Shifting Sands

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 485, 8 October 1948, Page 5

Shifting Sands

T should make us pause that the Prime Minister’s last word to us before he left for London was a warning that our security, instead of being based on firm ground, had no foundation but the "shifting sands of treaties," Coming on top of Mr. Bevin’s warnings, it. was the most disturbing statement we had heard for a long time from anyone so close to the facts. Mr, Fraser knows what there is to be known on the freecirculation side of the curtain. He knows what Downing Street thinks about the prospects of peace and what is passing through the official mind of Washington, and he clearly left for London heavy-hearted, The only light in the darkness is the strong feeling most people have that this time they will not be humbugged or deceived, Nations will not be asked to walk a plank that will not carry the weight. They will. not be told, and if they were they would not believe, that another war is "unthinkable." They know that it is not only "thinkable" but easily possible, Mr. Fraser said plainly that diplomacy was being frustrated by duplicity and that there could at the moment be "no enforcement against aggression." He said in other words that to look to the United Nations for security was blind and dangerous. It is trusting in words and not in deeds. Until the words express a reality they are like the castles of cardboard and paint that princes enter and leave in plays, -It was the Prime Minister’s melancholy duty to tell us this before he went away, and itis our duty now not to misunderstand him: to face the fact that peace hangs by a thread, but to avoid jumping to the conclusion that war is inevitable, It can happen when the sand shifts that rock is found underneath.