TEE T A B L E T , Juna 30th, 1951

i t

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 197, N o . 5797

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, JUNE 30th, 1951

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE FRENCH QUEST The Constitution Not Yet Viable

THE MAN WHO JUDGES THE HUNGARIAN BISHOPS

, The Testimony of a Hungarian Lawyer. By Matthias Vészy

THE MIND OF JULIAN MARIAS A Catholic Disciple o f Ortega. By Edward Sarmiento IN QUEST OF JOAD “LE DIABLE ET LE BON DIEU”

By Arnold Lunn

By Daniel-Rops

THE ENCYCLICAL “EVANGELII PRzECONES”

A Summary o f the New Encyclical on the Missions : II

DETERIORATION IN PERSIA M R. MORRISON’s announcement on Tuesday of the sending o f h .m .s . Mauritius to the Persian Gulf was heard in cold silence on the Labour benches, with so much palpable doubt and distaste that Mr. Phillips Price had to get up and say that there were Honourable Members on the Government side of the House who entirely approved of the step. It is one which cannot on any account be termed provocative. Mr. Morrison showed himself a little clearer and firmer than a week ago, and there .is no disposition to judge him harshly for events which were primarily Mr. Bevin’s responsibility, in the last months of Mr. Bevin’s failing health and attention. But, even so, Mr. Morrison, before he became Foreign Secretary, was the second or third man in the Government, with an unusual degree of responsibility for what the Cabinet did or failed to do.

readiness to talk, fully and exhaustively, with no subject barred, with the Soviet Union. It is, of course, true that they must never relax their vigilance or their preparations, and that they must always expect the battle for the human mind to be waged as unrelentingly and as unscrupulously in all fields. But it is also true that it is by ideas that the world is divided, and that the world has nothing to lose, and perhaps something to gain, from widening every occasion for the most public debate, the more fundamental and philosophical the better. The Kremlin’s Fear

Each week the position deteriorates in Persia, with the Tudeh Party, who have the initiative, having things all their own way. Behind the Tudeh stands Moscow, apparently disengaged, but in reality the sole and ultimate beneficiary. In front of the Tudeh Party, fearful for their lives and acting with the violence of frightened men, are the Persian nationalists with whom we have to deal. In this picture it becomes very difficult not to lose sight of our ultimate overriding purpose, which is to save Persia, both its population and its oil, from being absorbed in the near future into the new Soviet empire.

The omens are bad, in that the Tudeh have had so little difficulty in establishing their reign of terror, in making such effective use of the threat of assassination, and that this is so easy shows the very low level of Persian public life. By this threat they are forcing the unhappy Dr. Mossadeq and his associates to act with a disregard both of rights and of manners that will make irreparable the breach between what they represent and Great Britain. No doubt they desire that blood shall flow. Then the Nationalists will be isolated and very quickly disposed of, and the same kind of abuse that they employ against the company will be employed against them.

The whole strategy is one which we must expect to see employed over and over again in Asia and in Africa. The utilization of local nationalist sentiments to lead shortsighted people, digging their own graves, to isolate themselves, preparatory to an internal coup d'état. The general answer to this strategy must be to fortify the anti-Communist Governments, and the parties and groups that make them possible. The question is largely one of morale, of simple fear on the part of people who are certainly lost if they yield to it, and there must be a stronger magnet of attraction in a well organized and more alert international society to which they can all adhere and by which they will all be upheld.

The Western Powers are always right to repeat their

In the entire non-Communist world the Communists have long been free to argue their theses, and they have made very little intellectual progress. Nearly all the support they have collected has been like their support in the working classes in Italy and France, o f people who judge it good tactics, personally and collectively, and who join the Communists but are not particularly interested in the tru th or falsehood of the fundamental dogmas of Marx and Lenin. They are being continually reproached with their imperfect knowledge of their doctrinal creed by the hard core of convinced Communists. For a century the West has not been afraid to let that creed circulate, because it makes very few adherents and many of them are adherents only for a season, before they see into what plainly evil fruits the doctrine issues in action. But by contrast, wherever the power of Moscow extends, there is the greatest fear, the fear that drives men to cruelty, lest the ideas which destroy the Marxian doctrine should penetrate and circulate. The old books are steadily withdrawn from the nations now under the Communist heel, and from the primary school to the University all the resources of modern government are employed to impose and reiterate one point of view.

When bodies like Unesco were set up, the hopes were genuine, particularly in the United States, that they would prove to be instruments through which the Russians would enter the main currents of the modern world and would modify their extreme and intransigent bigotry ; that, for a hundred reasons, more and more people would be able to enter and travel about in the Soviet Union, and that the wartime alliance might prove to have provided just what was wanted—a comradeship in arms to give a new start to the relations between Russia and the rest of the world. These hopes were soon dashed, as it was discovered th a t in the eyes of the Kremlin the world outside Russia is plague-infested, a place from which the agents of Soviet policy, officials or military, had continually to be brought back in order to be disinfected, or perhaps cast aside as tainted and useless. But all this question of inter-communication is one which the West should be continually endeavouring to discuss with the