Polish propaganda

I think I can say, without mock modesty, that one of the pleasures that occur in the weekly package of fan mail is the oddities.

A few weeks ago, I had a couple that are more memorable than most. A Scotsman who'd evidently listened for some time to these talks was visiting the United States and he caught me on a Sunday evening television show that is seen only in the United States and Canada. Consequently, he'd had a picture in his mind of what I looked like and was, it seems, agreeably shocked. Anyway, he wrote to say the usual nice, but very acceptable things, and added, 'If I may so, you don't look so senile as I thought you were!' Now that, obviously, is one for the files.

The other is one that I must send a copy of to the producers of the recent docudrama 'Edward and Mrs Simpson'. I ought to explain that the Sunday night television show that I'm talking about, which has been something of an institution for the past ten years, goes out over the stations of the public broadcasting system. Contrary to the universal belief that American television is a commercial jungle in which Kojak and JR bay for recognition over enumerable soap operas, the public system has 292 stations, the biggest network in the country, and carries no commercials whatsoever.

The show on which I'm the MC takes the best of British television drama from not only the BBC, but all the independent producing companies. Well, recently, as I said, we put on the story that led up to the abdication of Edward VIII and I had a letter from an old Englishman, apparently long resident in America, congratulating me, nobody else, for, and I quote him, 'The extraordinary fidelity to fact shown throughout "Edward and Mrs Simpson".' How would he know?

'Well,' he wrote, 'in the scene at Ipswich where the reporters were waiting for the result of Mrs Simpson's divorce hearing, three reporters were shown at the entrance to the court who suddenly saw that Mrs Simpson's car was coming out of a side entrance. That,' I'm still quoting him, 'that was exactly correct.' He told me the names of the three reporters reading from left to right. He had been the third one. 'And when', he wrote, 'we heard the cry, 'There she goes!' , we dashed up the street towards her car and, as you correctly showed, I was the one running behind. The only error is that I was wearing a blue raincoat not a tan one!' That's another for the files.

Well, I thought of this man and that shot during the past week while watching the films from Poland, the official film, trains coming into Warsaw with humane shipments of beef from the Soviet Union – the film that General Jaruzelski's men will allow foreign camera crews to shoot – the general chatting cordially with workers, quiet scenes in the countryside, many emerging placidly from a mine shift. And bits of film, jerky shots of tear gas and running crowds smuggled out by unidentified photographers.

What's unconvincing about these pictures, not only the official film but some of the smuggled stuff is that if you watch carefully on several networks over several evenings, you keep seeing the same shots and in one I remember, there is one man I've seen several times who, evidently, detached himself early on from the crowd being teargassed and is running out of the left corner of the picture. That man reminded me of the third man, the reporter at Mrs Simpson's divorce hearing.

It reminded me, more relevantly, of something that happened in the middle 1930s when the American south-west, Oklahoma especially, suffered from what were called 'the black rollers.' Oklahoma, like a great deal of the agricultural South and West, had suffered down the years from over-ploughing till the topsoil had gone and when strong winds came in from the west, they blew up the loose soil and sand till, across hundreds and hundreds of miles, the sky was dark at noon and people dashed for shelter from the oncoming black rollers which, literally, cut down visibility to 10 or 20 yards.

Franklin Roosevelt's farm policy envisaged great sums of money to be voted by Congress to irrigate millions of these barren acres and to revive the land by strip planting and by growing a variety of crops on worn-out cotton land. And to dramatise the need for this policy, Roosevelt's Department of Agriculture sent out some of America's most distinguished photographers and had them turn in dramatic shots of bare farmland, the sand silted up against the bedroom windows of abandoned farmhouses.

One of these famous pictures showed in the left foreground the grizzly skeleton of a steer's skull to symbolise the legions of cattle that had died. It was very true and it was very moving. However, one acid critic of Roosevelt and his policies looked over several of these pictures whose captions said that they had been shot in various places, this one in Oklahoma, this in Arkansas, that in West Texas and he noticed that while a steer's skull was sometimes in one corner of the picture and sometimes in another, it turned out on closer examination to look suspiciously like the same skull. He raised a storm and a tidal wave of laughter by calling the steer's skull, 'the administration's portable prop'.

