U.N.O. and Spain
As a set-off to many wise and salutary decisions the United Nations Assembly has acted with great foolishness regarding Spain. By striking a purely ideological note it has gravely compromised its claim to a judicial impartiality. Everyone knows that the Spanish regime is not a scrap more totalitarian than the Russian or Yugo- slav or others that could be named. Yet because it happens to lean in one direction while totalitarianism in Eastern Europe leans in another U.N.O. has cast a hostile vote against it, thereby assuming itself a political label which it ought at all costs to eschew. The folly of voting for a severance of economic relations with Spain has fortunately been rejected, but the purposeless and ineffective folly of recommending the withdrawal of Ambassadors from Madrid by all U.N.O. members, and of excluding Spain from various inter- national bodies with which her association is for practical reasons obviously necessary, has been committed—the British delegate in- explicably supporting. Since the United Nations' Charter expressly debars U.N.O. from intervening in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State, the palpable fiction that Spain is today a danger to international peace has to be main- tained. There is nothing to hurt Spain in all this, but a great deal to hurt U.N.O.
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