THE TABLET, August 25th, 1951

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 198, No. 5805

LONDON, AUGUST 25th, 1951

SIXPENCE

FO irN D ED IN 1 8 4 0

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE ELECTORATE AND THE DANGER The Domestic Preoccupation, and Leadership from Below THE WORLD CONGRESS OF THE LAITY A Forthcoming Re-examination of Catholic Action. By Edward Mitchinson

DUBLIN IS NOT IRELAND The Agricultural Influence in Irish Life. By Terence de Vere White

RECUSANTS IN THE CHILTERNS

The Stonor Family History

THE BACKWARD COUNTRIES I T is at first sight a curious, but really not an unnatural development, that the desire of the United States and the British Commonwealth to mix their economies with those of poorer countries, in order to'hasten the development of the world’s wealth, is encountering fewer psychological obstacles among the peoples who were the enemies yesterday, like the Japanese, than among neutrals, and especially neutrals who lived through the last war under barely-veiled and essential allied protection, like the Persians and the Egyptians.

very beginning of that century a change began to come over the picture, and the British imperialist who annexed the Boer Republics was also the man who raised the banner of tariff reform, and started the notion that the Empire might be kept more and more as a preserve for the particular benefit of its own citizens. The twentieth century developed policies for more discrimination and more or less closed systems of Empire, of which the Axis blueprints—the projected Greater Reich, the intended Italian and Japanese empires—were leading illustrations. The Case of Persia and the Tudeh

When Mr. Yoshida, the Japanese Premier, writes to General Ridgeway to express the intense sense of gratification and gratitude of the Japanese Government, saying, “We look to you and your headquarters for continued assistance and guidance,” the contrast is very marked with the sensitive and at best very grudging attitude with which Persian and Egyptian nationalists respond to the invitation to make themselves effective members of a larger and more effective partnership than they can conceivably organize among themselves, or on any narrowly nationalist basis. It is, of course, true that the Japanese Government, and the Italian and the German Governments, represent nations whose previous Governments had put them very much in the wrong by unsuccessful aggressions. Those aggressions were the expression of the same narrowly nationalist spirit which the neutrals are filled with today. And it matters much less what have been the historical paths by which the Axis nations have reached their present attitudes than that Western policy shall encourage and enable them to continue in it.

Even in the United States, where men and women believe with what seems to the rest of the world a good deal of eager simplicity that democracy can be taught as a technical subject, or communicated as a faith, in a few years, people must doubt whether the Japanese are very different people from what they were ten years ago. But it is also true that, precisely because there is not much public opinion, and a great habit of obedience to authority, the mass of the Japanese people will follow, provided those who govern them lead them firmly, in a very different direction to that along which they were led through a lifetime before 1941.

It was an imitative direction, for Japan entered the modern world after 1867 at the very worst time, and, like the Hohenzollern Reich, modelled itself on what it saw, and saw the ultimate reality to be great States, self-sufficient and expanding and subject to no law but their own sense of what was fitting. Both the Germans and the Japanese overlooked the distinguishing feature ,of the Victorian British Empire, that it threw its privileges open to all men, to live and make money under its protection, in an immense free trade area. They thought less about what the British were doing than about how enviable it was to be thus free to choose what to do : it is so that the poor are tempted always to regard the rich. As they grew in power, in the twentieth century, from the

It is in the phase of the older nationalism that the Persians and the Egyptians are still stuck, well behind the times which call so insistently for men to live more and more in a larger community than in their national community, at least as far as common, defence and economic activity, two big sides of life, are concerned. And it is the tragedy of Persia and of Egypt, and of India and other countries, that while there are plenty of old-fashioned nationalists, and plenty of Communists ready to sell the national tradition, the third attitude, which alone holds hope for the future of each nationality in essential independence, the attitude of eager co-operation with the Western world is so very under-represented because men’s imaginations are led captive by their past history.

It is instructive for an understanding of the Persian crisis and the elements behind it to trace the development of the Tudeh Party, which was founded in October, 1941, at a time when the country was under foreign occupation, and when the abdication of the pro-German Shah had released strong currents of nationalism. The founders of Tudeh—which means “people” or “masses”—appealed to the lower classes, whi,ch had suffered from high taxation and for which the displacement of Islam from public life meant the loss of traditional and social ties. They became suitable material for political mobilization.

Tudeh’s first target was the working classes of the towns and industrial centres, perhaps 10 per cent of the total population. They took the initiative in the organization of trade unions and in the demands for an eight-hour day and wage increases. They also won over many peasants by advocating the abolition of servile tenure and of services in kind. But they appealed to the middle classes and the intellectuals by their anti-bureaucratic and nationalist slogans, which were skilfully combined with Communist methods of the class-struggle, and identified the upper classes with “Anglo-Saxon imperialism.” They made it clear that they were ready to collaborate with the Soviet Union, but never professed a clear Communist programme.

Success came at once, and, while the other parties of the new constitutional regime never counted more than a few thousand members, Tudeh became Persia’s first modern massparty. Other groups later attempted to stem the tide,