DEBIT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 393, 3 January 1947, Page 6

DEBIT

| ¢ By H. G. MILLER, Librarian, Victoria University College) of peace, at last is over and few will be sorry to see it go. It is hard to see how any but Communists can get much comfort from the condition of Europe in 1946, From Finland to Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe, including Czechoslovakia, is ruled by governments dominated by the Communist Party. France and Italy are deeply divided, Spain is threatened with a renewal of foreign intervention, Germany is held firmly down by Allied armies of occupation, Greece and Turkey are preparing to resist invasion, and Palestine is in the thick of something that can hardly be distinguished from civil war. Everywhere the friends of the western democracies are nervous and their enemies truculent; even the wretched Albanians have summoned up the courage to have a crack at the British Navy. Everywhere there is division and hate, industriously promoted; and nearly everywhere there is cold and hunger, not very strenuously resisted. The plain fact is that most of Europe is divided into two hostile camps and that many are beginning to say that sooner or later they will have to fight it out. There is not much comfort to be got from that. It is not much better in Asia. The Communists are not so prominent in the East, but even there they play their part. Persia has been bullied into parting with control of her, Northern oilfields; China has reverted to civil war and India is threatened with something that will make the Wars of Religion look like a picnic. There is not much comfort in that. Nor can comfort be got from the fact that the Russian Communists have encountered trouble on their home ground, and that to all the horrors of a long and terrible war has been added in 1946 the shock of a great new "purge" and a growing uncertainty about the leadership of the state. There are, indeed, those that squeeze comfort out of all this; but one needs to be more hardened in hopefulness than I can pretend to be to take pleasure in the possibility that a sixth of the surface of the globe is about to be plunged into civil war. . % He Be ig year 1946, the first year ND what about the Anglo-Saxon world? Well, in one important aspect things could easily in 1946 bave turned out worse than they did; and that is in the matter of foreign policy. There are powerful forces in "U.S.A. which have ‘been working for a deal with Russia at the expense of Britains and it looked for

a bit as if they might succeed. Happily, for the present they have been defeated; and Mr. Byrnes and Mr. Bevin continue to talk the only language that the Russians understand. In other respects the condition ° of things in the Anglo-Saxon world is not so good; indeed, some whose opinions are entitled to respect regard it as very alarming. I am thinking here of the American loan to Britain that came into effect at the very beginning of the year. There were many who hoped that the American people, who had kept out of the war as long as they could and before they came in acquired a large part of our overseas investments, would agree to a very generous financial settlement when all the fighting was over; but this hope has proved to be illusory. The American people, who are in fact-in spite of all the appearances to the contrary — a generous-hearted people, suffer from the very disabling weakness that they are perpetually haunted by the idea that the simple-seeming English are laughing at them up their sleeve. It was eating into them in 1946 and made them drive a very hard bargain. The result appears to be that, large as is the amount of the loan; it is not enough and that inflation has already robbed it of some of its value and that the conditions governing its use impose crippling restrictions upon the British exporter. — Peeeeaes, * LL this is rather general; so I will close with two specific mistakes of 1946 The first is the Nuremberg Trials. I have not the slightest sympathy with Germans convicted of particular crimes against common humanity and the rules of war, and I think that with regard to all such, probably substantial justice has been done; but the political offences are another matter. To try men for planning an "offensive war" was to try them by a law that did not exist when the offences were committed. To try them for offences that our Russian allies had themselves committed in Finland and (continued on next page) a