The Lords & the Light

"Such light," Laborite Lord Pakenham/- told Britain's House of Lords last month during a debate on atomic energy, "as has been thrown on dark places has shown them to be even darker than was supposed." The benighted areas referred to were the minds of Russians.

Last week the darkness proved deeper than even the Russians supposed. High-ranking officers in the Red army were reported to be neglecting their Marx and Lenin, and the official army paper Red Star felt obliged to issue a warning. "Soviet generals," it announced, "who fail to pursue such studies will lose out in assignments to responsible military posts." In Britain, where the Lords this time were debating Communist aggression in Western Europe, Lord Pakenham had a word of enlightenment about that as well.

"During the Council of Foreign Ministers," he recalled, "during one of the more pleasant--or shall I say, least unpleasant--moments, I found myself talking to Mr. Molotov in the presence of [Mr. Bevin]. Mr. Molotov asked me whether I had studied the works of Karl Marx. I replied that I had, but that I was anything but a Marxist. Foreign Minister Molotov suggested that one was unlikely to find a good Marxist in the House of Lords. Mr. Bevin then put in: 'That is just where you are wrong. The House of Lords are the only people in England who have the time to read Karl Marx.'"

/- Great grandnephew of Major General Sir Edward Michael Pakenham, who was killed by General Andrew Jackson's men at New Orleans in 1815.

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