CONTAINMENT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 654, 18 January 1952, Page 15

CONTAINMENT

POLICY FOR THE WEST, by Barbara Ward; Allen and Unwin. English price, 12/6. HIS book is an exposition of the : policy of "containment"-an examination of ways and: means by which Soviet encroaghimént may be arrested. Accepting the basic fact of Soviet hostility, Barbara Ward acknowledges the necessity for rearmament, while emphasising the truism that there can be no sound defence without economic stability. Her comparison of the relative strengths of East and West is, on the whole, encouraging. Containment need not entail financial ruin. The degree of mobilisation required by the democracies "probably lies at a level of about 15 per cent of their national incomes," while "at the height of the last war the United States was devoting 50 per cent of its resources to the war effort, Britain 60 per cent." The policy of containment may, of course, be put into execution more effectually by a Western Europe which has _ achieved some advance towards unity in the form of federation. Signs of such a’ movement have already become manifest. In her final chapter the author propounds a question. "How have we in the West contrived so to dim our vision that we appear to have lost it? When was the initiative lost?" The answerscarcely one to be expected from an economist-explains the lapse in terms of spiritual values. "The men. who founded the Industrial Revolution and believed in unchanging and unaltering economic laws were introducing a god of economic determinism into one sector of their society. It was a savage but appropriate justice that led Marx to turn ahah be

economic determinism. against them in their own industrial stronghold." Which all boils down to the repetition of an ancient belief that sooner or later one is punished for one’s sins.

R. M.

Burdon