T H E T A B L E T , December 2nd, 1950

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 196, N o . 5767

LONDON, DECEMBER 2nd, 1950

SIXPENCE

FOUNDED IN 1840

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

ONE WORLD AGAIN The Prerequisites o f the Colombo Plan THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS IQ . Re-education without Theology. By Douglas Woodruff A TURN FOR THE BETTER A LETTER FROM PARIS Our Special Correspondent at Strasbourg reports By a Paris Correspondent SOCIAL SECURITY : THE PHRASE WHY WORDSWORTH LIVES

By Christopher Hollis, M .P .

By Gerard Meath, O .P .

THE CHINESE ATTACK N EITHER Mr. Bevin nor Mr. Dean Acheson on Wednesday minimized the gravity of the latest happenings in Korea, although Mr. Bevin had to make a statement specially framed to reassure a section o f his own followers, whose attitude provides a needless complication.

the dynamic and unresting nature of the Soviet ambitions.

The Chinese delegates had no sooner arrived a t Lake Success than their language there, and the acts of their Government in Korea, bore out to the full the more pessimistic expectations and forebodings. We are witnessing now the fruits of the work on which M. Molotov has been specially engaged ever since he passed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Mr. Vishinsky in order to devote himself to extending the Kremlin’s power in Asia. The large-scale attack by the Chinese Communists which has driven back the United Nations armies and exposed them to serious perils made an entirely new and much graver situation, not only for the American Government but for every government in the Atlantic Pact. What the Kremlin has already achieved through the Chinese Communists is to halt the recovery of the non-Communist world, to compel every government to devote more of its resources to weapons of defence, which at the best will not be used. It has increased the strain on every economy and the internal tension which has to be faced with rising costs and shortages in every land. These in themselves are great positive achievements ; they are the Kremlin’s reply to the steady progress which the Western world had made, progress which justified the retiring American Ambassador, Mr. Lewis Douglas, in saying a t the beginning of the month, a t his farewell speech : “The march of Communism in Europe has been arrested and turned back,” and that “however real and menacing the dangers that lurk in the unknown future, the European estate and conditions in the Western communities today reflect a period of tangible political and economic recuperation.” As Western Europe recuperates, it inevitably gathers attractive power as a magnet, and makes harder the task of the Kremlin and its agents in keeping Eastern Europe insulated at a far lower level of personal liberty and economic well-being. The discipline has been steadily intensified, but the desertions have continued, and when Mr. Dean Acheson gives a warning to watch Europe now that the United States is plainly to be preoccupied in Asia and a Communist China is being used for this purpose. There have been many indications, large and small, that the Soviet programme in Europe has been more than once revised and the time-table shortened. What the Kremlin sees in Western Europe is more recovery than the Marx-Lenin text-books allowed for, but at the same time more political disunity, a greater degree of reckless underpreparedness, which is a survival, dangerously protracted, from the days when the West chose not to recognize

The news from China and all the large developments which will follow from it are the most eloquent commentary on what has been taking place a t Strasbourg about which our Special Correspondent writes. They are also a commentary on the delays which have held up the Atlantic Powers in creating or, as it may now be, in improvising land forces. It is sufficiently clear that there must be both, national armies and European army, as there is a United Nations army in the field today in Korea, and that the special business of the European army must be to hold the European frontier in Germany. It will be quite in keeping with the tactics that the Kremlin habitually uses towards governments and public opinion, just as it does towards individual prisoners, if abrupt alternations of hope and depression are carefully arranged to succeed each other. The propaganda for peace is carefully correlated and timed with the military action which so wantonly precipitated the Korean crisis. There are plenty of people in this country who will draw the wrong moral from what has just happened, and treat it as corroborating Lord Salisbury’s not very happily-timed suggesttion o f a conference with Stalin. Of this Lord Vansittart wrote in the Manchester Guardian on Tuesday, pointing out the extreme danger for the West of being inveigled into tacitly accepting the present enslavement o f the Central and Eastern European people, by offering an agenda turning on German and Austrian treaties. To abandon Eastern Europe is to destroy an essential equilibrium which must be restored. The Bavarian Elections

The Bavarian Elections have left the Christian Democrats, the C.S.U., only one seat ahead of the Socialists, 64-63. The C.S.U. and the Bavarian Party ought to be one party, and not two. The Socialist gains are partly due to a swing of the pendulum, to high prices, lack of coal and houses. But it was, as in Hesse, mainly due to rearmament, where the Socialists can attract a good deal o f support by representing Dr. Adenauer as too accommodating towards the West. The German fear is lest they are used as expendable troops, under-armed cannon-fodder, to break the first shock of the mechanized Red Army. While the Socialists are at least as averse as any other Germans to a German Army, because that will mean the reappearance of German Generals, who would inevitably become political figures, Germans are also afraid of being included in a European Army with small units and no high officers to protect their interests or prevent their being sacrificed. These are some of the anxieties which are felt today but will be increasingly allayed as, but only as, highly mechanized troops arrive in Western Germany and defensive forces are built up. The knowledge th a t they had got a lead, that they were, as Goering put it, a