MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IT was inevitable, I suppose, that forAgn critics should have confused our prudent hesitation to commit ourselves blindly to the Schuman Plan with the simultaneous manifesto which Dr. Dalton with such unhappy gusto launched upon a bewildered world. It is generally admitted, even in Labour circles, that in the long history of human mismanagement\ no document has ever been so fanatically ill-timed. It is true that it contained several assertions of principle which, if read in a mood of objective calm, should have appeared both sensible and useful ; but the tone of self-assertive egoism, of patronising complacency, in which the document was composed rendered it impossible for even the most temperate foreigner_ to read it without experiencing gusts of intemperate rage. Assuredly it lacked both the sense of occasion and the sense of audience. And as a result a loud wail of protest has arisen from across the Channel and across the Atlantic which has silenced the more objective murmurs of those who realise that anger is not a state of mind in which to assess the value of political pronouncements. It is interesting to observe that we are again being accused of adopting toward our neighbours a " governessy tone." Billow and William II, to say nothing of Tirpitz, would again and again record in their diaries how intolerable Britannia became when she assumed towards Europe the voice of a governess addressing refractory pupils. Hitler and Goebbels echoed the same complaint. And now that Britannia has ceased to be so serenely confident in her shield and trident, the old ungainly phrase recurs. It is a mistake to dismiss as ridiculous an accusation which is both so general and so recurrent ; even to the British reader the document seemed to possess undertones of prim querulousness ; and when friendly foreigners say that we annoy them by talking as a, governess, we should pause in ourself-righteousness and determine to cease talking in future in the way that governesses talk.
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In the criticisms that I have read in the foreign newspapers can be detected a breach of logical sequence. On the one hand we are assailed for lecturing Europe and America on the principles of correct Anglophil conduct ; on the other 'band, we are reproached for egoism, isolationism and indifference to the needs and sufferings of our fellow-men. We are blamed both for interfering and for being unwilling to interfere. More serious is the indictment that Great Britain, having abandoned both the opportunity and desire for European leadership, is relapsing, not into the splendid isolation of Lord Salisbury, but into " localism," by which is meant parochialism and a closed-shop state of mind. Implicit in this line of criticism is the suggestion that our foreign policy is being deter- mined,, not by the old ideal of a just equilibrium and a Concert of Europe, but by the new and narrower concepts of trade unionism. The British system, it is contended, is becoming sectarian, is ceasing to be both national and international, and is losing that sense of ethical mission which (although often derided as hypocrisy) did none the less give to nineteenth-century statesman- ship a certain continuity, standard and impetus. Such suggestions appear to me exaggerated, since foreign policy is in the end determined, not by wage-levels, but by geography. Nor do I agree that we are the only country which inclines in this difficult economic age to a self-regarding attitude towards world affairs. But it is certainly true that humanity as a whole has in the last twenty years become so accustomed to cruelty and suffering that atrocities which a generation ago would have set the constituencies aflame from Cornwall to Midlothian are today relegated to the sub-conscious as too horrible to believe or to face.
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The eagle eyes of Gladstone and Edward Grey did not flinch from the spectacle of human cruelty with the unmanly evasiveness which tempts us today to turn our glance aside. In Parliament and on the platform they would denounce such, to us, minor episodes as the condition in the Neapolitan prisons, the murder of a few
Bulgarian comitadji, or the forced labour in the Belgian Congo' The country itself was stirred by such denunciations, and the per- petrators of these cruelties were exposed and shamed in the eyes of the whole world. It will be argued that it was easy enough for us to brand iniquity at an epoch when the voice of England was all-powerful, and when we could sway the whole movement of the Eastern question by sending three frigates to Bezika Bay. It will be contended that now that the balance of power has shifted so fundamentally it would be a mistake for us to disturb our relations with foreign Powers by protesting against atrocities which we have not the physical or political capacity to prevent. There are those even who wince away from these dreadful matters, and console themselves by believing that they cannot really have happened, that they are much exaggerated. Yet even they know in their hearts that throughout Eastern Europe today there is fear and oppression ; and that the minds and souls of boys and girls are being crushed and moulded so as to render them no more than senseless cogs in a diabolic machine. Is it that we have lost our sense of moral anger, and that we can no longer experience that saeva indignatio which, with all its cant and prejudice, did certainly assert a standard of human conduct which could not be transgressed ? " But what can you or I do about it ? " comes the question. The answer is, " We can protest."
* * I have been reading this week a report on the kidnapping of Greek children by the Communists. In the last three years some 28,000 Greek boys and girls have been snatched from their families and transported behind the iron curtain, where they are to be brought up as janissaries in the Communist ranks. This is not a fairy story invented by the Greek Ministry of Propaganda ; the Communist organisations and wireless have themselves stated that many thousands of these children have been " transferred " from the zone of guerrilla warfare and granted " hospitality " in Albania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland and Albania. Moreover, the Special Committee of the United Nations which was operating in the Balkans confirmed the fact that these kidnappings had occurred, and recommended the Greek Government to negotiate with the several Communist Governments for repatriation. These negotia- tions, as might have been foreseen, produced no result ; none of the abducted children have as yet been returned. The resolution passed by the Assembly of United Nations in November, 1948, urging that these children should be repatriated was completely ignored. The Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which offered to investigate the fate of these kidnapped babies, were refused admission to the countries to which they had been abducted. In 1949 the Assembly again passed a resolution urging that these children should be returned to their parents, and again entirely without result. The civilised world is faced with an atrocity in comparison to which Herod's massacre of the innocents is a mere episode. And the civilised world is powerless to obtain redress.
* * To the ordinary British mother it seems so inconceivable that four of her children between the ages of three and seven should suddenly be swept away from her and abducted into the night ; that she simply refuses to believe that any such event could possibly occur. Yet this is, in fact, what has happened to thousands of families in Greece. How can any human being, whether Christian or pagan, condone such enormities ? We cannot oblige the Governments of Albania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland to restore these infants. But we can, and should, face the atrocious fact that these abductions have occurred. And we can force those of our friends who defend the Communist theory to state whether they deny or condone this atrocity. If they deny it, then they are demonstrably impervious to truth. If they condone it, then they are excusing an act which, under any interpretation, is a fiendish outrage upon virtue.
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