Occasional Prose (7 page)

Tariq Ali, though he did not express it so succinctly, was aware of being caught in a dilemma implicit in the war games of street protest. Having attacked Grosvenor Square in March, he did not wish to “repeat himself” in October, for the only way of topping the previous performance there would be by a heightening of violence. Hence he spoke of Grosvenor Square as a “death trap,” to which he was unwilling to commit his followers. De-escalation, according to this reasoning, then became inevitable—a change of pace and direction, to Downing Street and Hyde Park, rather than to the U.S. Embassy, and in disciplined, orderly formation, instead of in fighting salients.

He was thinking, clearly, in terms of showmanship, and in these terms he may have been right, except that the London police stole the show on him. Moreover, in his concentration on the
manner
of the demonstration, he lost sight of the matter: the U.S. war in Vietnam. Indeed, the Demo, which might have been a tragedy, turned into a comedy of manners. He did not foresee that, of course, on the eve of the march, nor perceive it later by hindsight. What the demonstration had already accomplished, he told me, was that all over England, in pubs tonight, people were talking about Vietnam, which had been practically forgotten since March. Did he really believe this? According to my guess, people in pubs were talking about the Demo all right and about
him
, but not about Vietnam and this could not be blamed exclusively on the press. The oncoming confrontation between the police and the marchers was viewed as a domestic sporting event in which you chose sides and took bets, but also, if you were fearful, as a sort of invasion from Mars or D Day, D standing for doom. With a tense contest like that right on their doorstep or scheduled live, on video, how could people be expected to turn their attention to a war in a remote country and to which the sole active British contribution was training police dogs to track down Viet Cong? Like many fiery and histrionic persons, Tariq Ali seemed to have no sense of the impact of the drama he was mounting on the ordinary clowns in the gallery. In short, no common sense. “What do you hope to accomplish, etc.?” is a commonsensical question, which was why it was an unwelcome interruption in a theatre of revolution.

In his bed-sitter in Hampstead, Mr. Abhimanya Manchanda, the leader of the Maoist group, accepted the question as perfectly legitimate. “I do not know,” he said, and then added, with a mischievous giggle, “but I know we are giving the Government the jitters.” This was incontestably true. The effect of the march, he went on, more formally, would be to call the Vietnamese question to public attention, which was the same as what Tariq Ali had said and yet quite different. Indeed, to my pleased surprise (for on the basis of rumor and press reports I had been expecting a frightening super-left irrealist in comparison to whom the burning-eyed Tariq Ali would look like a board meeting of the Fabian Society), Mr. Manchanda, small and rather merry, had his feet very much on the ground. When we telephoned on that Saturday night to check up on the address, we were told that he was out, which was a blow, because we had an appointment with him for an interview. “Oh, he’ll be right back,” an American girl’s voice said. “He’s just gone to the Laundromat.” In the entry hall of the two-story house, not far from where Karl Marx had lived, there was an empty baby carriage and outside on the steps were some milk bottles. The baby evidently belonged to the family upstairs, perhaps his disciples; we met two American girls and a young Canadian man in the small bed-sitting room whose chief article of furniture was a large duplicator. These young people, unlike the supernumeraries at the
Black Dwarf
, were not wearing the costumes, hair styles, and fashion accessories of the pace-setting New Left. They were dressed in plain ordinary clothes; one of the girls was in pants. The furniture was old and losing some of its stuffing, but the room was neat and there were ash-trays. Mr. Manchanda went out to make us some coffee in the kitchen. Behind me, above the Regency-style sofa on which I was sitting, was a sight familiar to me from North Vietnam: Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. Above them was a big colored photograph of Mao and on the opposite wall a nice one of Ho. No slogans, no poster art. The girls were bending over a tract they had just taken out of the duplicator.

Mr. Manchanda, a former teacher, was an old-fashioned classical Marxist. Like many of those men, he had a witty mind, referring to Tariq Ali as a “revisionist playboy,” and remarking, after the march was over, that he had not cared to join Tariq Ali’s “guided tour of the West End.” He explained with patience the doctrinal differences between them. It was a question of correct slogans about the Vietnamese war.

