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THE CHINA MAIL, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14, 1950.
Behind the Iron Curtain--No. 1:
LIFE IN ONE OF
ONE OF RUSSIA'S
PUPPET STATES
mean
Where they
Editor in Chief .................. Reporters & General Office
24384
82812
talk about liberty, and really tyranny.
(four lines)
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HONG KONG IS
BY-PASSED
|
Where they march to the theatres in threes...
G
J
This is the first in a series of articles describing fe in one of Russia's puppet states. The author has only recently test Hungary, where he lived and worked for many years.
Then the members form up in threes outside the secretary's office and are morched off to en-
Where a trade union card is n Joy themselves. matter of life and death,
How do people live behind the Iron Curtain? I cannot spent about Russla, because I have never been there.
But I do know about Hungary: I lived and worked there for
years.
Hungary is one of Russin's pup- pets, a "people's democrney." And the first thing to notice about this people's demoerney is that nobody can tell you what it is. Lots of people will spend a lot of time trying to define it., Georgy Dimi- The Secretary of State for troy, who died in Russia while the Colonics and the War under medical treatment (some
them people think his malady wan Secretary delivered selves with unusual volubility calibre 45), once spent more than small hole in the head: about on the subject of Malayaan hour at a Party Congress try- when they returned to Lon- ing to define a people's democracy, dun. They made no reference He was not specially successful. whatever to Hồng Kong ex- cept on the necessity of building married quarters for the troops here. Since it is mostly bad news nowadays that makes for publicity, Hong Kong has no reason to begrudge the overwhelming prominence of Malaya. In deed the longer we can go along on our quiet way the better while we await the outcome of the new turn in the situation in China, and see more clearly what it may mean in trade improvement or otherwise and, let us hope, in more neighbourly rela tions.
Some of the political cognoscenti have made it clear they would like a little more light on their favourite topic; the question of a Con- stitution for the Colony, The Committee of the Reform Club were out of luck in their
It sounds good. The right
tr
I would not attempt a definition. I don't suppose my friends in Hungury would attempt it either. lut we can tell you how it works, work, for instance, is constitution. sily guaranteed to every citizen But if a citizen cre his factory-and res, including personal
is denounced in are many and spite for denunciation-hla trade union card in withdrawn. Without trade union card he cannot get any kind of work. Without trade
union card he cannot get any kind of State relief. So e slarves,
The wise citizen So the wine elilzen takes good care not to be denounced. So he
toes the party line.
And so the
people's democracy presents united front to the world.
is s
It is simple as all that. It nudaciously, as brilliantly. successful as it sounds.
By perverting trusted polities ideals, like democracy and the right to work, it has produced
But nights are dark in Hungary. as they are everywhere else, and it is not always that a full muster
their dose of culture. reaches the free seats to swallow.
Cinemas mostly show Russian lins, although there are castonal French and British ple-
tures,
The Russian
ост
ilms are very unpopular. A friend
of mine **** once went out of curiosity be- cause he had heard that there were never more than five people present at a Russian found this wos untrue-the night he went there were seven other people in the place besides him- self.
Alm. He
"Hamlet" problem
"Hamlet" caused a great pro blem. It was immensely popular and played for weeks. Its po- 110 sign of pularity showed diminishing so it had to be taken
off.
Sport is also becoming "organ- Ised under the trades unlons and Sportsmen must be ideologically the Secretary of State for Sport,
according to Communist standards and are not allowed to
pure
Worse than that, these matches |
The Red moll of the jungle
were causing an interest in the By GERRARD BARRY Four bandits-one a lovely woman-walked recently into
West which could became danger- ous to political orthodoxy. Sa take part in international com- they were withdrawn from the petitions if they aren't.
coupons and the names of Rus- Blan teama substituted.
In any case, they can leave the country only If they intend to re- turn and if they have an odds on chance of winning.
The exception to this rule is a visit to Russin. There, they must defest gracefully acknowledge and come back singing the praises of Russian skill. Hungarian tennis player who did Asboth, the
so well at Wimbledon, found that the standard of tennis in Moscow was higher than anything he had seen elsewhere.
Football is still very popular in Hungary. The State-run football poal-called the "Tato"-has wide clientele though the per line is much higher than in cost Great Britain, and the stakes re- turned much smaller.
the tipsters, but at least they
These were even less known to
were idealogically safe,
Foreign broadcasts
In Hungary they all listen to there is no law against it, but for foreign radio broadcasts. So for
all that one dare not do it too openly.
