But fundamentally, Van Paassen was a Christian Democratic Socialist concerned, as he put it in his autobiographical Days of Our Years, with the enduring struggle for justice for ordinary individuals.
This redoubled political violence was in part planned by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, whom Van Paassen had interviewed in 1929 about his incitement of the bloody uprising that year against the Jews in Palestine.
During the 1929 Palestine uprising, after his reporting on the massacres contradicted both the Mufti's statements and local British officials' news releases, he became the target of several assassination attempts, after the last of which a Captain Saunders pointedly asked, "Moreover, why do these things happen to you?
On the other hand, against the evil of Germany's collapse stood the alternative of giving Adolf Hitler, under a Four-Power accord, carte blanche to break out of his dangerous isolation by clearing himself a road through Czechoslovakia to the oil and wheat fields of Rumania, thus putting him in possession of the wherewithal to risk a war of long duration with the Soviet Union.
In this way Germany's pressure on the Western imperialisms will be lessened, and at the same time the intolerable burden of carrying the Reich's colossal war machine will be shifted, at least partially, from the shoulders of the German people to those of the prospective colonial tribes in the Muscovite plain.
To prevent an interimperialist European war by coming to an understanding with Nazi ambition for expansion in Eastern Europe has been the fundamental directive of England's foreign policy under Baldwin and Chamberlain.
Having her eyes on the Far East, where Japan has arisen as the next historical challenger of British naval and colonial power, Britain desires above all else to have her hands free for the struggle she must wage in the Pacific.
For, as England in the past has successively destroyed the naval power of Spain, Holland, Louis XIV, Napoleonic France and Imperial Germany, she must sooner or later envisage checking Japan before her spheres of influence in China and her Indian, Malay, and Australian possessions are threatened by that new and determined rival.
...It could therefore be predicted with reasonable certainty after the smoothly effected annexation of Austria that Czechoslovakia would be the next link in the chain encircling Germany to be sacrificed, and, thereafter, that Poland, Hungary, Rumania and Yugoslavia are to be similarly abandoned when Hitler judges the time opportune to take another step in easterly direction.
Rather than forgo the unlimited supply that the mines of Iberia and the Riff offered, Hitler summoned General Sanjurjo from Lisbon (where he was living in banishment) to Berlin in March 1936, and the plot for a military insurrection against the Republic with the aid of the Fuehrer and Signor Mussolini was hatched."
However, French Prime Minister Léon Blum said that "every time we make a move to help the Spanish Republic, we are warned by Downing Street that if we become involved in war with Italy and Germany over Spain, France cannot count on British support."
By the creation of a third hostile frontier, he made the Quai d'Orsay so absolutely dependent on England that France lost her freedom of action entirely and was reduced to the status of a second-rate power....In December 1936, Germany had the satisfaction of receiving the first shipments of iron ore from Spanish Morocco and a year later had not only the mines of the Asturias under her control, but had ordered Franco, in exchange for artillery tanks, Junker planes and ammunition, to have one million tons of ore, antimony, tin, copper and lignite in German ports by the end of 1939.In reality, the civil war in Spain strengthened Hitler so enormously that in the perspective of history that dolorous episode may well come to be known as the starting point of the Nazi mastery of Europe.
[8]In his 1939 book Days of Our Years Van Paassen wrote: Germany is much farther on the road to dechristianization than the Soviet Union, even if the churches in the Reich remain open and the incense still rises from the altars.
[9]In 1941, Van Paassen wrote: To many observers, amongst them a number of statesmen, the civil war in Spain at one time appeared to be nothing more significant than a bloody dispute between adherents of two equally obnoxious ideologies, Fascism and Communism.