TU B T A B L E T , J u ly 22,id, I960

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 196, No. 5748

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, JULY 22nd, 1950

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE NEW RESOLUTION The Clarity o f Mr. John Foster Dulles MAN MADE TO MEASURE Reflections on a United Europe Congress. By Douglas Woodruff A PARIS LETTER THE CHURCH OVER JORDAN The Change o f Government Catholic Life in the Hashemite Kingdom

A FAMILY LIVING WAGE The Responsibility of the Trade Unions. By Michael P . Fogarty

THE HUGUENOTS Their Fourth Centenary in England. By J . J . Dwyer forces, that this is much more than an American affair ; and so it is very tempting to invoke the United Nations. It is important, therefore, to bear in mind that it was only an accident that enabled the United States to invoke and use the United Nations, whose rules were especially drawn up to ensure that it could never be used against Soviet aggression. China and the Security Council

CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE P RESIDENT TRUMAN has naturally refused to let the Kremlin play once again the familiar game, which served them so well for years after 1945, of selling for a high price promises to cease doing something they had no right to do in the first place, creating ugly situations, and then demanding large concessions in return for alleviating them. The military operations in Korea were but one of a long chain o f such things, undertaken to see what the understanding and temper of the Western world might be, and undertaken with the idea that perhaps, as has so often happened, the Kremlin could take and keep, provided it had the boldness to take, but with the further idea that, as a second best, a deal could always be done in the name of peace, and some other advantage gained in exchange. The Americans have replied correctly, first by taking up the challenge in military terms, and next by refusing to make diplomatic concessions in return for the abandonment o f a military aggression.

But American, like British, diplomacy is still continually in danger o f confusion, because its own long-established categories in which it sees international relations are quite inadequate for coping with this new reality which has grown up in the world since the October Revolution of 1917. The words “War” and “Peace,” the conception of two distinct conditions, one of avowed enmity, with no relations except through a third Power, and one of friendly relations, with all sorts o f established courtesies and diplomatic immunities, belongs to a world which the Communists have destroyed. The Communists wage war the whole time, but they wage it with far more weapons than nation States, use a part of the population in each country whose ruin they plan, and have some of the populations for their agents, but many more as a field for intellectual and moral sabotage. It is good to sabotage a ship or a factory, but it is even better to reach and corrupt the minds and hearts of the people by whom the ships and factories are built. It is a form of warfare which extends down to the schoolroom as well as through the Trade Union, and the Kremlin can calculate that, provided it maintains its pressure and increases its material resources by enslaving more populations and collecting the product o f their forced labours, it can more and more compel the Western world not merely to live much more austerely, through having to devote more and more labour and resources to defence, but can also compel non-Communist societies, as a mere matter o f survival, to curtail many of the liberties of which they are most proud. It can compel them to institute screenings and tests and supervisions, because the Communist agent has to be detected and excluded.

The Americans are naturally anxious to see other troops beside them in Korea, to demonstrate, if only with token

I f Russia returns to the Security Council, still more if the Chinese Communists are allowed to sit there, the United Nations will be paralyzed as before, and the American administration must now decide ; either something new must be formed as the basis o f a standing alliance o f anti-Communist countries, or if the United Nations continues as a meeting place, there should be no more talk of its flying a flag, or being represented as in the field. Undoubtedly there are many small countries whose Governments and representatives are much readier to fall into line with United Nations resolutions than they would be to enter a new organization. Even to the British Government it has been some advantage to be able to invoke United Nations obligations as a way of combining military action with the proof of pacific intentions. This is still truer of smaller and more divided countries, where the populations do not know that the United Nations can do nothing except during periods o f Russian abstention, and this abstention cannot be predicted or relied upon.

We trust that Mr. Bevin, in his sea-side convalescence, has come to reconsider the wisdom of his precipitate recognition of Communist China. The material benefits which made British merchants press for this recognition have not been reaped. The Communist Government proceeds, as it might have been expected to proceed, strictly on a basis of suiting itself, trading where it wants to trade, treating foreign interests in the light o f its own immediate internal convenience, and not discriminating in favour of nationals o f countries which have accorded recognition and against those whose countries have withheld it.

But there is, in any event, no sort o f need to couple recognition with support of Communist China as a candidate for the Security Council. We have now had five years’ experience o f Communist methods in the Security Council. The original idea of including China was part o f the thinking in nineteenthcentury Great Power terms which has been found so very irrelevant. We are plainly entitled to oppose Communist China, on the ground of defective intention ; that if they came to the Security Council they would not come with the intention of carrying out the essential purposes for which it was created.

As the inescapable need for re-armament forces itself on