Fast Denounces U.N. Action In Korea as Blow to Peace

United Nations intervention in Korea is unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of a small nation, novelist Howard Fast charged last night before a capacity audience in Emerson Hall.

In reply, Edwin O. Reischauer, professor of Far Eastern Languages, defended the U.N. action as the only answer to a clear case of Soviet aggression.

"We have made a lot of blunders in Korea," said Reischauer, "but if any one thing was not a mistake, it was going into Korea."

Deriding Reischauer's claim that the Soviet Union had planned the Korean conflict, Fast called the term "Communist aggression" an exercise in "magical semantics."

"We must examine the mysterious proposition that there is some magic dust that makes people go into battle at the bidding of the Soviet Union," he said.

Fast then maintained that South Korea, not the Communist government of the north, actually precipitated the outbreak of the war referring constantly to newspaper clippings, he attributed the subsequent U.N. decision to intervene in Korea to an American fear that Japan might fall within the Communist sphere of influence. The resulting war boom precluded the possibility of Japanese trade with Red China, Fast insisted.

In answer to Fast's charge that South Korea and the United States were the real aggressors in Korea, Reischauer said, "Mr. Fast is still mixed up between a fact and a statement."

"There was outright aggression in Korea--an aggression engineered out of Russia," he continued. If the United States had not met this open challenge in Korea, said Reischauer, there would have been no hope for a workable international system.