Even an atomic world would be easy and safe if all political choices were between freedom and slavery, progress and reaction, good and evil. The world is not safe or easy, because many of the choices are between slavery and more slavery, reaction and worse reaction, evil and more evil.
The U.S., far from perfection itself, has many political allies who are incompetent, reactionary, corrupt. But the U.S. has one transcendent political and moral responsibility: to prevent war by stopping the extension of Soviet power short of the point where it could make a victorious war. To discharge that duty, the U.S. needs allies—as clean as possible. But it needs allies—clean or dirty, just as Britain and the U.S. needed reactionary and tyrannical Russia against Hitler. U.S. opinion tends to whitewash some allies (as it whitewashed Russia in 1941-45) and to scold ineffectually at others (e.g., China). Either by wishful whitewashing or reckless scolding, the U.S. can weaken the anti-Soviet front and encourage Soviet aggression.
One U.S. ally (in a way) is Tito. What kind of a regime is he running? To find out, TIME sent its Paris Bureau Chief Andre Laguerre to Yugoslavia. This is his report:
IN a Belgrade café last week, Milica sneezed, and then smiled happily. A dark, sturdy girl, she had been discussing the police in Communist Yugoslavia. She explained her smile:
"We have a saying that whatever you are thinking before you sneeze will happen. So maybe we shall have more freedom."
Milica's wish is unlikely to be fulfilled. The only fact signified by her sneeze was the arrival of a cold wave after a mild winter. Snow was falling outdoors, and a bitter wind mocked the worn and flimsy clothing of the city-dwellers. Beyond Belgrade, from the crags of Montenegro to the grain-belt plain of the Voivodina, everywhere in the six federated Peoples' Republics of Yugoslavia (see map), men & women shivered.
I think I heard less laughter in Belgrade than in any other place I have ever visited.
The capital's slush, compounded partly of black Serbian mud, made walking hazardous. But most Belgraders walked; the city's insufficient trolley cars were so packed that the press called them sardine boxes. The homeward trek at nightfall conveys a strange sense of depressed urgency. Many Belgraders do not feel safe anywhere between their homes and their work; they flit off the streets like ghosts fleeing a graveyard at dawn. Here & there, watching the crowds from street corners or hotel lobbies, stood men either in uniform or in ankle-length black leather coats—which in the popular mind is the unofficial uniform of the dreaded security police, "Udruzenje Drzavne Bez-bednosti," called "Oodbah," formerly OZNA.
So depressing is Belgrade's atmosphere that I asked an enthusiastic young Communist official if he could show me some happy people. We went to the Kalemegdanska Terasa, a restaurant overlooking the Danube. A group of Dalmatians were singing folk songs. Some bored officers were sitting at tables and sipping wine and soda; a group of employees from a ministry were exchanging loud wisecracks. The restaurant was dirty and packed. Two youths fought over a vacated chair. I could sense a desire to escape, but neither gaiety nor contentment.
Enjoyment has no place unless