KOREAN VICTORY: WHAT FOLLOWS COMMUNISM?

Questions of the week
by Douglas Hyde
IATFIAT will be the shape of the new, liberated Korea? This question, which is now agitating the minds of more thoughtful Americans and is finding expres
sion in the British Press and at the Labour Party conference, is of much more than Korean or Asian significance. It raises the whole question of what should be the shape of post-Communist regimes generally.
This paper, early in the Korean campaign, took the view that to concentrate upon the weakness and corruption of the South Korean administration of Syngman Rhee, as some people, understandably, were doing, was to lose sight of the main issue, -which was the need to see Korea against its world, cold-war background.
By the same token, the character of the regime which is to replace the Communist rule in South Korea and. presumably. in the North as well. must also be seen against that background.
One does not have to swallow the Communist propaganda
to he able to see that the Communists were astute enough to introduce reforms in the North ulsich, in all conscience, were just as badly needed in the South as well, but about nothing was done.
Too often the Communists arc handed such opportunities by their opponents, who arc then in no position to complain if they make the fullest possible use in their agitational propaganda of the contrast between democratic sentiment and Communist achievement..
Until the United Nations acted in Korea it appeared that the whole of South-East Asia lay wide open to Communist advance. The deplorable social conditions of the peasantry and of the new proletariat of the tolvns were its opportunity.
The U.N. has now shown that it means to meet armed aggression
with force of arms. But socially and spiritually South-East Asia still lies wide open. • The Communists' Korean military adventure may have failed, but its failure will not have stopped men in revolt against ageold injustices, who have been inflamed by clever Communist agita
which
bon, from continuing to take to arms in one country after another.
To rely upon putting down each such revolt cum Russian inspired aggression with blood would be a fantastically and brutally costly thing in both men and materials.
The alternative is to show what the democracies can do in a country which has tasted Communist rule. where social consciousness has been sharpened and the desire for re
form has been whetted. Not only will all Asia watch Korea in the coming months and years. All enslaved East Europe will be watching too.
East Europe
LET us make no mistake about it:
not everyone living under Communist rule lies groaning for deliverance. Not even all Catholics in those countries, particularly among those who were traditionally the " exploited," are certain that a return to the old life of pre-Communist rule would necessarily be a change for the better.
The deliverance of the Korean people from Communism has been a costly business. And there are hundreds of thousands of Koreans lying on scorched battlefields or in their ruined homes who will never be able to judge whether the cost was too high.
There are millions of others who. survivors in their devastated land, will take a great deal of convincing that what they have undergone was really a blessing in disguise. They will most certainly need more than mere words to convince them.
Those who watch from behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains to see what happens next will not be encouraged if the next item on the agenda proves only to be a blood bath of revenge followed by yet another Government careless of the welfare of its people, yet backed by Western democracy.
The precedents are not encouraging. The Paris Commune of 1871
was followed by the Thiers reprisals; the abortive Russian revolution of 1905 by the Stolypin reaction ; the Hungarian Soviets of Bela K1111 by a repression which left dreams of revolt still festering the more bitterly in the minds of tbrtured men, By such means are the seeds of future revolt sown and men's minds turned to hatred.
Such " liberation " can appear more attractive to those outside than to those who have to endure it. It embitters its victims and degrades the victors — whilst assisting their ultimate defeat.
The New Life
IT is easy to dismiss all plans for the new life which should follow liberation in Eastern Europe as being unrealistic; easy to say that the first job is to achieve the liberation.
Korea has shown that, in fact, such an attitude is itself unrealistic. The sudden break in the Northern front and the recapture of the capital presented the United Nations with a first-class problem for which they were largly unpre
pared. For little had been said or done about what should come next,
Under the circumstances the handing back of the capital to the heavily-compromised Syngman Rhee was more or less inevitable. But it was an appalling anti-climax for the West, and for many North Koreans it seemed a signal that they dare not retui 0 to the ways of peace.
There must have been many doubters who. learning what had been done, took hastily to the hills with their guns in the belief that nothing was now left for them hut to fight it out as guerrillas.
The Communists do not do things
that way. Even as they fought in the resistance movements of Europe ifor Communism, not for country). they debated the forms the post-war world should take. As they gathered in their emigre centres in London during the war years the Communists of Eastern Europe made their theme song: " We must be ready to take over."
Leadership
NO one knows when or how deliverance of the countries of Eastern Europe will come; God alone knows that. But our prayers for its liberation, if we are sincere, must be backed by thought and deturnination that what follows must be something which is truly Christian in practice as well as in theory.
For we pray, not only for Russia's deliverance but, in particular, for her conversion and those prayers come dangerously near hypocrisy if by them we mean only a return to old systems which were not always characterised by their likeness to the blueprint contained in the social encyclicals.
The leadership of the anti-Communist forces of Eastern Europe is fortunately very much in the hands of Catholics. Upon them may well fall the task of fashioning the shape of things to come.
Meanwhile, in Korea, there are Some among the representatives of the United Nations who urge that a united Korea shmild be given every help in making itself a model of what can be achieved under nonCommunist rule. Against its will it was made the guinea pig when it came to aggression; there is a lot now to be said for its becoming the guinea pig of peace.
A million Christians, predominantly Catholic, and already identified by Communist propagandists with the West, could be the allies of a movement, not for a wooden imposition of a " Western way of life" (which is not necessarily a Christian way) but for a living social movement which owes its inspiration to, and flows naturally from, the message of the Gospels.
Christian solutions are, as always, sane as well as humane solutions. And it happens that the reforms with which the Communists have sugared their pill. and which have tempted so many, usually go no further than what might be expected of Christianinspired administration.
Gas Strike
TO the London housewife, trying to cook meals with a minimum gas pressure, the latest