co-operative policy for the future, the way is clear ahead for them to do so. We will not, however, lower our guard and they cannot expect us to be notably responsive until the process has gone a good deal further than it has up to now.
38. We shall watch out for communist initiative in positive co-operative action. Areas of co-operation are not hard to find. Moreover, let us not forget that we have had experience of the policy of relieving tension from time to time before this. It is an old technique of communism, the stop back before taking two steps forward. The mere turning on or off of international tension is not an index to the good faith of communist negotiators. It has been a tactic, in the past at least, to serve a purpose; and it is the nature of the purpose that we have to explore. We are thankful for the cessation — or perhaps I should say the diminution — of the campaign of hate and vilification. But the welfare of mankind is not immediately affected by the manners, good or bad, of international communism. The test of Soviet intentions lies in communist initiative, as I have said, in positive co-operative action in directions of importance, as distinct from the matters of small consequence on which the Soviet Union has experimented so far.
39. As I have said, such areas of co-operation will not lie hard to find. They exist today, for instance, in Germany, in Korea and in Indo-China, each of them areas in which the Communists can establish their bona fides and their sincerity in a practical and convincing way. They exist, again, in the problem of the international control of atomic energy.
40. If, however, the Soviet gestures of 1953 turn out in fact to be no more than a minor manoeuvre in world politics — and we are likely to discover whether or not this is so in the coming year — then the disappointment, and even the anger, of the ordinary people all over the world will be very real.
41. And now perhaps I might be allowed to speak a little on the major current problem of Korea.
42. Most of us had hoped that this Assembly would have been able to avoid a recurrence of the discussion of the Korean question and of the constitution of the political conference, and that all that had been disposed of in the recently concluded seventh session of the General Assembly. There seemed little that could he added by this session and, indeed, it might be thought that further discussion of this matter in New York would tend only to complicate the issues facing the political conference and possibly burden and embarrass it with an even less easy atmosphere than it will inherit in any event. Whether this General Assembly can avoid further argument about the constitution of the political conference, and about the Korean problem generally, is dependent mainly on the authorities in China and in North Korea.
43. We believe quite simply that the settlement of the Korean War and the Korean problem generally should be the affair of the countries directly concerned, and that the problem would only be further complicated by the addition of other countries which have had nothing to do with this problem during the last three years. In our view, it is for the Communists to proceed to appoint their delegation to the conference and to agree to a time and place for the conference so that it may start its work, and not to seek to interfere with decisions made by the United Nations General Assembly affecting our representation.
44. It is well known that for our part — I speak for Australia — we might have preferred a somewhat different representation at the conference and, in fact, we made suggestions to that effect at the recent General Assembly discussions. But we have accepted, as an expression of the will of the General Assembly, the resolution [711 (VII)] that has been forwarded to the Chinese and North Koreans. We believe that the United Nations, for its part, has taken a proper decision concerning the political conference, and that the communist Chinese and North Koreans should be advised accordingly.
45. One must refer, however briefly, to what the United Nations action in Korea means in its historical context. It represents the first action by a world-wide organization to resist armed aggression by collective force. What the United Nations did in Korea is, and will remain, a lasting deterrent, I believe, to aggression. I have said more than once, both here and in Australia, that it is my belief that had the United Nations not acted as it did in Korea, then the world by now would have been faced by aggression in some other quarter. The history of the nineteen-thirties is too clear a lesson for us to reach any other conclusion.
46. We cannot note the conclusion of the fighting in Korea — one hopes the permanent conclusion — without paying a tribute to the courageous leadership and unstinted contribution of the United States. This is not only true so far as the military action in Korea is concerned, but it is also strikingly true in respect of the relief and rehabilitation of devastated Korea. The action taken in Korea under the leadership of the United States was the right action and it will, I am quite sure, be known in the years to come as one of the really decisive actions in history.
47. The end of the fighting in Korea has brought to many people a new hope for the future, but, as an offset to this hope, another and more dreadful anxiety has arisen. It has become clear, during 1953, that both the United States and the Soviet Union have the knowledge and the capacity to make the hydrogen bomb. From what the layman knows of the effect of such a weapon we can imagine the unspeakable devastation to both sides in a war in which such weapons are used.
48. We must face, before very long, a situation in which both sides will have reached saturation point in the possession of atomic weapons, saturation point being the point at which both sides possess a sufficient quantity of bombs to destroy all the major defences of the other side. The approach to this saturation point makes international agreements for control, through an effective system of inspection of manufacture of atomic weapons, not only urgent but imperative. It is something to which the great Powers which possess these weapons must set their minds if the world is not to be destroyed by itself. They must realize the deep anxiety of all the peoples of the world that the ever-present fear of complete destruction should be removed.
49. Apart from the direct destructive effect of atomic bombs — and more so of hydrogen bombs — the poisoning effect on the world’s atmosphere of the explosion of these weapons must be taken into account. It might well be that all the population of very large areas of the world would be killed by atmospheric poisoning, by the explosion of any considerable number of these dreadful weapons.
50. Lenin is credited with having said: “It would not matter a jot if three-quarters of the human race were destroyed. The important thing is that the surviving quarter should be communist.” A more dreadful thing could not be said.
51. I have already spoken about the situation in Korea and what my country hopes will come from the armistice, from the political conference to discuss the Korean question and, if all goes well, possibly wider questions in the East more generally. The achievement of peace in Korea, itself, has affected greatly the atmosphere of international relations. It is difficult to stop hostilities, as we all know, when they break out. But this has been done and it is a great achievement. The whole world wants peace in Korea, and lasting peace in Korea. The reaction of relief and hope brought about by the end of fighting in Korea reflects the attitudes of the peoples of the world generally towards war.
52. Now, perhaps, I might say something, towards the end of what I have to say, about my own country, Australia.
53. The place of any country in the world today is made up of several factors: its population, its international associations, its geographical situation and its performance over, say, the last generation. I believe it is true to say that the combination of these factors, so far as Australia is concerned, adds up to our having a position in the world more substantial than our population would otherwise warrant. I need not enter into these factors in detail, other than to mention our traditional and greatly valued membership in the Commonwealth of Nations, in which we have all the advantages that How from our close association and co-operation and consultation with our mother country, Great Britain, and the members of the Commonwealth, whilst at the same time we have our own autonomy and our own ability to determine our own policies.
54. We are, relatively speaking, a young country, and we like to believe that we have shown that we are determined to pay our way in the world both in peace and in war, and not to be a liability to our friends.
55. We are in no doubt, we people in Australia, to which camp we belong. We are a democratic country and we believe that we are a not unimportant link in the world-wide chain of democratic countries, and that in the dreadful event of another world war we would again have a positive part to play as a strategic base against the common enemy.
56. We Australians are not in any proper sense a warlike people, but we believe that the part that our lighting services have played in two great wars is evidence that we would not hang back if another threat were to develop against our democratic way of life.
57. I believe that all of us in the United Nations are web aware of the situation in the world today. I have tried, so far as it is possible to do in a short statement, to put the point of view of the Government and people of Australia. We are heartily sick and tired of the suspicions and distrust which divide the world, the seeds of which have been sown by the Soviet Union, and we look forward to the day when we can all devote ourselves again to what is, in truth, the constructive task of leadership: that of making the world each year a progressively better place for the average man and woman to live in.