THE TABLET, December U r i , 1950
THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW
PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA
VOL. 196, No. 5770
FOUNDED IN 1840
LONDON, DECEMBER 23rd, 1950
SIXPENCE
PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER
« MUNIFICENTISSIMUS DEUS ” The Bull Proclaiming The Assumption Translated by Mgr. R. A. Knox
« TO MEN OF GOODWILL ”
Mutual Tolerance in the Free Society A MASTER OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
By the Abbot of Downside ENDS AND MEANS IN EDUCATION
By the Right Rev. George Andrew Beck
A PAGE OF VERSE
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE
By Joseph Christie, S .J .
THE HOLBEIN EXHIBITION
on to say that a t the base o f all these contradictions lies fear, because war has meant quite a different thing to Americans who fight it a t a distance, and to Europeans who experience it as occupation. But he concludes that in the European scale o f values it is better to be atomized than sovietized, better to be dead with Jan Masaryk than alive with Cardinal Mindszenty.
PRELUDES AND DISHARMONIES P RESIDENT TRUMAN, in his Proclam ation o f a State o f emergency, declared that the country is in great danger; and he has asked Congress for funds to build eight new centres fo r Government Departments in the Washington area, sufficiently far apart to need separate atom bombs. This is commendable realism, which the Americans wait in vain to see reciprocated on this side. Defence by dispersal, one o f the main answers to the atom bomb, is being eagerly taken up in America, and the different States are competing in drawing attention to the advantages they offer to industry ; all sorts o f Cinderella places take new hope when their geographical disadvantages can now be represented as positive advantages. The movement helps the inland cities as against the coast, which use to offer a great advantage in cheap sea transport, but is now exposed to the submarine bringing the bombs, a picture firmly fixed in the American mind. The complement to this policy o f dispersal inside America for defence is the creation o f widely dispersed centres for retaliation in this hemisphere.
I t is what has happened to the Central Europeans th a t has so profoundly demoralized the Western Europeans, precisely because they are people o f their own kind, and because they were so lightly abandoned, and now the fear on the mainland is that the American strategy all too easily envisages an initial retreat, only the retention o f bridgeheads in Britain or Spain, and th a t in fundamental military conceptions in Washington the European peoples and European land are “expendables.” General Eisenhower has to allay these feelings, while the Europeans have to reassure the Americans that they do not expect to be carried limply to their own salvation.
I t would be so very much more natural if it were the other way round, if it were the Europeans who had to prod the Americans to wake up and do more, if Europe were a ferment o f defence and the Americans, safe a t a distance and without personal knowledge o f what Russian domination can mean, were being slow to rouse themselves. But a t Brussels Mr. Acheson is the prodder, and there is still an impression o f sluggish reluctance to do what will certainly have to be done to gear the national economies to adequate defence. The Europeans have refused to be intim idated by the Soviet declaration that it will not tolerate any German rearmament, very serious though this declaration may prove. To be intim idated is hopeless, and the risks have to be faced.
The nature o f European fears was well summed up in Le Monde by Maurice Duverger as follows : “America is uneasy and irritated a t the European contradictions. Europe has entered the Atlantic Alliance, but keeps a nostalgia for neutrality. Europe wants to be protected against aggression, but wants to see the struggle against the aggressor in Korea abandoned. Europe asks for arms but does not push on quickly with her own rearmament. Europe needs soldiers, but refuses those o f Germany. Europe demands priority over Asia but plunges into the adventure o f Indo-China. Europe refuses Communism but nourishes the germs o f Communism. Europe fears the Soviet but remains open to Russian invasion. . . . How can the Americans understand the Europeans when the Europeans are so confused themselves ? ” When in this passage M. Duverger writes, all through, Europeans, does not he really mean Frenchmen ? The Dutch and the Belgians would jo in with the Spaniards in saying so. He goes
Meanwhile we have an immediately critical period to pass through in which our own negligence has greatly increased the temptation to the Soviet to use their present huge superiority. All the commentators have to use adjectives like “ pitiful” for the forces the West could produce tomorrow, three years after the signing o f the Brussels Pact and creation o f what was called in 1948 jo in t Western Defence. The position is not quite so bad as it might appear ; the Russians have immediate striking power, but they have not prepared the ground, and the lesson o f Napoleon and Hitler is there before them to show how fatal it is for an army to spread like a flood over a vaster area than it can hold down. I f the Germans refuse to be hurried it is because they consider that nothing adequate can be improvised in the coming months ; and if the Russians refrain from attack now, it will be for larger considerations o f world strategy, and from a clear realization that the potential, eventual, military power of their opponents is incomparably greater than theirs, and that they could easily re-enact H itler’s history o f early triumphs, due to superior preparedness a t the outset, ending in overwhelming disaster as the other side achieved first mobilization and then striking power. The Lotus Years
It was as well that the Government escaped from Parliament for a month with Mr. Churchill’s words ringing in their ears : “The months slip quickly away all the time. Several years have already been wasted, frittered away. The overwhelming Russian military power towers up against us, committees are multiplied, papers are written, words are outpoured, and one declaration succeeds another, but nothing in the slightest degree in proportion to the scale o f events or to their