For a long time, the Trotskyists of the Vietnamese Solidarity Campaign had refused the slogan “Victory for the NLF,” on the ground that the NLF, a coalition of a number of class elements, had a bourgeois nationalist complexion;
their
slogan was “Support for the Vietnamese Revolution,” i.e., for a non-existent phenomenon. Similarly with the Maoist slogan “Long Live Ho Chi Minh,” rejected by the Trotskyists on the ground that Ho had betrayed the revolution at Geneva in 1954, also that he exemplified the cult of personality and was a “bureaucrat.” “If Ho is a bureaucrat,” observed Mr. Manchanda, with glee, “I wish we had more bureaucrats in this country.”

I must say that on these issues, which had no direct bearing on the march, I considered the Maoists to be completely right. As for the march itself, here too I found myself agreeing with Mr. Manchanda: the main enemy is in Grosvenor Square; march on him there; never mind if you are repeating yourself. On the issue of violence vs. non-violence, there did not seem to be a real theoretical difference. The Manchanda group had been described in the newspapers as favoring violence, and the Tariq Ali group not, but actually Tariq Ali was organizing dramatically for violence (that list of first-aid stations, manned with doctors and nurses) on the supposition, amounting to prophecy, that the police would start or “provoke” it, whereas Mr. Manchanda, when I asked him whether it was true that he planned to storm the U.S. Embassy, shrugged and said simply, “We are too few.” In Grosvenor Square, the next day, a lilting voice I thought I recognized as his could be heard urging restraint on the crowd, though possibly this was merely
pro forma
. In fairness to the sincerity of Tariq Ali’s position, it should be added that the sheer fact of marching on Grosvenor Square contained a potential of violence, which handing in a petition at Downing Street did not. Grosvenor Square, if not a death-trap, is a box in which pressures build up almost by themselves. Once you have marched into it, you find yourself waiting for something to happen, and the next stage is to
wish
for something to happen; you cannot just stand there all afternoon, looking at the police while they look back at you. That wish, incidentally, was shared by TV viewers and by the press at large; the contemptuous descriptions of the march as a “fizzle,” the “non-event of the year,” and so on, by people who
opposed
it, reveal an acute disappointment with the relative peacefulness of the encounter. Instead, one might take heart from just that. The fact that so little did happen in the interior of that box is probably a lesson in the effectiveness of Gandhian techniques. For the first time perhaps in history a massed police force practiced “passive” resistance, and it worked. Thus if the police are brutal, as in Mayor Daley’s Chicago, it is not from necessity, as they insist, but from choice.

What came out of our meeting with Mr. Manchanda, following on our meeting with Tariq Ali, was a series of paradoxes. The Trotskyists, in slogans and stance to the left of the Maoists, in practice were to the right of them. The Maoists, generally thought of as inflexible revolutionary extremists, showed empirical wisdom and adaptability. The
style
of Tariq Ali was radical; the style of Mr. Manchanda was modest petty bourgeois, recalling the home lives of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky himself. Maoist China, they say, is hermetic, suspicious, hostile to foreigners, yet the Maoist cell in Hampstead was as open as the Laundromat where Mr. Manchanda had been doing his smalls. Though we came from the bourgeois press, we were not treated as trespassers but simply as guests—the reverse of what had happened in Carlisle Street. It was even possible to take exception, as I did, to the icon of Stalin; “We can continue that discussion another time,” said Mr. Manchanda after a few words defending Stalin’s place in the history of revolution.

This too was perhaps a lesson in the persuasiveness of non-violent techniques on the plane of ordinary human relations, for the next afternoon, marching up from the Embankment, when we came to the crossroads of choice at Trafalgar Square, whether to turn left with the Trotskyists down to Whitehall and Downing Street or right with the Maoists to Grosvenor Square, I had no real hesitation in making up my mind, and what slight hesitation I had was purely journalistic, for the police had told us the previous night that Grosvenor Square might be a “decoy,” to draw Her Majesty’s forces off from the real site of battle. Innocent of the sectarian character of left-wing politics, they seemed to think that Mr. Manchanda could be in cahoots with Tariq Ali to execute a master coup.

