Martial law in Poland

In the early days of these talks, indeed, as late as the 1950s, I used to sit down at this time of the year to do, deliberately and with no shame, no second thoughts, a Christmas talk, even when, as I recall, sometime about 30 years ago the actual reason for the festival was getting swamped by the department stores and the advertising people giving us the promotion business with both barrels as early as mid-December.

Now we steel ourselves the day after Thanksgiving, the last Thursday in November, against an explosion of electronic carols, Christmas specials, street decorations and a dinning babble – or Babel – on television of salesmanship and manic joviality, so that more friends than I can count, including practising Christians, devote most of their hopes and prayers to the happy arrival of 26 December when it will all be over and when practical housewives can get on their wraps and snow boots and ear muffs and sally off to the January sales. It was even a cynical note, in those days, that the January sales began the day after Christmas.

Well, this year the January sales began the first week in December since the recession, what the administration hates to have called 'the Reagan recession', the recession has afflicted retail sales as much as anything and if the stores didn't get the slashed prices of the January sales going as soon as possible, the Christmas takings would begin to look bleak indeed.

Well, I don't do a jolly Christmas talk as such any more because, I suppose, of guilt about the anxiety and grief all around us. Of course there was always grief and anxiety around the world but you may have noticed that it didn't seem as bad then as now. It seemed – 'it' being almost any time you cared to think of ten, twenty, thirty years ago – a more innocent time. This is a fatuous idea but it's one that every succeeding generation has.

In the 1920s, a big French intellectual came along to issue a profound epitaph on the men who fought in the First World War. It was a generation that lost its innocence. By the end of the 1920s, the oldsters were applying it to the outrageous bad manners and sex mania of the flappers who called themselves 'emancipated'. Emancipated from what? 'Emancipated...' thundered the famous Dean of St Paul's, 'emancipated from innocence!'.

In fact, the bell that tolls the loss of our innocence is as dependable as Big Ben. Come to think of it, more dependable when you consider that a couple of inches of snow flurries can cause the old gentleman to cough and snuffle. And now film makers are busy discovering the 1950s as the era before the fall. In a recent book there's a chapter called 'Eisenhower: the innocent years'. The amazing thing to me is that evidently we go on recovering our innocence long enough to keep losing it.

I think the clue to this recurring attitude lies in another thumping cliché which never dies, for the good reason that it's true. It is that 'Time is a gentleman and sees to the healing of the scar tissue of memory'. It would be just as true if it went, 'Time is a coward because the memory of wars, poverty, greed, malice and the rest is too awful to keep green'. To stay healthy you'd better forget. So that in time, year after year, century after century, even the greatest tyrants become comic characters.

Twenty years from now, when AD 2000 comes in, I don't think you'll get much of an argument from anybody, least of all the historians, that the twentieth century produced three monsters – Hitler is already tagged and filed away as one, with no dissenting vote from anybody. Even the Russians now grant that Stalin was another and, pretty soon, once the murderous record is out in the open and socialists and liberals can manage to look at it without blushing, I have no doubt that Mao Tse-tung will complete the unholy trinity. But, by then, all of them will have passed over, like Attila the Hun and Napoleon, into popular songs and funny impersonations on the Benny Hill Show.

So at this Christmas time one of my cards is a charming, coloured engraving of a particularly bloody battle, fatuously fought by a distinguished regiment during the Crimea, and a gentle and, certainly, a very peaceable librarian of my acquaintance, sends me one of Goya's battlefront drawings. Nobody has sent me a photograph, drawing, engraving or colour print of an American plane unloading its bombs on a Vietnamese village. The span between what is art and what is tasteless is, as yet, too short, as we've just seen in a terrific row that blew up in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago.

