DOES SOVIET SELF-HELP AID HITLER?

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 107, 2 November 1939, Page 12

DOES SOVIET SELF-HELP AID HITLER?

In days of old, when oracles were consulted, the job was by no means completed when an oracle spoke; the task remained of determining what the oracle meant. Arid so it is with M. Molotov's speech. M. Molotov, speaking for the Soviet Government, is said to have branded Britain as an aggressor. That is a score for the Nazis. He is further reported to have said that Britain and France are needlessly and senselessly prolonging the war. That is score No. 2 for the Nazis. But he also distinctly pronounced the word neutrality, which is a key word. The denunciation of Britain and France as imperialistic warmongers (somewhat of a slight for British trade unions I) is mere opinionative currency that buys no goods, but "neutrality" is die key to action orj inaction, and definitely means inaction so far as Russian participation in the war is concerned. Intrinsically, y therefore, that one word weighs more than all tlie other words—some thousands—which M. j Molotov expended on the main issue. As a moral judgment, the allegation that the Allies are war-guilty because they will not make peace over the body of Poland sounds smashing. But is it a moral judgment? Would M. Molotov be pressing peace on Britain and France if the Nazis had seized all Poland, and if the Soviet had seized none?

Refusing to accept any such dictum as a moral judgment upon us, the "Daily Telegraph" sums up tlie whole issue in a homely phrase, "Russia looks after herself!" Those four words are the key to motives, just as the word neutrality is the key to action. M. Molotov's fervour for peace, following the murder of Poland, is Russia looking after herself. The British Labour paper "Daily Herald," which certainly would not endorse M. Molotov's statement that "this war promises nothing for the workers but bloody sacrifice," finds that the high light of the speech is its negative side—"Russia will not fight for Hitler." That is only another way of saying that -the word neutrality, as we have pointed out, outweighs all the other words. The "News Chronicle" dismisses this verbiage with the following sarcasm:

In return for handing over the control of the eastern Baltic and part of Poland to Russia, Germany gets words -—words which provide neither butter, nor parsnips, nor guns for the Nazis.

Looking after one's self connotes that the principal burglar had better be kept busy lest he have time and leisure to change his mind about the division of the Polish spoil. But wishing him well in a..* war which keeps him busy does not mean joining him in the war in a military sense; and it is in this spirit that the western democracies interpret the word neutrality. The Nazis, however, are instantly ready with their counter-interpretation. They declare that the German cause.is not harmed by either M. Molotov's speech or Italian Cabinet rearrangements. They expect Nazi-Soviet relations to develop "a more positive initiative." Meanwhile, Finland, Rumania, Turkey, and the, world in general watch and wait.

By no stretch of the imagination can M. Molotov's speech be regarded as the "turning-point" that figured in Nazi anticipation. The Soviet Government has not used M. Molotov as a channel through which Herr Hitler's peace terms might be recatalogued or added to. If there is to be a "positive initiative" the Russian Foreign Minister's mainly negative utterance cannot be regarded in any sense as a contribution thereto.