And so I find myself not exactly unconvinced, but disturbed, dissatisfied, with so much film coming out of Poland that contains the government's portable props. Cameramen, of course, love visual drama – fires, riots, chases, the movies were practically invented to show chases – but grant that the cameramen assigned to cover the Polish scene would like to film a proper balance between normal life and the disruptions of it, they're getting precious little of either and of course it's impossible.

The official film can be totally discounted. You could send a hundred cameramen into Chile today to show what life is like under the regime of General Pinochet. They might get some shots of Marxists being arrested on a charge of attempted assassination, they would come out without any shots at all of the thousands of suspects being picked up without a warrant or of torture centres, of summary executions, or even of what one recent American visitor reporter says is the symbol of Santiago, as the movies are of Los Angeles or the skyline of Manhattan. He was referring to the sub-machine gun cradled by military police along the shopping malls and in the wealthy suburbs.

Martial law is, by the mere fact of its being imposed, impossible to film or to report in words or talk, since any government that resorts to it, having put the strictest control over civilian life, can obviously exercise the strictest control over the press and all inquisitive outsiders. So I haven't talked much these past few weeks about Poland because I have to say that I, for one, have little idea what is going on. After reading myself almost dizzy with long, bold, informative pieces in the American and British press, I still don't know whether General Jaruzelski is a saviour or a stooge.

The most persuasive piece I've seen on this topic comes from a Russian, a Mr Krasnov, a defector since 1962 who is now a professor of Russian studies in California. He says that it is neither wise nor diplomatic to dismiss General Jaruzelski's military council for national salvation as a puppet government. He reminds us that the general, when he was Minister of Defence in 1970, was put under house arrest for refusing to use troops against rioting workers and that in 1976, he again defied the government by declaring that Polish troops would not fire on Polish workers. Mr Krasnov makes the telling point that the Soviet press reports more acts of resistance to the military regime than the Poles report which suggests that Jaruzelski's success, ruthless though it be, may have confounded the Russians, too, in being designed to stamp out the chants of mass resistance which could then bring the Russians in, in the flesh and in force.

Well, the administration – President Reagan certainly – inclines more to the belief that the general is under orders from Moscow more than from Warsaw and this week he managed to show Chancellor Schmidt enough evidence or testimony of it to have Herr Schmidt awake from his strange seeming indifference to the Polish coup, when he was talking to the East Germans anyway, and come out and say that the Soviet Union had responsibility for it. Before last Wednesday, he had barely, if ever, mentioned Moscow. After his talks in the White House, he has repeated his sympathy for the Polish people and the workers but now he equally condemns what the White House sees as the source of the Polish tragedy. And this is counted in the White House as a Reagan triumph.

Elsewhere, I suspect, there is just as much uneasiness in America as there is abroad about President Reagan's approach to foreign policy, whether in Poland, in the Middle East, in China, wherever. It's the approach of Wyatt Earp, of the frontier marshal with, we discover later, a water pistol.

In all foreign crises, the president tends to come out or come on tough, to back away next day or have his aides deliver what is called a 'clarification' and then to do not much more than the allies do or want. Certainly, for all the hot talk about sanctions on precious technology that the Russians can easily get elsewhere, the cool fact is that President Reagan has not stopped shipping grain to the Soviet Union, he has not called off the nuclear arms talks in Geneva and there are even men in the White House and the State Department who are working on the possibility and the sense, or nonsense, of a summit meeting this year between Mr Reagan and Mr Brezhnev.

Somebody just wrote, 'When the president is confronted by the facts, he denies that he's switching but he switches.' In other words, his second thoughts seem to be better than his first.

It's a habit many Americans hope will grow on him.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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