Three years ago, you may recall, Mr Mosconi, the mayor of San Francisco, was murdered at gunpoint in his office by a political rival. Since then, the city has dedicated to his memory a big new convention centre and the city also commissioned, some time ago, a bust of the dead mayor to be the symbol which greeted you at the entrance to the Mosconi Convention Centre. The sculptor finished it and delivered it two weeks ago and it was unveiled to an outcry of horror from the San Franciscans. The head was that of practically a gargoyle, a grinning face such as you'd see on a frieze in a medieval church but the face rested on a pedestal and what was on that outraged the citizenry even more than the caricature of a face.

The pedestal is chiselled, or scarred, with graffiti deliberately scattered at random of a handgun, of gouts of blood, of other messy details of the murder scene. The artist and a number of his supporters maintained that that was the way it was and that for once a statue, a piece of commemorative sculpture, should commemorate not a way of life, but the crummy manner of a death. It was too much for the city council and for the San Franciscans. It had to be guarded for the few days it was on exhibition because of the risk of its being defiled by vandals. To most people, it was already defiled.

So the Art Commission wriggled out of this fiasco – after all, they had their reputation as connoisseurs of modern art to protect – by saying that though the work was a powerful and passionate work, a meaningful work (I'm sure somebody called it 'meaningful') by a dedicated artist, perhaps after all it was not quite appropriate for the convention centre, a vast auditorium where thousands would come flocking in years to come, to have a good time and fill the city coffers. So, it was paid for and returned, with regrets.

The pretty Christmas decorations at the entrance to the centre will not be sullied by the grizzly reminder that no one in public office today is safe from the lunatic and the handgun.

So San Francisco, like every other city of the Western world, turns instead to the joys of pushing and threading through impossible crowds and traffic jams to buy presents and gets home exhausted and turns on the telly and, night after night, sees, hears, broods about, for the first 15 minutes of the news, about Poland.

It's the peculiar ordeal of the United States at this stage of its history – which is supposed to mark the peak of its power as a world force – that it can not look on any military move anywhere in the world as just another serious event which well-informed people ought to know about. In my youth, it was Britain's ordeal. A threatening gesture by a Greek dictator and the first picture on the movie newsreels was of the British foreign secretary striding to 10 Downing Street. Spain broke out in civil war and Britain sent a couple of battleships into the Mediterranean just as a warning to anybody else who thought of disturbing the peace and the trade lanes.

In any so-called foreign crisis, we, in Britain always asked, 'What are we going to do about it?'. And the Americans looked across the safe Atlantic and they, too, wondered, what Britain was going to do. Now, 50 years on, it's the Americans who feel that they are called on to do something. The awkward, the historic, difference is that they may have the men, they may have the money but, by jingo, they don't have the arms, the permissible arms, to put the other big power in its place.

They can only say they look on martial law in Poland as a grave development and mean to warn the Russians that any move of their own armies will be... will be, well, will, I mean, produce very serious consequences. And, in this very tricky crisis, there is the fact that the Polish constitution allows for just such an emergency, sanctions martial law and that Solidarity did move from a series of social and labour protests into a political vote to, in effect, overthrow the Communist government.

So, it's their business and the administration has to wince in the recognition of it and it has learned, from the Russian wheat embargo, that any trade embargo by any one or two countries is easily bypassed by the device of trans-shipment. In the nuclear age, we are stuck by our incapacity to do anything decisive in the game of Them and Us.

But, there is a gleam – a Christmas sparkle – at the end of the tunnel. It's provided by a comment of an American industrialist talking about our theme of the other week, the Japanese superiority in technology and labour-management relations. He said this week, 'It's not so much that their technology is all that superior but they spend 24 hours a day thinking about human relations'.

I suspect there's a lesson for all of us in this, whether it's the struggle between Them and Us at the arms control talks in Geneva or a factory manager resisting putting in a cafeteria where employers and employees will eat alike. It's a refreshing thought, anyway, that the Christian message this time should come from Japan.

On this note, may I ignore the new British greeting – when did 'Happy Christmas' come in? – and offer you the old British and the continuing American greeting, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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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