Scotland Yard was alert, almost comically so, to all contingencies. They gave themselves full credit for the elaborate precautions they took, to screen buses of demonstrators arriving from the country and make sure there were no hidden marbles or other weapons aboard, to screen airports and other points of entry for agitators arriving from the Continent, to screen the universities and uncover the identities of potential “troublemakers.” An inspector told us there were Special Branch men assigned to every university as a matter of course—a piece of news, casually delivered, which as an American I found disturbing and unpleasant, for if we have FBI men on all our campuses, it is kept dark, and, if known, would cause a national uproar. I am against police spies on campuses. Despite appearances, the English are tougher than the Americans, more pragmatic and cool-headed—the result probably of having a seasoned ruling class trained in the public-school system. There was nothing crude or inefficient in the handling of that march; and the punishment that followed, like the advance precautions, was swift and almost silent. On Monday, five youths, three of them unemployed, were given sentences up to three months’ imprisonment for “possessing offensive weapons”: one had allegedly thrown a bottle, one was carrying a flag-stick, one a walking-stick, one admitted possessing three bags of marbles, and one, who got two months, was accused of having “a piece of wood” and assaulting a constable, which he denied. This summary justice (the other side of the coin or, let us say, of the shiny merit badge) rated a tiny inconspicuous item in the
Times
, about an inch high; no details were supplied, not even names or ages. The above information comes from the
Guardian
, which, like the
Telegraph
, printed a fuller story but gave it no undue prominence. Several other persons received suspended sentences, and two “men,” aged eighteen, were remanded in custody till the following week for using “an electronic device” to interfere with police radios.

It is true that at certain moments flag-sticks were flying about “like spears,” the press said; if they had said “like toy spears,” it would have been more to the point, for the flag-sticks I saw launched into the air were so thin and light they almost floated. Some firecrackers were thrown, causing the police horses to rear. Pennies were hurled at the police and at windows of flats, but no window I saw was broken except a big plate-glass one on South Audley Street, which looked as if it had been smashed in a charge. Once there was an incident that for a moment looked like trouble: when a fat, short, middle-aged woman wearing a bright-green embroidered mandarin coat began prowling along her balcony, somebody threw an object at her which proved to be a cardboard disc; a middle-aged man, probably her husband, came out from the flat and twice inspected it with a concerned, moral air. It was impossible to feel sympathy for people like that, who were making a parade of looking down in a figurative and literal sense on the crowd of protesters below, nor for the spectators in the windows of the American Embassy, out of range of any missiles. One man in a left Embassy window was busy photographing throughout; even when night came, his lens, evidently infra-red, was pointed at us—impossible to guess whether he was an Embassy security officer duly identifying the “troublemakers” or just a camera nut, like the G.I.s in Vietnam who are said to go into combat snapping pictures to send home as souvenirs.

But it was not hard to sympathize with the police and their frightened, rearing horses. It was Sunday, a day off for most of them, and it is not pleasant to have things thrown at you, harmless or not, and to have your helmet knocked off and tossed about as a trophy, when you are only doing your duty. Guarding an embassy is not a wicked action
per se
, but just routine in all countries when circumstances call for it, and if the demonstrators had broken through the police cordons, they might have met something decidedly worse inside: a chief inspector from Scotland Yard assured us that the Marine guards were armed with Mace and machine guns—a recurring rumor strongly denied by the Embassy, which can point to the fact that even in Moscow, when the U.S. Embassy has been besieged by crowds, the Marine guard has not had machine guns. Only the regulation pistols.

There is no doubt that the British police behaved with amazing self-control and good humor, under a certain amount of provocation. It is stupid to deny this and to assign the credit to the order and “discipline” of the demonstrators, who, at least in Grosvenor Square, were not especially orderly, even in terms of their own aims. They could probably have broken through the police lines if they had had better organization and leadership. The majority plainly did not wish to or only half-heartedly, but they would have followed if a breach had been made. As it was, only the Anarchists were serious about mounting charges, from the direction of South Audley Street, one of which was nearly successful. The Anarchists that afternoon were the best fighters, and among them must have been some of the young unemployed workmen who got sentenced in the magistrates’ court; they were fairly easy to pick out in the crowd, which was mainly middle class or upper middle and student, by the Rocker-style leather jackets they wore and by their expressions of intent, concentrated fury. “If you’re just here to look, push off,” one of them said to me.