World Press Digest

Winston Churchill, writing in the London Sunday Chronicle on Germany says:

It is in Germany that nationalism presents itself in its most repulsive form. The bitterness of defeat has produced a monstrous reaction.

A whole people, the most educated, the most scientific, and one of the most gifted in the world, has cast away every vestige of constitutional law and liberty. It has repudiated the whole liberal civilization of the nineteenth century.

It has plunged back into the Middle Ages, with Jew-baiting and official murder as the vaunted features of its national life. It proclaims in ludicrous defiance of historic fact its possession of a racial purity, in the name of which it conceives itself entitled to drive from its bosom every strain of alien blood.

Christianity itself is made to march at the goose-step. The swastika replaces the Cross. The Bible is rewritten so that the Jordan becomes the Rhine, and Jerusalem Berlin — or perhaps Munich. The Eternal Father of mankind and Creator of the universe must become a tribal god.

This is a terrible reversion. It can be explained only by an inferiority complex which has rendered one of the greatest branches of the human family singularly unsure of itself.

PALESTINE VIEWED AS A CROWN COLONY

The Near East and India, discussing the possibility of converting Palestine into a crown colony, says:

It is not the first time that the suggestion has been made that international authority, through the League of Nations, be sought for obtaining a Colonial charter. Jewish circles particularly are in many cases keenly interested in removing the present anomalous juridical condition of this land, on the ground that the political and economic disadvantages of this loose link with Great Britain far outweigh the benefits of a mandatory regime, and that it would be far more meet to go the whole way to become “another jewel in England’s colonial diadem,” to use the common metaphor.

If Palestine, with its unusually important value for British Imperial communications (the air and land routes to the Far East, the Iraq Pipe-line, the fine harbor base at Haifa, and other unique strategic interests), were to be taken formally into the family of the Commonwealth, it would bring about significant economic changes for the benefit of local export trade. For not only could Palestine be included within the ring of Imperial preferential tariffs, but it might also escape the present drawbacks of mandatory life in the free trade maintained by other countries which have considerable import business into Palestine, without any hard-and-fast reciprocal export arrangement. The growing adverse trade balance of the country is giving cause for alarm in commercial quarters. Last year it is estimated that there was a margin of some ten or eleven million pounds between imports and exports, the former at £15,000,000 and the latter at some £4,000,000.

There are others who foresee a breakdown of the Mandates system of the League owing to the increasing nationalism among the European nations. From many points of view, the annexation of Palestine is thought to be coveted by certain Powers; and it is to forestall any sudden manoeuvre, should the exigency arise, that many believe in the wisdom of formal inclusion in the British Commonwealth.