THE TABLET, MAY 19th, 1956. VOL. 207, No. 6052

Published as a Newspaper

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

MAY 19th, 1956

NINEPENCE

Singapore Breakdown : Security and Majority Rule Dead Sea Scrolls: Some Acquisitions of the Vatican Library. By Geoffrey Graystone, S.M. The Church in Scripture and H is to r y : By the Abbot of Downside Catholics and Communists in Australia: a Survey . n . By Colin Clark The New Archbishop o f Vienna: Some Personal Impressions. By J. J. Curtin On M iraculous H ea lin g : A Report from the BMA. By Letitia Fairfield Critics’ Columns : N otebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

SOVIET RELAXATIONS

T HE great chess master, Capablanca, used to teach the important chess strategy of building up the game on one side of the board in such a way as would enable the attacking player to shift the attack more rapidly to the other side than his adversary could follow with defence. It will be a good time before the Western world can begin to feel sure that the Soviet Union is not setting a lead in the relaxation of armaments and armies intending thus to disintegrate the joint arrangements for defence which the West has so painfully made over the last eight years. In peace and in war coalitions are always difficult to keep together, unless there is an overriding and obvious common necessity, and the Soviet Union has rightly perceived that the way to weaken and perhaps to disintegrate NATO is to leave NATO without an obviously formidable and poised adversary. When Sir Winston Churchill at Aachen suggested that a new Russia might join NATO he was saying something very congenial to Soviet ears, because obviously in the presence of such a new Russia NATO loses its point and purpose.

The question which no one must be in too much hurry to answer is whether we are to witness any such new Russia. The sceptics should be as slow as the optimists with any categorical answer. We see through a glass darkly. We are dealing with people whose background, formation, and habits of mind make them very difficult to appraise. We can accept the argument for economy : the new weapons cost so much that there must be a reduction in what is spent on the old. We must bear in mind the possibility that deep in their calculations is the knowledge that, in the free and therefore divided societies of the West, once defensive arrangements are disbanded it is very much harder to restore them, whereas the Russian people, who have never known anything but the imperious discipline of the Communist Party, succeeding the less efficient but equally autocratic rule o f the Tsars, could be brought to attention over-night. All today’s relaxations may well be the next move in the battle for Germany, which is the battle for Europe, to weaken NATO, to deprive the movement towards European unity o f its main driving force, preparatory to a new approach to the Germans. For all this it is logical to reduce the Red Army and to announce the end o f Arctic labour camps, all of which can be increasingly blamed on the cruel Georgian despot who called himself Stalin, and the cult of Stalin, like the cult o f the Tsar as “The Little Father o f his People,” can be relegated to museums, to be observed with a pitying smile.

But it can also be a very sensible conclusion o f the Soviet leaders that there is a wonderful prospect open before them among the frightened and sensitive peoples o f Asia and Africa, who have made it plain how reluctantly they face the prospect o f accepting joint arrangements for defence, as a painful necessity. SEATO was brought into existence, but it is very much against the grain of Asian politicians and electorates, who would be delighted to think it was no longer necessary. If we recall the late M. Vyshynsky’s dictum, that “We shall win by our ideas,” nothing has, in fact, hindered the spread o f those ideas more than the inescapably obvious characteristic o f the Soviet Union as a tyranny. The enthusiasm of workers everywhere has always diminished as they have come to learn under what sort o f discipline the Russian factory-worker lives his laborious days ; and the recent announcement that it will now be possible for such workers to leave their jobs is an official admission that they have not been free, although there have been fatuous apologists in the Western world who pretended that they were.

It has been well remarked that the most dangerous moment for any institution is when it begins to reform itself. All concessions, wrote Mettemich, either take away a right or take away a property ; and they not only weaken the body parting from them, but they inflame the appetites o f those who contain them. It becomes exceedingly difficult to stop, as the Soviet leaders will find in proportion as they seem to be recognizing the principle that there are personal, human, rightr which have to be respected even though they are against the co 'active advantage.