NOTES AND COMMENTS

DIPLOMATIC MANCEUVRES
jvilit. Churchill's speech to the French
was made in view of the HokinHitler meeting which took place immediately afterwards in an unmentioned part of occupied France. Vichy made much of Petain's courteous reception by Hitler and the full military honours he was given. After unchecked rumours it became certain that the collaboration between France and Germany discussed at the meeting in no way involved French military action against Britain. Hitler's principal aim was agreed to be to organize a united front in Europe " against British interference." French colonial neutrality would defend Axis activity from bases and airports in Syria and Africa. The King's message to Petain—a startling and welcome change from the abuse so often hurled against him as " effete and senile "—expressed sympathy with the French and kept to the spirit of Churchill's speech, urging the French at least not to hinder the British effort.
Meanwhile Hitler continued his journey and met General Franco at the Spanish frontier. It was generally agreed that Hitler's aim was to ,iset from the Spaniards similar moral support as that from the French, in no way involving military action against Britain. The Spanish press denied there was any intention of joining in the war. The British press took the view that Hitler appealed to Petain and Franco rather than threatened, and the air was full of theories of peace offensives,
In the midst of these negotiations the Italians launched an attack against Greece, and opened out their Strategic plan of advancing from Albania to Salonika. In the morning of the same day Hitler arrived in Florence where he was received by Mussolini. Present at the meeting were Von Ribbentrop, General von Keitel, and Ciano. The results of the meeting were lo be judged
by subsequent events. It is thought probable however that the discussion settled the Axis attitude to France, while possibly Mussolini was asked to abate demands on French territory for the time being until a more suitable opportunity arose. Another question discussed was the establishment of a continental united Front, with the possible addition of intention to leave the British Empire alone, if Great Britain would abandon all continental commitments—Hitler's permanent ,plan. Alternatively von Keitel's presence indicated that the grand strategical plan for the big attack on the Near East, involving German pressure from Rumania and Italian in the Aegean, was settled.
ATHENS v. ROME
MR. Mackenzie King, the Canadian Prime Minister, was the first British Empire speaker to refer to the magic name of Greece, but the Greek war of independence is likely to beget a wave of historical and. poetic enthusiasm which has not been conspicuous in she war so far. What helps the peculiar antagonism to Italy, is the feeling that Mussolini is leading the Italians closely in the path of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the power from which Liberals all over the world strove to liberate Italians in the nineteenth cebtury.
Moreover, at this time the authoritarian regimes look to their past history, and if the Italians are proud to be descendants of the imperial Romans, they must recognise the peculiar privilege of the Greeks, who with equal right can claim descent from the race of Socrates and Pericles. The Fascist propagandists have had easy game in the past in calling their adversaries barbarians, and this has (on historical grounds) been said of England, with a discreet silence about Germany. But with Greece they are hoist with their own historical petard, and if at one period Greece belonged to the Roman Empire, at an earlier period Sicily and southern Italy belonged to the Greek colonists who were the founders of, western civilization. The only serious claim to uniqueness the Italians could make would rest in the glory of the mediaeval and rermaissance past, their Catholic past, but Mussolini has turned this down in favour of the Roman Empire.
Cardinal Newman maintained that the mental and spiritual basis of Europe was based on the Greeks and the Hebrews, and whereas we drew our spiritual background from the Old and New Testaments, the whole mental and intellectual tradition of the West was drawn from the Greeks. A primary example of this relationship to Greece could be found in St. Thomas Aquinas, who drew upon Aristotle and the Scriptures. The function Of the Roman Empire in this conception of our civilization was partly the introduction of law and universality, partly the propagation of Greek and Hebrew ideas. Actually these cornparisons between modern countries and their past are Largely fallacious, and Mr. Churchill has as much in common with the Romans as Mussolini in many ways, but it is worth mentioning because of this paradoxical struggle between Athens and Rome, Pericles and Julius Caesar
,GERMANY AND THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
HE big German diplomatic offensive is being carried out with one eye cocked on the American presidential election, and it is quite possible that some effort may be made to confuse the American electorate at the last minute.
A possible line open to the Germans is the one of discovering documents proving that American diplomats in Europe have gone in advance of the American electorate in supporting Allied countries and promising American intervention. This line has already been taken with regard to Mr. Drexel Biddle, the American minister in Warsaw, whom the Gentians accuse of encouraging the Poles to hopeless resistance. Any accusation made against American diplomats reflects directly on the President himself, as most American Ambassadors and Ministers are party men, and not independent men as in Europe. It is now generally accepted that the Germans would like to see Mr. Roosevelt beaten in the coming election, not because there can be any illusions about Mr. Wendell Willkie's attitude to the Nazis, but because Mr. Willkie would be a weak president. There is a widespread feeling on the continent that if Mr. Roosevelt is elected for a third term America will be in the war by the spring, and it le considered certain that Hitler's hope of winning the war or getting a German peace would be badly shattered were America to move. While the majority of Americans consider that America's chances of keeping out of the war are now slight, it is significant that Willkie is being supported by John L. Lewis, the Labour Leader, who is an isolationist, and by sections of American Catholic opinion, especially the Irish. Wendell Willkie is a businessman of the old school who is defending American capital against the New Deal, and his social policy is not in accord either with that of American Labour or of advanced Catholic Social teaching,
There would be a chance, though it is probably a slight one, that social troubles could be stirred up in the United States
if Willkie were President. Roosevelt's personality has become so dominating that in time of stress he could be an American Churchill. Reports from America show that there already exists there a crusading spirit perhaps stronger than the one existing in England—it was so in the. last war—and were the United States to ko to war they would enter it with a passion for the idea of democracy as strong as the Nazi passion for the German race.
TURKEY AND 'MUSTAFA KEMAL
TURKEY is the key to the Eastern 1. Mediterranean, but it is surprising how little is known about the country in Britain. One of the most widespread errors is that Turkey has a strong influence over the Moslem world for religious reasons.
In fact the very reverse is true. The idea sprang up with the difficulties Great Britain had to face in the last war, those of leading Indian and Arabic Moslems against the Sultan, the Defender of the Faithful.
But Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern Turkey, was anything but sympathetic with Islam, and as Christopher Dawson has pointed out he was one of the first "leaders " of a, Fascist type who sprang up after the last war. lie rose to the position of "Ghazi" or "Saviour "—the Turkish equivalent of Duce or Fuhrer—on the wave of passionate nationalism which drove the Greeks from Smyrna and all Asia Minor. But he was a genuine revolutionary, and bloke up the traditions by which the Turks had lived since the capture of Constantinople. Polygamy was forbidden. The Turkish national dress was prohibited. The Moslem Faith was disestablished and its public practice was penalized. European style hats were imported in hundreds of thousands from Czechoslovakia, and it was said that agriculture was being ruined by monogamy: for the old Turkish farming system was based on the wives working in the fields while the husband acted as a sort of overseer and sat smoking his pipe in the porch of his house.
Education in modern Turkey is westernized and secularist, and strongly influenced by the kind of materialism which also obtains in Russia, if we omit the Marxist doctrines. The Ghazi himself had a mania for education and he used to teach the new spelling—with its Latin alphabet—which he invented himself to his officers and political followers. He scoffed at all religion, and his immense grip over the Turkish people testified to the decline of Moslemism in Turkey.
Modern Turkey's cultural position is half way between that of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Like Russia the educational systemis rationalist and materialist. But like Germany the new Turkish state is nationalist with the makings of a strong racist movement. In foreign policy Turkey is largely dependent on Russia, sympathetic with Great Britain and fundamentally anti-Italian.