THE TABLET, January Qth, 1951

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 197, No. 5772

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, JANUARY 6th, 1951

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

A GRIM PARADOX

Mr. Foster Dulles and the Western Interest in Central Europe

ITALY AT THE TURN OF THE YEAR

Impressions o f a Visit. By Michael Derrick THE RED S.S. ENGLISH LIBERTY The “ Police” of Eastern Germany By Professor B . A . Wortley

THE AMERICANS AND KOREA Public Opinion in the United States. By Arnold Lunn THREE HOLY MARONITES CINEMA ON THE DEFENSIVE

By Donald Attwater

By G. C. Norman

WAKING UP

“ T7EW years in our history can have opened more gloomily.”

r So the Manchester Guardian opened its leading article on January 1st. Certainly, waking up can be a painful process, especially when the dreaming has been pleasant and the waking is caused by the presence o f intruders. So the British public is tempted to excessive depression as, in the cold light o f dawn, it realizes that it must leave its comfortable bed to face the arduous and dangerous exertion of the day. But it is much that the man is a t any rate not going to be murdered in his sleep. A t the New Year two years ago we had to record that unless 1949 was very much better than 1948 we were heading for catastrophe, and last year that 1949 had been a bad year, chiefly notable in history for what the West had not done. But now a t long last we can record the awakening. The speech in which Mr. Foster Dulles disposed of ex-President Hoover’s hankerings for retreat and isolation dwelt on the great wickedness of the whole system organized by the Kremlin : that it is the rule o f the few who dare not trust the many.

What is still imperfectly understood is how thoroughly and carefully the West was infected with Communism from the early ’thirties onwards ; how successfully their political parties o f the Left and their Government departments were infiltrated and colonized. The Americans are more alive to this than the British, because the penetration went further in America ; and the two sensational trials o f Alger Hiss in the last two years were an eye-opener to many Americans who had for long been taken in by the Communist campaign to discredit as unbalanced those who drew attention to the danger. Alger Hiss reached the inner circle o f American policy under Roosevelt ; he went to Yalta, and he was one o f the chief authors o f the cunning formula for “ unity Governments” in Poland and other countries which paved the way for Communist domination. He imposed upon Mr. Foster Dulles, as he did upon Mr. Dean Acheson, because he came out o f Harvard Law School with warm commendations from Mr. Justice Frankfurter. Yet he was shown a t his trial to have been a Soviet agent from the early ’thirties. Mr. Henry Morganthau’s right-hand man, in preparing the plan for the pastoralization o f Germany, was another concealed Communist, Harry Dexter White. But the greatest success o f the Communists who had infiltrated the State Department was their success in discrediting Chiang Kai-shek. There were other factors a t work. Chiang Kai-shek was badly surrounded and advised, and presumed too much on his indispensability to the Americans, because he never believed they could let themselves be persuaded th a t the Chinese Communists were not the Continental Moscow brand, but only agrarian reformers. I t was General Marshall himself,

as Ambassador to China, who took the decision in 1946 to stop large-scale aid to Chiang Kai-shek in order to seek an understanding with the Communists ; but the atmosphere in America had been skilfully prepared for this decision, as the general atmosphere was created which suggested that no price was too high to pay for Soviet partnership, and that, a t the right price, that partnership was forthcoming. The Popular Front in the United States

The New Dealers of the early ’thirties were ideal huntingground for the Communists. They were young, ambitious, intellectual, filled with disgust at a world in which the idealism that Woodrow Wilson had personified, and that had lived on in various forms o f pacifism, had lost the day. They found themselves in a world increasingly threatened with war, and actually experiencing great unemployment. They were drawn to think that radical solutions could never be too radical. Lenin’s taunt th a t the Bolshevik is one who seeks power and knows how to obtain it, and the Socialist one who would like power but does not know how to get it, while the Liberal does nothing about anything, stung them on the raw, for the Americans are a nation o f doers, who value action for its own sake. Although Communism is the complete negation o f Liberalism, to be an advanced Liberal was the first step towards eligibility for the Communist movement. Secret Communism ministered to the desire o f thwarted men to feel they were achieving something, and their conspiratorial activities and esoteric knowledge gave them a feeling o f superiority.

No one can understand the ’thirties and the ’forties, either in America or in Europe, who loses sight of the chronological order o f events, the abrupt and brilliantly justified reversal of Communist tactics from the barren preaching o f world revolution to the building o f Popular Fronts with Socialists and Liberals in the early ’thirties. Tactics which were themselves the result o f the obvious resurgence o f the Germans succeeded very swiftly in countries filled with the bitterness o f unemployment and offering ready texts for intellectuals whom it satisfied to preach that there must be a complete break with the past. The Communists encountered little prejudice when they offered themselves as Allies, and the Left Book Club in England had from the beginning a great Communist participation, while the Communists took the lead in exploiting the Spanish Civil War in a way that left lasting effects in circles much wider than those o f British Socialism. The ’thirties were a prelude. There was a great but temporary check during the disconcerting phase o f the Pact between Hitler and Stalin, but after Hitler’s invasion o f Russia the Communists were able to reap the full harvest o f all the