THE TABLET, August 4th, 195'
THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW
PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA
VOL. 198, No. 5802
LONDON, AUGUST 4th, 1951
SIXPENCE
FOUNDED IN 1840
PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER
PASSIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
The Western Powers and the Greater Society FORMING A NEW FRENCH GOVERNMENT
The Critical Question of the Catholic Schools BAD MORALS AND BAD ECONOMICS Mr. Gaitskell’s Dividend Limitation. By Douglas Jerrold
FRANCOIS DE FENELON A Tercentenary Appraisal. By J . Lewis May
MR. MORRISON AND “ PRAVDA” T HE Korean negotiations proceed at a tired snail's pace, and in a way which suggests that they are only part of the war of nerves, intended to confuse and divide the countries and the electorates who achieved sufficient unity to stage an effective United Nations campaign. The refusal at Washington to indulge in an optimistic view is corroborated by the references to Korea in Pravda's answer to Mr. Morrison, where Pravda writes :—■
of making itself heard, why the Communist Party monopolises every medium of expression, and why, if general elections have put the Communists in power, the Communists are so very afraid to let them be held unless they can nominate the candidates. Mr. Morrison in Home Politics
“ For over a year now the Anglo-American forces have been tormenting the freedom-loving and peaceful people of Korea, destroying Korean villages and towns, murdering women, children and old folk.” The general line of Pravda's answer to Mr. Morrison is exceedingly simple. It is that wherever the Communists are in power it is because the will of the people has called them there and supports them, while the only people who are excluded from the full enjoyment of liberty of every kind are either landlords and capitalists or the agents of foreign capitalist Powers, whose evil and inhuman intentions justify the discriminations and the penal measures which are employed against them. Throughout this long answer there is unfortunately not a glimmer of a desire to relieve the tension by finding any common ground. The author and his masters show themselves' narrow-minded and fanatical bigots for their political and economic doctrine, men all too reminiscent of familiar types in a kind of religious controversy now happily diminished, where the spirit in which the controversialists have written has given them away, showing that their desire was not in the least to persuade or unite, but only to confirm their own followers in crude and simple prejudices and divisions.
Mr. Morrison wrote a quietly reasonable article, so that there should shine through it a personality transparently far removed from the blood-thirsty agent of capitalism that the Soviet propaganda depicts. It is all the more to be regretted that Mr. Morrison, now that he is Foreign Secretary, should be disregarding in domestic politics the sound tradition that, while the Foreign Secretary remains a party politician, he should speak of his political opponents with more moderation and restraint than other Ministers need to do, precisely because at any moment he may want Jo speak for the whole nation and to have the whole nation behind him.
it is true that Mr. Churchill seems all too content to continue to live his active political life inside the old tradition, whose ways he first learnt before 1914, when party politics were conducted inside a much more settled and secure framework, and the leading politicians, very likely close friends and with family connections, set out to show the public sport. It is hard to see how Mr. Churchill gains anything electorally that would not come to him more certainly and with much less effort on his part if he could bring himself to be more of the elder statesman. As things are, the extreme moderation ‘and responsibility with which he handles international issues tend to be lost to sight in the heat of his exchanges, even with quite slight figures on the Labour benches.
All the same, Mr. Morrison can be congratulated that for a few minutes he secured access to the people of Russia, and that what he said has been judged to call for such lengthy and shrill denial. A debate has been opened, and one of the most far-reaching importance, and it should be continued by every means we can command. The particular contentions of Pravda's rejoinder should be examined in detail, and a good beginning could be made with the statement :
“Actually, as is known, the Communists came to power in the' People’s Democratic Countries as a result of general elections. Of course, the peoples of those countries threw out the exploiters and all kinds of agents of foreign secret services. But again, such has been the will o f the people, and the voice of the people is the voice of God.” The intellectual defence of Communism is made to rest so entirely on the sacred and absolute rights of majorities, and this is something which Communists in practice regard with such utter contempt, that the argument should be pressed, to ask why the voice of the people is refused all opportunity
The unscrupulous whispering campaign, to which Mr. Morrison lent himself, that “ the Tories are warmongers,” is in fact only helped in proportion as domestic politics are stoked up. The issues are so momentous, and the price the country is having to pay at home and abroad for bad policies, the natural fruit of a wrong political philosophy, is so inescapable and so painful, that what the country needs is the opportunity for reflection and digestion, and not the arousal of the spirit of partisanship. The higher the level on which this consideration of where the country is going can be kept, the better it will be for the anti-Socialist forces. They are forces which have been greatly weakened by intellectual and moral confusion and political opportunism, but forces which draw great strength from a national tradition which, more than any other, reacts against the over-strong executive and centralized bureaucracy, and has always believed in lesser things than the State, in the voluntary associations, the genuine local authority, the family and the individual, all sources of our national strength which are being steadily
