THB TABLET Juuo 1st. 1957. VOL. 209, No. 6106

Published u a Ncniirapcr

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

FOUNDED IN 1840

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

JUNE 1st, 1957

NINEPENCE

By Motor to Moscow : The Search for Cultural Contact Poland’s Uncertain. Future : Communism without Tears? By Auberon Herbert

Disarmament Prospects : Dr. Adenauer's Mission. By Eugene Hinterhoff

Edward Elgar : An Appraisal for his Centenary. By Rosemary Hughes

BishopS-in-Presbytery : The Scottish Reaction. By Ronald Walls

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

WHAT TO SAY

'T 'H ERE is nowhere where it would be easier to waste a great deal of money at the present time than in broadcasts and other publicity in the Middle East. It may be that too little was done in the years following immediately on the end of the war, when our political position was very different. Today our strongest line is to keep making it plain that the accusations of Cairo Radio and the Voice of the Arabs are out of date, untrue, living in the past. The countries of the Middle East are sovereign and independent, the oil companies working under freely negotiated and strictly commercial agreements which are to the mutual advantage of both parties. If we want to convey the truth that the Western world represents a better and easier state of society than the Communist world, the best way to do this is not to give the impression of being highly organised and mobilised for Government propaganda. Beyond the rebuttal of any particular violent accusation, we have not a great deal of a political nature that we can usefully say. Our strength now in the Middle East is the strength of the proBritish among the Arabs themselves; of the Government of Iraq; of minority parties elsewhere. We do not help them if we do anything that revives the memories of only a few years ago, when a large part of these territories was under British or French mandate, and Dr. Charles Hill must be particularly careful not to put this propaganda in the hands of people whose attitude of mind was formed in those past decades, who tend to think all the time that we still have some special prerogative in that part of the world today because we had it up to the end of World War II. No direct British propaganda is going to be nearly as effective as that which can emanate from Baghdad, authentic Arab voices countering Cairo.

What is very much to be desired is the ending of the predominance of Cairo in the world of Moslem higher learning. The secularisation of Turkey by Kemal Ataturk removed one great counter-balancing power, and now, as universities come primarily for technical training, into the plans of Middle Eastern States, Cairo is the only place they can turn to for Moslems fit to hold university positions; and those who come from Cairo today bring with them an antiWestern formation which makes us have to view with great reservations the progress of higher education in Moslem lands. While these countries accept the general standards which the world has reached in the matter of religious freedom, in the sense of letting people practice their inherited religions, they remain extremely hostile to the further notion that men should be free to change their religion without suffering civic or social disabilities for doing so. What the Western world, not only Britain, wants to recommend to the Middle East is the idea of the mixed society as the superior form of civilised life; that xenophobia is a regression to the primitive, narrowing and impoverishing, and that one of the marks of an advancing community is the welcome it extends to influences from outside. Admittedly this is difficult so soon after an epoch in which the influences from outside were, not to put too fine a point upon it, the masters and also the rather arrogant masters of the countries in question; and we need to be patient and full of historical understanding even in the presence of a jejune and intemperate nationalism, understanding that it is all the first flush of a sense of independence.

It is good news that Mr. Nehru is prepared to lift the economic blockade of Goa. His motives are purely practical. He has discovered that he is rapidly alienating the large numbers of Goanese who had previously been in favour of union with India. His measures have inflicted indiscriminate and severe hardship in a way that can inspire no confidence in the justice of the Government of India under which he is asking the Goanese to agitate to be placed. Goa is a typical illustration of the temptatiop which can prove loo strong even for statesmen who pride themselves on having risen above the small passions of past rulers. Kashmir is a different story, where Mr. Nehru has also disappointed Western liberalism—the people in Britain and America who would never have believed in the ’thirties that, having risen to power in the ’forties, this would be his style in the ’fifties.

Mr. Nehru is. in his own view the leader of Asian nationalism to whom Indonesians and Malayans and Burmese should look as a leader and exemplar. They will find in him a man resolutely opposed to the fragmentation of large mixed societies into smaller political units. He has inherited from the British Raj the strangest medley of people and creeds, and he wants to hold it all together with Indian nationalism. What he is in fact saying is that, whatever the historical rights and wrongs by which such a political struc­