There is a story told of a countrymon who came up lo Budapest in the evening, stopped u policeman and asked him th ቦ time, The policemon, without
at a block looking at his watch, glanced up of flats and said: "About half-post eight."..
"Marvellous," said the peasant, "how do you know that?"
"Well,"
Since there were not sumelent Hungarian matches of doubtful outcome to moke up a good the Scottish and English leagues coupon, at one time games from į "they've all closed their windows said the pollcenina, to the London programine rausf were put in.
be coming on."
This caused complications be cause tipsters knew of Arsenal and Rangers and could make a fair attempt at saying the namer Leicester City. Even if they list. but were hopelessly stuck with ened to the BBC they still could not check their coupons.
Family life
The Australian housewife is finding more and more rea- sons now to sing about her work. She cannot buy rice yet for her rice-puddings, and she cannot get cream, but al most everything else is get- ting back to pre-war normal.
She has 10
shopping queues and almost no rationing. Butter and tou are still "on coupons,"
but everything else is "free" and available in unlimited quantities. Prices are all up, but so are war greater a worry than I used what words
its pitiful side. Budapest work- It is a good story. But it har
ers may not be believing Com munists but there are a lot of good actors.
And the really tragic part of it Is that they have to be.
in Australia
The
with
ing, cooks with a gas-stove of and fruit (stewed or tinned) English design and Australlan with fee-cream or custard. manufacture. She has a water- only really Australian dish is the she wants an electric washing-perched on top of it, or, alterna- healer over bath and sink, and grilled steak with two fried eggs machine for the laundry. Sho tively, steak smothered
stewed oysters,
Dinner at 6 p.m., then, with the children in bed, a quiet night of sewing or reading, or perhaps a couple drop in for cards (bridge or poker).
-By Arthur Morley
It's not the routine that would ment, but Mrs. Jones finds it send you delirious with excite
on the nerves.
attempts to buttonhole the topsy-turvy land where no-one wages, so the family budget is naj it yet, so she still dees her laundry comfortable, pleasant and
War Secretary on the subject. When told that Mr. Strachey came here solely to discuss the problems of his own Ministry, they argued that as a member of the Cabinet he is responsible in part for any Constitutional reform in Hong Kong. Actually though of Cabinet rank, he is not member of the Cabinet, in which the armed services are represented now by the overali Defence Minister.
&
knows any
more
mean. You can read the Party and you could reasonably think text. books ant the constitution
that here is the Promised Land. You have to live in it to know that the reality is the bondage in Egypt.
It is a bondage that takes lu every phase of life. It even takes In going to the plctures.
Party secretaries Bre given blocks of free tickets for theatres, for instance, and the tickets are distributed among the members.
their lesson. The Malays boycotted this Constitution, and the Government had to get out another Constitution which, though it was the outcome of much consultation with all concerned, still did not satisfy everybody.
And
be.
to
most other parts of the world, Compared with her sisters in Mrs. Albert Jones, of suburban Sydney, is what she would de- scribe as "on a good wicket."
"Home body'
cannot afford the £100-odd for in a gas-boiler and concrete tuba.
Early start
',
easy
a Malay woman's hut, sliot child and stabbed
one
another.
Then, as the screaming mother fled in horror, the woman bandit killed her.
That bandit 18 25-year-old
Sainslah
Boerstmon, Malaya's lending gun-moll, who has a price of 2,000 Muluyan dollars on her bead.
I must have seen the young Samsinh many times in the days when I used to visit the Malay yernacular Kampong schools in the 'thirties.
She must have been like any other
Malay schoolgirl a laughing golden-brown child, with deep black eyes and a golden anklet ring her tiny feet,
She was lovely and Innocent then and I wonder how often white women, looking at her her friends playing happily in the sun, must have frafel :
"They're lovely. What
ntid
a pity they have to grow up!"
What a pity Samsiah had to grow up. It has cost the lives of scures of white people and natives.
Samstal first came Into prominence when Boerstman, her Indonesian jouranlist husband, was given a sti ja sentence for sedition in Perak, the state where Samaluh was born. 15he fled from Perak Bustwards to Pahang and to-day hunts the jungle as co- leader with Chi' Dar bin Abdullah, also from Perak, of a gang 40 or 50 strong.
