CREDIT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 393, 3 January 1947, Page 7

CREDIT

or so we have seen her take the initiative in disarmament. Her readiness to reveal details of troops at home and to waive the veto in disarmament inspection shows that frankness, especially over atomic weapons, will elicit frankness. Here again we may take comfort from history. For more than a century the Russians have been thought of in Britain in terms of steam-rollers and bears, while the ideological gulf was wider then than now, but it was only in the admittedly avoidable Crimean war that the two Powers clashed. To say that the modern world is too small for two big ideologies is a counsel of despair. * x HE attack on the veto by the smaller *" Powers and the Russian concession on disarmament are only sallies in what I believe is developing into a full-dress assault on the evil Leviathan of national sovereignty; that is to say, the theory that externally the nation-state knows no law but its own interest. _ Efficient disarmament inspection would cut the heart out of Leviathan, for what is he without his weapons? Perhaps the defence of the veto will prove the last stand of the sovereignty-mongers. The attack proceeds on a broad front. It is evident, in a more equivocal form, in the Balkans, in Churchill’s call for a western federation, in pronouncements by Bevin and Byrnes, in the Bretton Woods agreement. No less significant is the Nuremberg trial. The court will be remembered for punishing breaches of the rules of warfare and crimes against humanity. But its chief title to fame

is that it has made a crime of aggressive war. The world’s conscience has been vindicated in law. "Reason of state" ceases to be a valid plea; public morality is brought nearer to private morality. % * % in the long run. In the short run, the problem of a convalescent world is one of food, clothing and shelter. It is at least to the credit of the relief organisations that the worst prophecies of famine and exposure-in large parts of Europe, India and the Far East-have not been realised. This is little enough. But peace settlements with ‘the Nazi satellite states have been completed- | the Paris conference was important rather for its exhibition of national postures than for its subject matter-and_ the removal of uncertainty eases the. work of their rehabilitation. In Europe many millions have voted for the first time, and millions have been returned to their homes. It is too early to pass judgment on the progress of social and economic reconstruction, but the year has underlined the lesson that bread will win the battle of democracy. Therein lies the importance of the economic merger of the British and American zones in Germany. * * * peer steadily and seen whole, 1946 justifies no extravagant fears. No sane man will go bail for the future, and it is for the historian of a later day to write the epitaph of 1946. There is little reason to think that in doing so he will have to avail himself of those white lies which Dr. Johnson permitted in lapidary inscriptions. UCH abstractions have meaning