THE TABLET November 17. 1956. VOL. 208. No. 6078

LTABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

NOVEMBER 17th, 1956

NINEPENCE

Building Up the United Nations: The Best Road Open to Us

Tjhe Slender Thread of Confidenee: The Pope’s Broadcast on Present Anxieties

From the Grim Frontier: I : The Threats to Austria. By Stella Musulin

IT: The Nation Still Resisting. By Bela Menczer

American Catholics and ihe Intellectual Life: By Mgr. John Tracy Ellis

Cardinal Wyszynski’s Advice: A Canonical Visitation Resumed

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

THE HUNGARIAN DEFIANCE

A S the martyrdom of Hungary at the hands of Russia goes on, the Hungarian patriots, for all their lack of weapons, and indeed because of that lack, are inflicting an immense defeat on the Soviet Union, which has to consider all its satellite forces unreliable henceforward, not auxiliaries but men who need to be carefully watched by Russian troops. The Communist cause, all over the world, becomes increasingly indefensible as the Soviet iniquity goes round the world, and is seen as the abomination of desolation, sitting where it ought not.

Will there not emerge Russians to understand that the security of Russia is not going to be maintained by these methods; that Russia feels far more secure on the Finnish border, because the Finns are allowed to live in independence, and that exactly the same relationship could be made vyith the Finns’ relations, the Hungarians? j Public opinion everywhere in the free world is now protjpundly stirred. It is an immense tragedy that the Middle Eastern crisis should have flared up at just the same time, and not surprising that many people connect the two, and think the military considerations were allowed to prevail in Moscow because of Egypt. While each crisis was moving according to its own developments, they have intensified each other, but the British and French ought not to be accused on those lines as they are being in Europe and America.

Few people in Britain read the American or the continental Press, and this country has never been very conscious of or interested in what the rest of the world may think; but that is part of a byegone day. It matters a great deal today. It is a serious thing that so many Americans should be echoing the sentiment expressed by the New York Times commentator on the Port Said seizure, that America was not told about the take-off and does not care about being invited to the crash-landing. These charges of “ deceit,” scepticism even about the vast number of Soviet arms in Egypt, should never have been made possible. President Eisenhower is to meet Mr. Nehru before the end of the year, but shows no particular readiness to see the British and French at present. It is politically better for American policy to be United Nations policy, working through that organisation.

What has just happened has not been the resolute confrontation of the Soviet, which still has to come, but which, when it comes, must be a stand made jointly by the United States and Great Britain, and other large Powers beside. We may as well face the fact that fundamentally what is going on in the world today is still the maintenance of a passive attitude in the face of Soviet Russia by the great civilised Powers, from their profound love of peace and horror of war as war could become. It is not appeasement in the sense of concessions, but then there is nothing parallel to the Treaty of Versailles to be unravelled clause by clause. Soviet Russia was a victor Power in 1945, and has been under no disabilities, has no claims to lands or populations taken away by treaty. But there is no equality or reciprocity in Russian intercourse with the West. Entrance to Hungary is barred to United Nations observers, by the legal quibble that what is happening in Hungary is a purely domestic matter between the Hungarian Government and a number of its discontented citizens. The Western world judges it imprudent to threaten action, whereas the Russians threaten action freely in the Middle East, and keep their massed intimidating forces on the frontiers of Germany and Poland.

There are very strong reasons for the restraint and patience which the Western world is showing. It rests largely on a belief that there are divided counsels in Russia, and a less confident belief that, the more moderation we show, the more likely the moderates in the Kremlin will be to prevail. The truth may well be the opposite, that it is the Hungarian patriots who will prove to have strengthened the moderates in panic, for the longer the struggle goes on the more the Soviet Union is branded in the eyes of the world ; and this more than anything else may hasten the growth of the United Nations, which is the subject treated separately in our leading article. For unity men need the unifying principle of a common enemy.