T E E T A B L E T , J u ly 14th, 1061

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 198, No. 5799

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

LONDON, JULY 14th, 1951

SIXPENCE

FOUNDED IN 1840

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

ONE WAY TO DISASTER The Policies Advocated by Mr. Aneurin Bevan

RED STAR IN SLOVENIA The Continuing Character o f Marshal Tito’s Communism

WHITE COAL AND BLACK THE LANSBURY EXPERIMENT

By Reginald Langford

By Rosemary Rendel

BISHOP BERKELEY RECONSIDERED

By Frederick C. Copleston

TALKS IN KOREA

T HERE were various curious occasions in the nineteenth century when wars were averted or ended by arbitration, when for one reason or another the Governments concerned found it expedient to accept it, as Bismarck did when he asked Leo XIII to settle his differences with Spain over the Caroline Islands. But, apart from such exceptions, wars have not come to an end, since the time of the absolute Monarchs, without the defeat or exhaustion of one side or the other and the imposition of the terms of the victor. There has not been the necessary recognition, or at least not a real enough recognition, of any source of moral authority higher than national sovereignty, to which the contestants could refer their disputes, or by the tests of which they could negotiate together.

interior lines to extend the Western Powers to the full, in the Far East it is different. There Communism is already committed to the force of arms, the operations having been given a higher priority in accordance with what Lenin called “ the Asia détour.” The most that can be hoped for in Korea is a breathing-space. To make any serious reductions in the United Nations forces there will be to invite a repetition of last year’s onslaught ; and meanwhile Moscow will continue to pin down a considerable proportion of the present strength of the Western Powers, while no longer giving the troops of the United Nations a battle-training which, from a purely military point of view, has not been without its advantages. The Prospect of Armistice

I t was the hope o f the idealists that the United Nations might provide such an authority, just as the preceding generation o f idealists had reposed the same hopes in the League of Nations. But it is against the United Nations itself that the Communists have been fighting in Korea, so invincible is their conviction that there is no higher source of authority than their own Communist creed, and nothing is less plausible —nothing, indeed, could be more absurd—than the eager readiness to believe that they are now showing themselves the first people at least since the French Revolution to accept the principle of peace by negotiation. Nothing is less plausible than the view that, if a cease-fire is negotiated in Korea, this will be the end of the war there ; that peace, even locally, will have been achieved, and that the Communists, without military defeat, will have abandoned the intention of imposing their revolution below the Thirty-Eighth Parallel.

It is true that it has always been a mark of the Communists, whether in the East or in the West, to know when to yield as well as when to attack, and to be prepared to yield when it is deemed prudent, as it was in Germany with the abandonment of the tentative isolation of Berlin from the West, and as it was in Greece with the decision to send no more troops across the Bulgarian border. They are able to do this because, when they control every source through which the people whom they govern can learn about what has happened, they can always describe it in terms acceptable to themselves, by saying that the war in Greece was an internal Greek affair, in which the local Communists were eventually crushed by Western intervention, or by saying, as they are now doing, that it is the Americans who are supplicating in Korea and they who are humanely offering terms.

But the war in Korea is a special case. All the Far Eastern considerations of “ face” are involved, and the onus is on those who launched the invasion a year ago to bring it now to a successful conclusion. For whereas in Europe, and in the Middle East also, Moscow is not yet committed to more than a patient probing of the defences, exploring here, withdrawing there, testing the ground and taking advantage of vast

Any notion that, where before there was a war, now there is the prospect of peace, is idle. It may well be that, from a publishing point of view, the appearance of One Way Only, the pamphlet of Mr. Aneurin Bevan and his supporters who resigned from the Government in April, is well timed to coincide with the meetings of the Generals a t Kaesong, but there is no reason whatever to believe that recent events lend support to the thesis of this pamphlet, or help to attach any meaning to the axiom of policy upon which it all depends, that “ a supreme effort must be made to negotiate a settlement with Russia in the next two years.” The notion o f a negotiated settlement is naturally attractive, particularly when warfare has become of its nature so calamitous ; but no negotiated settlement can ever have any meaning unless it is negotiated under some sanction, and in the lack of any moral sanction the only possibility of a settlement with the Soviet Union, in the sense of a removal of the imminent danger of war, lies in the possession of superior force.

It seems at the moment as though the condition of a ceasefire in Korea was the withdrawal of all foreign troops, which is the condition that Moscow sought for so long to impose in Germany, so that the Communist unification of the Reich could be presented as a purely internal German affair. The respite in Korea—if there is a respite at all—may be shorter and it may be longer than is expected, but all the indications are that the main purpose of the negotiations in Soviet eyes is simply to shift the blame for the existence of war to Western shoulders. It is comparable to the collection o f “ peace signatures,” to which such tremendous efforts have been devoted in Eastern Europe for the past year and a half. If there is war in Europe, Moscow will ask its victims to remember how zealously the Communists at any rate devoted themselves to the cause of peace, while war was nevertheless thrust upon them. So also in Korea, they hope that the operations to reduce the southern part of the country can be continued while, if there is opposition, loud-speakers everywhere say that Mr. Malik did all he could to secure peace.