TEE TABLET, March 3rd, 1951

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 197, No. 5780

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, MARCH 3rd, 1951

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES The Nations in the Presence o f the Greater Society i

ISLAM AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

The Reports o f a Developing Rapprochement THE TROUBLE ON THE RAILWAYS Background to the Threatened Strikes. By John Fitzsimons IN PRAISE OF PIGS A LETTER FROM ITALY

By Jorian Jenks

By Giorgio Asinari

THE CASE OF THERESE NEUMANN

By Letitia Fairfield

Mr. Hugh Seton Watson, in his important study, The East European Revolution, says in the preface :

STREAMLINING THE SATELLITES I F what the Czechs are now enduring is a process already familiar to Poles and Hungarians, Rumanians and Bulgarians, and, before them, to the various peoples of Russia, the Czechs are fortunate in that, coming last, their resistance is much more sympathetically and closely watched, and they have less of the feeling of being forgotten, and of being too often deliberately misunderstood by the outside free world, in whose understanding and support their hope for liberation must lie. The Czechs are the most westerly of the subjected peoples, with a considerable length of frontier with the American zone of Germany ; and it must be Western policy to keep that frontier as open as possible, and to frustrate the Communist attempts to seal it off. The imposition of Russian Marshals, Rossokovsky in Poland and Koniev in Czechoslovakia, to command the armies of these two anti-Communist peoples, is a measure of police control. The Russians know very well that neither Poles nor Czechs would fight for the Kremlin against the West : that, on the contrary, they would want to fight for the West, and the military structure of command is much more a prison structure, a way of holding prisoners of war in advance, so that they can be prevented from becoming combatants, partisans, wreckers of what would be very extended and exposed Russian lines of communication.

I t is only ju s t three years since the coup by which the Communists gained exclusive control in Prague, when they had already gained it in the other East European capitals ; and Czechoslovakia was the only country in which the first purges o f “ Titoist” deviationists had not been completed by the end of 1949, before so much attention was being paid to such matters in the Western Press. But the Prague defections are closely comparable to those of Rostov, the Communist Vice-Premier of Bulgaria, or of Rajk, the Communist Minister of the Interior in Hungary, both of whom were hanged at the end of 1949 ; or to those of a long list of less prominent party-members who suffered in a similar way for their quarrels within the party. It is a wrong judgment that likes to think that all Czechoslovaks are fundamentally closer to the West than other Central or East Europeans, and that it was therefore not at all surprising that Dr. d em en tis (who is in any case a Slovak) should in the end opt for the West as against Moscow. Rostov and Rajk had been leaders of the underground Communist Parties in Bulgaria and Hungary during the war, and were certainly not disposed in favour of the West, whatever ludicrous charges of spying on behalf of the Western Powers were preferred against them at their trials ; and Dr. dem en tis likewise was an undoubted Communist of the Moscow obedience from the time of his election to the Prague Parliament in 1936 to the time of his removal from office in March, 1950.

“ It is remarkable how much of current events in Eastern Europe is explained by even a little reading of Russian twentieth century history, of the works of Lenin and Stalin, and of the early history of the Comintern.” This is profoundly true, and it follows a frank avowal that until the last few years he had not read these necessary authors, and did not believe what the anti-Communist elements in Central Europe told him, because he thought it came either from unscrupulous people who wanted power themselves, or from the wealthy who had a vested interest in keeping what they held. In this he speaks for a whole generation which grew up in the ’thirties primarily alive to the ills of capitalist society ; but it remains an astonishing thing that in the England between the wars, an age which prided itself on its many facilities for being informed, a whole generation should have grown up passionately interested in international happenings, but neglecting the essential texts and studies which would have taught them so much. They were facing in the wrong direction, thinking of other evils and other enemies, and easily forgot that things are not necessarily therefore untrue because those who are saying them are interested in saying them and in having them believed. But it is also true that Lenin’s writings are bitter and unpalatable reading for Western social democrats, and progressives generally, because he saw them so clearly and so contemptuously as preconditioned to be used and then destroyed by Communism, as has happened over and over again. M. Gilson’s Retreat

M. Etienne Gilson, who, until about the middle of last year, was one of the leading exponents in Le Monde of the untimely and fallacious “neutralism” with which that newspaper has come to be associated, and who is now in Canada, at University College, Kingston, Ontario, has recently said, in an interview appearing in the Journal de Genève, that he “ will never set foot in France again, because France, like the rest of Western Europe, is destined to an irresistible Soviet occupation in the fairly near future.” He has also resigned his Chair at the Collège de France, a fact which his colleagues there learned only from the Press. His action has naturally produced a good deal of controversy, and his apologia in Le Monde was a sorry document, leading M. Mauriac, in the Figaro, to regret that a man accustomed to handling historical texts should have been inveigled into political journalism so late in life. Others have been less kind. The Figaro Littéraire denounced M. Gilson's attitude some weeks ago, and when he replied, Pierre Brisson, publishing his reply, commented th a t the original attack had been substan­