THE TABLET February 2nd. 1957. VOL 209 No 6089.

T1 iE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria i

FOUNDED IN 1840

FEBRUARY 2'nd 1957

NINEPENCE

1lie Dimes Doctrine : Evading an Issue

Britain in the Arabian Peninsula : The Gulf Sheikdoms. By Sir Rupert Hay

Poland After the Election : The Catholics and M. Gomulka

O l i r H u n g a r i a n s : An Adventure in the Newest Snobbery. By Bruno S. James

N o i l in Dialeetica . . . I Presenting Newman. By J. Lewis May

Review ol Reviews : The Non-Christian World. By Lancelot C. Sheppard

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

STANDARDS FOR ASIA

r PWO events in the United States, the refusal of the Mayor -*• of New York to give any sort of official welcome to King Saud and the decision of the Senate to go back ten years in a full review of the country's policy in the Middle East, both point to the underlying reality which the Eisenhower doctrine does not face.

The ten-year review will take the investigators back beyond the formal proclamation of the State of Israel, that turning-point in the Middle East, of thé consequences of which American policy now, as we argue in our leading article, takes such inadequate account. (We wish our own Constitution had some parallel means of taking large and long-term retrospective surveys of what national policy has been and how it has been carried out).

King Saud at the WhiU House represents much that Americans have been brought up to dislike. He is a King in the old style, entertaining all the passengers on the liner on which he crossed the Atlantic, and distributing over £7,000 in tips to the staff; but showing a Moslem intolerance to Christian activity in his country; fiercely anti-Jewish, and defending the legality of slavery nearly a hundred years after Lincoln’s proclamation of emancipation. These were the three charges listed against him by the Catholic Mayor of New York, Mr. Wagner; and they must be seen together with the unstated but material fact that there are no Arab voters to speak of in New York City. King Saud was given a very regal welcome in Washington, with the same sort of exceptional Presidential courtesies lately extended to Pandit Nehru; and the difference reflects the wide divergence between the necessities of American foreign policy and the strength of New York City feeling.

Catholic feeling there has also caused Marshal Tito to call off his Drojected visit; but this is on the whole a pity; it is very important that a man like Tito, self-educated in Marxism, should see with his own eyes what capitalist society is really like, in the form most calculated to impress a materialist. The Communist leaders—the Chinese are the latest—are now fond of travelling about their own Empire or into Asia and see nothing to make them revise their textbook belief that the future is inevitably with Marxism. Both Moslems and Marxists need to become more conscious of the great world which is neither, and which does not live either by the Koran or by Das Kapital. The United Nations should be a good place for broadening these mentalities.

It is rather odd that Pandit Nehru should have had recourse to force to seize Kashmir, for no part of the world has a greater vested interest in building up traditions of legality. Those traditions could guarantee to the Indian Government in Delhi its continued authority over the many races and creeds of the Indian sub-continent, whose political unity cannot be taken for granted, for it is the unity imposed by conquerors, the empire of the Moguls and then the British Raj. It cannot be taken for granted, if the world becomes a place where terrorism, violent coups, movements for independence, are a profitable source of excitement and an exciting way of obtaining great profit. Mr. Nehru withheld his sympathy from the Cypriots because he saw the danger of parallel local movements of patriotism in that lion’s share of the British Indian Empire to which he and the Congress Party succeeded. The methods used to secure Kashmir for India, the docile United Nations Assembly, give to the operation an air of domestic politics, just the sort of thing that could be organised against Delhi.

If Mr. Nehru has acted precipitately, throwing away his considerable credit in the United Nations, it may be that the spectacle of the Russians never taking any account of the United Nations, and of Britain and France only doing so reluctantly under pressure, made him draw the conclusion that the prospects for an international authority are so nebulous as not to count. But it is perhaps even more likely that his reasoning is just the opposite ; that he is alarmed at the degree of vitality the Assembly has shown, and at the way an Emergency Force has been got together, and that, in short, he has concluded that these years might be providing him with his last chance of getting away with something on which his heart has long been set. The United Nations is unlikely to try to organise any effective