The Evening Star FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1936. WORLD ISSUES.

Evening Star, Issue 22447, 18 September 1936, Page 8

The Evening Star FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1936. WORLD ISSUES.

The word “ momentous,” too often used extravagantly, is applied rightly to the issues which confront the regular session of the League of Nations Assembly now beginning at Geneva. For one thing, the Assembly will be called upon to consider how the League’s Covenant can be revised or its powers strengthened. for the future avoidance of such humiliations as have beennmposed by recent crises. That by itself would be sufficient programme to make an extraordinary session. Over a dozen Governments have forwarded proposals for reform, and more will produce them probably when the delegates meet. There will be proposals to increase the League’s powers and to reduce its difficulties by a Covenant that would attempt less, but the League’s weakness is not in machinery; it is in the human errancy and disinclination to put long views before short ones of States that compose it. When the League works best it still works slowly. ■ With or without a preliminary debate it is expected that this problem of reorganisation will be referred to a committee. It is unlikely, therefore, that it will be conclusively dealt with by the present Assembly. The Spanish war is expected to be considered. Divisions of individual nations are not, normally, the concern of the League, but this trouble is far too serious to be ignored. It has bearings which extend far beyond Spain. In one sense it is an internal struggle, but in another the conflict is being fought between two extreme forces, Fascism and Communism, of which one is as dangerous to democratic government as the other. In Spain, as elsewhere, one has proved itself as cruel as the other. It is not a question of Christian Communism, which excessively simple or most disingenuous souls have discussed in our correspondence columns, but of political Communism, which is entirely a different thing. For the Spaniards themselves the most terrible aspect of the conflict now raging is that expressed in a cartoon of ‘ Punch.’ The two zealots, Fascism and Communism, face each other with knives over the prostrate body of Spain, who exclaims in despair: “ Whichever wins, my agony endures.” The Government against which the revolt began may have been less extremist than it was imagined tq be. But an early judgment on the issue was that the Government itself had very little control over events. “Even in the capital,” it was pointed out by ‘ The Times,’ “ it has less part in making decisions than the various committees of Communists, Socialists, and Anarcho-Syndicalists, and the one almost certain result of the conflict is a despotism either of the Left or of the Right. In remote parts of Spain, such as the Balearic Isles, moderate sentiment retains perhaps some chance of finding an expression, but most of the peninsula itself seems to be becoming an agglomeration of townships violently Marxist or violently Fascist.” All Europe is concerned in that conflict, because all Europe is divided largely between Fascist and Communist extremes of government. And the democratic countries that remain must be concerned, because the contending forces make to them their own

challenge. “ From tho standpoint of a democrat and a Liberal,” it has been said, “ these Russian [or Spanish] Reds and Italo-German Black-and-Tans have this one thing in common —that they have both put their trust in the same denial of liberty and in the same barbarically intolerant political philosophy of violence. Democracy is being challenged by a ‘ Fasci-Communism ’ which is uniform in these essential points.” For its own safety Europe has to see that the conflict of these forces, when it is waged by aeroplanes and machine guns, at least is confined to Spain. A committee, representative of the leading.nations, has been formed with that intent, and another committee has for its object to humanise, as far as possible, if it cannot stop the war. In one way and another the League’s Assembly is likely to be much occupied with the Spanish struggle.