Serious Matters for Europe

...How are the Asians going to put their faith in economic cooperation when they see the Western powers ready to sacrifice the freedom of half of Europe for a good, steady growth of business between their own producers and the tyrants of the East...

...From the Tories it might be expected...

...For instance, it is not by carefully weighing how many tanks Egypt and Israel are getting, or by sharing out this way or that the concessions and dividends of oil companies, that the Middle East will be pacified...

...Senate investigations subcommittee on February 17 that the relaxation of trade embargoes in 1954 had permitted the shipment to Communist countries of furnaces and vital crucibles and "super-refractories" which would produce the rare alloys essential for the skins of guided missiles and jet planes...

...Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and China, with the hearty collaboration of Western big business, build up a formidable industrial war potential and simultaneously try to disarm the West with smiles...

...This zone of the world is in turmoil...

...they even have the good humor, the decency, the sincere desire to do well by the world at large...

...He could not understand why such equipment had been decontrolled...

...Where and in the name of what principle is the West to discipline its business men, who race with one another to strengthen the war potential of the Communist world for the sake of their own dividends...

...It is sheer madness to allow so essential an industry to be a passive prey for dividend-hunting and national rivalries...

...Then there is the Soviet penetration of the Middle East...

...The disquieting factor here is that the FDP (as well as the German Social Democrats) should think it profitable to appeal to narrow nationalism...

...Evidently there is: the lack of leadership from which it suffers...

...The first is the existence of an urge for a reasonable organization of the whole of mankind in the whole planet...

...Oh dear, no...

...Indeed, the list of "serious matters" for the free world is becoming disquietingly long, so that only a few can be mentioned if at least a brief comment is to be added to each...

...Stalin...

...For what the nations of the world are longing for is not charity but order and justice...

...It goes on gaily, providing Moscow and China with everything they need...

...He was a bad man...

...They have the power...

...It is a painful duty to have to state that the two Anglo-Saxon governments on which the fate of the world hangs today seem utterly unable to rise above the standards of the nationalist and power-policy era...

...But what is to happen to the free world if the two Anglo-Saxon powers give the world a daily example of nationalism and power policy, not only in their handling of the world situation but even in their mutual relations...

...Other witnesses pointed out the strategic importance of other materials now being sent to the Communists...

...But couldn't British Labor now and then suggest something in world affairs which might raise it above what it seems to be a group of shareholders in John Bull & Co., intent on obtaining a fair share of the profits of the business...

...The most they seem to be able to visualize is a nice balance of power between themselves, with a fair share in it to France and to a "reunified" Germany and a precarious bargain or balance with the Soviet world, obtained by the famous panacea of talks from strength...

...Oliver Ralston, a Government metallurgist, told a U.S...

...The West is busy building a cuirass of steel against the Eastern dagger...

...The era of the H-bomb and television requires a bold rise to new levels of world politics...

...Add to this that according to the British press the increase in Egvpt's trade with the Soviet Zone is of the order of 60 per cent and that with the West 2 per cent...

...The same applies to Great Britain...

...A good, impartial observer, Carlos de Baraibar, writes that today "the most popular and perhaps the most influential diplomat in Cairo is the Soviet Ambassador" (Cuadernos, March-April 1956), and he describes the commercial and cultural invasion of the Soviets in Cairo in truly impressive terms...

...Is there a common denominator in all these symptoms of the disintegration of the West...

...The second is the remarkable success of the Soviet Union in meeting this urge with a doctrine and a policy which, despite its defects and its crimes, is universal...

...Why shouldn't Thomas Dehler be as nationalistic as Sir Anthony Eden, Colonel Nasser as militant as Admiral Radford, David Ben-Gurion as nationalistic as Secretary Dulles...

...And as for the communique, its chief importance lay in its total silence about the fate of the Eastern European peoples, with all that such a silence implied and hinted at for Moscow...

...The Western states do not seem able to make up their minds about it...

...An expert, Walter Z. Laqueur, writes in The New Leader of February 13 that some of their mistakes may be due to lack of information and adds: "For example, military and political aid is still being supplied to Syria, where the Communists and their sympathizers have taken over most of the key Army positions...

...But it is not the only one...

...While Lenin, of course, was a great statesman...

...But the East is not thinking of daggers...

...Such an announcement would do more than millions in financial help and shiploads of surplus wheat and tinned milk to raise the confidence of the Eastern peoples in the Western powers a confidence now very close to zero...

...Any claims of the United Stales to a universal political philosophy are belied by her stubborn nationalism in such matters as gold, immigration, protectionism, industrial and financial expansion, and dealings with dictators for the sake of military establishments...

...And this song, taken up by all the "anti-Stalinist" Communists of the West, is used as a decoy for innocent Socialists...

...Nor is this "either" entirely correct, since there is an obvious link between private and public (national) interests throughout the oil industry...

...This vacancy at the top was writ large in the statement issued after the Washington conference more than a month ago...

...Despite fine words, Sir Anthony Eden's visit to Washington did not fundamentally alter the fact that Western forces in the Middle East are at loggerheads, as the supply of American tanks to Saudi Arabia suffices to show...

...The two Anglo-Saxon nations are the only hope of the world...

...Now this policy and they have no other overlooks the chief factors which determine our present...

...and Western Socialists, for the first time in many years, are about to consider relations with the Communist party of the Soviet Union and other Iron Curtain countries and with the Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Yugoslavia...

...What is wanted in this field is an announcement by the two Anglo-Saxon powers of a scheme for the pooling of all the oil of the free world under a World Institute controlled by NATO (or some such agency free of Communist membership...

...they have the stability...

...First, the split in the West German Free Democratic party...

...How about trade between the East and the West...

...The long statement could again be described in the terms of Voltaire's famous epigram: un deluge de mots sur un desert d'idees...

...Marshal Tito addresses the Soviet Communist Party Congress as "Dear Comrades...

...It will get at our chest with its political Microbes...

...The FDP leaders' reduction of the European issue of East German liberation to the German issue of mere German reunification smacks of a narrow German nationalism, and their insistence on talks with Moscow is, in the circumstances, of a demagogic character...

...the situation requires the removal of oil from either business or national hands...

...If it does not rise to higher levels, the West will die of Communist consumption...

...But alas, they lack imagination...

...they have the ability...

...If only Churchill were thirty years younger...