A
When she visits the towns along the Singapore-Siam rail- way in the Triang-Jerantut area she dresses in a gally-coloured sarong that reaches to her ankles,
and
perches a red hibiscus flower in her hair.
She dusta her face with rico powder, blackens her eye-brows with kohl, and wears organge- yellow lipstick.
Under her sarong, strapped to a bell about her waist, hang two hand
grenades.
In the jungle she wears Com-. munist bandits' uniform --- shirt and slacks fastened at the ankles, And the grenades hang from her Aalst in full view,
On the mountainous fringes of Pabung live the Sakals. They are Umid, lovable, backward people.
Exactly which deeds of violence committed in the Triang-Jerantut engloren are due to Samslah and her -- What are the main difficulties gang is not known, but these of housekeeping. Rent is 30s, to atrocities are almost certainly her.
work: All told, she has not a
for bad £2
an average cottage. fairly con- Furniture is dear, and so are do- home; comfortable and
mestic machines vealent, but not yet up to the
and gadgets. standard of the Americans. SI.:
Home-building is a heart-breaker in is improving it, however,
because of rising costs-you can usually is buying a new gadgets £2,000 good-bye If you
build a two-bedroom home. on time-payment, as they call the hire-purchase scheme, Her current purchase is a pressure- cooker (26).
and
Mrs. Jones, our typical house- wife, lives in a red brick detach- ed cottage in a middle-class resi- dential suburb. She has twa children and her tradesman hus- band earns £0 a week. She goes Her day starts at 7 a.m. Break- to the cinema on average
followed one fast is porridge,
J
Home builders
A lot of Australian couples are building their own homes, at by week-ends and in their spare
One day a gang broke, inlo a Sakai vilinge, dragged out 34 of the natives, forced them at gun- point to dig their graves, then shot the defenceless natives into them.
WHA
night each fortnight, she spends bacon and eggs or boiled eggs for me, with the housewife-acting stable was killed. a few hours each week in her all hands. Husband buys his as general hod-carrier and buil-
garden and she does her housework.
She has a char to do ironing er
cleaning for four hours each week and she is saving for a 10-h.p. cor..
time.
lunch (28, Gd.), and the children der's assistant, own
They seem to take cut-lunches, with an apple enjoy it, and certainly enjoy a or banana, to their State school | sense of personal accomplish- (free). They buy, milk at school ment. to round out the meal.
All told,
Australia's typical With the family off for the Mr. Jones doesn't have a bad day, Mrs. Jones spends the morn-
The climate is mild; there Mrs. Jones tends to be more of ing on her housework, made are the beaches and near-by the latest developments in a homebody than her opposite light by her post-war vacuum- | countryside for week-end relaxa- Malaya indicate that this numbers in some countries. Her cleaner (£23), which polishes as tion. thorny problem is still very so she is not so close to her neigh- and fruiterer call during
Buburb is more thinly populated well as cleans, Baker, milkman
And if she much alive and as dangerous bours. She lacks the social con- morning. Bread is 7d, for a 21b. domestic help (malds are as ever to stability.
tacts of any local,” as Australians loaf, and you can get It in all scarce as the proverbial hen's Malaya, of course, has regard the presence of women in shapes, sizes and colours, from teeth), she has come to regard racial problems that do not a hotel bar as being wrong and crisp while rolls to big whole-pitching in and doing one's own work as being part of the natural exist here-apart altogether even immoral.
order of things,
meal loaves.
the
It was also contended that. political stability is an essen- tial feature of the defence system. That is true enough, though it is equally true that the creation of Constitutions does not always make either for harmony or for stability, The most remarkable feature of the position is the secre- tiveness observed on almost all sides in the Government, and the apparent lack of general interest on the part of the general public, who seem quite content to leave the matter to small groups whose pet hobby it is.
from the dire emergency Consequently Mrs. Jones apends. Mük is 10d, a quart, and Mrs. The most significant recent which now necessarily takes a lot of time in her home; takes Jones gets quarts. Fruit and utterance оп the question precedence of everything. As pride in it and entertains in it. vegetables are not cheap. Lettuce was the statement extorted Mr. Griffiths said with blunt She has two bedrooms, a living may cast from 4d. to 18, depend
room, dining room, verandah,| Ing upon the season; tomatões ls. from the Minister of State for truth, unless the jungle war kitchen and laundry; all on one lb. But bananas and pineapples the Colonies, Mr. Dugdale by is won talk of Constitutions floor and usually with large pawpaws and apples and oranges a Labour back-bencher who and political reforms will be windows.
