THE TABLET, August 4th, 1956. VOL. 208, No. 6063

Published as a Newspaper

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

FOUNDED IN 1840

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

AUGUST 4th, 1956 '

NINEPENCE

Nasser and Mossadetj: The Blindness of One to the Experience of the Other til Ore/ and the Tight-Rope: Working for a Popular Front. By Jan Przybla

A Letter from Austria: Eager Recruits for the Army. By Stella Musulin

GeOl’g e Vertue, Engraver: A Catholic Bicentenary. By Edmund Esdaile

Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

THUNDER FROM THE THUNDERER ' ’P H E Opposition could hardly have had a worse day for

Socialists is an obvious one, but not we think, one that they will continue to press with any great zeal.

their motion calling for the ending of National Service, with rumours of an imminent recall of reservists, with Mr. Dulles arriving in London on the following day, and with three-Power conversations about the Suez Canal already in progress. Reasonably could The Timex call Colonel Nasser’s seizure of the Canal “ A Hinge of History,” comparing it to Hitler’s march into the Rhineland and to the Stalinist coup in Prague in February, 1948 (which was certainly a hinge in the editorial history of The Times), and saying that if Colonel Nasser is allowed to “ get away ” with it, (hen “ all the British and other Western interests in the Middle East will crumble.” “ Anyone who thinks that a victory for Nasser would not encourage other extremist demands against the oil-fields—and against strategic bases—• should confine himself to tiddleywinks or blind man’s buff.” The language of The Times was of an unfamiliar robustness as it stressed the urgency of action:

It would be comforting to be able to assume that the Government’s position in this defence debate was unaffected by anything that had happened in the previous few days. It would be reassuring if it could be taken for granted that policy is never allowed to twist and turn a corkscrew way in the rear of events, but flows steadily and undisturbed, its course determined by men who can take long views and are not easily surprised. But, alas, no such reassurance can be found. Only a few days before Colonel Nasser blew smoke from his nostrils it had seemed fairly possible that the Government was preparing more drastic economies over defence than it will now consider. The Prime Minister's analysis of the mind of Moscow, in the Foreign Affairs debate last week, stressing the overwhelming character of the ultimate nuclear weapons, seemed to be preparing the way for disclosures that will now not be made, of an intention to shed conventional weapons that has already had to be revised.

“ Quibbling over whether or not he was ‘legally entitled’ to make the grab will delight the finicky and comfort the faint-hearted, but entirely misses the real issues.” There should, we think, be more moderation than The Times appears to recommend. It should be considered whether Colonel Nasser has not encompassed his own destruction in any case, and whether a main effect of the threat of force may not be to make all the other Moslem peoples feel with and for him. The temptation in this country is to be tough with what is thought to be weak— whether with Mussolini twenty years ago or with the Cypriots and Egyptians now. There is a danger that the mere fact of having now resisted the temptation to toughness for so long, with the Persians for instance, may make it more difficult to resist it now, or to endure any longer the taunts of furious back-benchers.

It was clearly no time to talk about abolishing the call-up: and Colonel Wigg even went to the lengths of defying his Whips in his indignation that his party should be doing so. All that could really be done in the circumstances was to talk about the various possibilities of a selective call-up. As things are, only three-quarters of any age-group is being called up, and the reasonable solution, when the numbers can be further reduced, is clearly to increase exemptions or raise standards, or both. The doctrinaire objection of the

The Prime Minister made the development of nuclear weapons the prime reason for his belief that war between the Soviet Union and the Western world is now less likely. But is possible to exaggerate the deterrent effect of these weapons in explaining why Soviet policy has changed; why, for instance, there are announcements of a reduction of the Soviet armed forces. These changes are at least partly the result of the vast human pressure, not so much for peace, for there is always a certain fatalism in the Slavonic countries about the prospects of peace, as for the basic material amenities of life, desired in the best materialist manner. The Poznan Rising was, at the root, a protest against the consequences of mercilessly making the Polish economy the kind of economy that can support strong forces with conventional weapons; and when M. Malenkov first emerged in Moscow, after the death of Stalin, it was as a sort of Bevanite, protesting that even the Soviet Union could not afford an economy in which the requirements of conventional war always had the highest priority. But the day has by no means come when the already inadequate defence of Western Europe can safely be relaxed in response; and Colonel Nasser has made it clear that we cannot afford to be any weaker than we are in other parts of the world.