By Rayarama Das Brahmachary

On Tuesday evening, October 8, Dr. Benjamin Spock received the Gandhi Peace Award at the Community Church of New York. This award is a far-distant poor relative of the Nobel Prize, which went this year to the less controversial figure of a French jurist. There was no big money gift at the Community Church, as is the case at the Oslo affair, though there was a nice medallion, the weight of which pleased Spock. Nor was there any press to speak of at the Gandhi Award, the New York Times didn't do a "Man in the News" piece on Spock as it did on Rene Cassin, the world's governments didn't-and wouldn't dare praise the American pediatrician on the floor of the U.N. General Assembly.

There are other differences, far deeper ones, between these two personalities and their approaches to peace; though, as we'll see, the differences don't go quite deep enough.

The eminence of M. Cassin stems essentially from his part in formulating the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights. This document is such a marvel of compromise and euphemism that not one member of the General Assembly voted against it when it was adopted in 1948-the year Russia sealed her iron curtain across Eastern Europe. The Declaration deals with such glossy fancies as the universal right to life, liberty and security of person; freedom from arbitrary arrest; freedom of movement, residence, speech, press, assembly and worship. These were the human rights which M. Cassin and his associates felt could be accepted by all nations, religions and races unanimously. And they were-in theory. On paper, where nobody has to get serious.

The United Nations, naturally, has no power to enforce laws, much less standards of morality, upon its member states, but the Declaration was meant to focus the weight of world opinion on specific issues. In the words of one writer: "…when the Assembly of the United Nations gives its judgment, that judgment has a thundering authority as the voice of mankind."

The "thundering authority" theory is the bedrock of the United Nations and its mission of peace today. It is a forum rather than an actual court of universal justice, and the notion that such a forum carries real power is the latest thing in opiates for the people. Of course, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Dominican Republic and Vietnam, the Middle East and quite a number of other conflicts-more than fifty in all since the Second World War ended-have shown us that forums don't mean all that much. Men like Rene Cassin construct their wonderful compromises and legalisms, and try to speak to mankind in terms of fair play and honor, while the people who actually run things go on with their brutal business unaffected.