are fairly inexpensive--and can buy them almost all the year. may perhaps have been "in- quite superfluous. Mystifica- She has a small electric re- You don't have to go shopping spired" by interested circles|tion over the silence and in-frigerator, but, generally speak-i for these things--home deliveries here. He indicated/
that activity that have-fallen úpon Whitehall is leaving it to the local scene would pro- Hong Kong, and would not bably be dispelled, at least in impose upon the community part, by the assumption that here some form of Govern- the chief source of anxiety in ment they were not yet ready cautious minds is not the ex- to accept. The indication was tent of the suffrage, though that important elements in that can be serious enough in Hong Kong still differ on the the production of controversy, matter, as they did when it but the danger of direct elec- was a much liver tople than tions and of pressue from out- it is at present and as, no side.
Jobless graduates
you
are the standard thing, the fruito" always has his sample baskets loaded.
At the shops
After lunch Mix. Jones goes to America's universities and the local shopping centre. Butcher colleges (will produce a record first stop. There is always a wids crop of graduates this year. It choice, but she has to watch
prices closely. will include the peak wave of young ex-Servicemen who went to college at Government pense after the war.
Plenty of roasting fowls, but ex-they're too dear at 1'is. Od. Leg of lamb is 9. 6d. so Mrs. Jones decides on corned beef, In June more than 1,250 Insti- tútions of higher learning will. Enough for one hot meal, one award 187,000 degrees. This is cold meal and some sandwiches. 4,000 more than last year, and costs Ta. Gd. She gets sixpenny-
168,000 more than in 1948.
worth of soup, meat (beef shin) and is, worth of pork. sausages,
Mira. Jones could not get in the Then the grocer, with his, shelves loaded with all the goods
| years just after the war. Biscuits
doubt, they still do. There is, One of the local bodies, in- for example, the different; deed, made the review of the eniphasis placed by some Treaties one of its planks. To people on the proposed transform a diplomatic issue Municipal Council and by which is merely potential, but others on the Legislative not actual, into a capital ques- Council, and the dispute on] tion of domestic policy would But, writes Clifford Hulme, for breakfast. who is to get voting rights. be disastrous. That is one of many of the graduates will ade On the other hand, there is the reasons why the Malayan leans who were seeking work in themselves to the 4,129,000 Amer- a feeling that the Colonial rather than the Singapore March. Office is dodging the post type of Constitution would be and exploiting what is, after all, not such a bad pretext in order to avoid possible fur ther complications. It has not always been so squeamish the Constitution imposed of demagoguery, the forma comers will be tough, and there is children, School is over at 1.30 Home again, to wait for the upon Malaya Immediately tion of Parties, and the habits great concern for workers over p.m. Then there le dinner to after the war is a case in of the hustings with only a to who, partly because of pen, cook--much the same radipes and point. But the very unhappy feeble respons on the part in plans, are finding it more cooking methods. Britain's
difiquitous work once thai with mea „perhaps tought i of the electoratë.
conn
more suitable as a temporary young people leaving secondary fruits, vegetables, soups, cheeses, At the same time, thousands of are back so gre tinned meats, solution. The first gives re-schools will want work. The June sausages, matches, cigarettes, presentation to practically total of unemployed therefore is every form of Interest, and expected to exceed 6,000,000. activity without the dangers
Job, competion for the new-
Quiet
↑ routine
cannot get much.
14
A NEW
In March this year a train deralled Fouin of Men' takab after an explosion. A con-
In October last year two people were killed and 10 others injured when bandits stopped a train between Jerantut and Men-. takab,
The day before the same ban- dits lits robbed one rubber estate and killed two Chinese on second.
A month earlier 15. people... including two Europeans were kllled when bandita attacked Kuala Krau on that same railway
line. The town was occupied by the bandits, the telephone wires rut, the rallway track torn up and the police statlon burned down.
But the list could be extended almost indefinitely. No wondur there is that price of 2,000 dollars on her head.
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