The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. WAR AND MR. HOLLAND.

Auckland Star, Volume LIII, Issue 190, 12 August 1922, Page 6

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

WAR AND MR. HOLLAND.

■ ■ m For the cause that lacks assisianom. For the wrong that ieeds rcsistamos. For th« future iti ihe distance. Aid the good that toe ms do. SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1922.

We need hardly say that any movement which has for its object the prevention of war will have our support so long as the promoters of the movement conduct and express themselves in a rational way, and we have already expressed our warm sympathy with the. World-wide "no more war" movement. Though we cannot endorse everything that was said at a meeting in Wellington in connection with this movement by Dr. | Gibb and the Rev. R. Inglis, of the League of .Nations Union, we can understand their point of view, and *« sympathise with their enthusiasm. But the speech delivered by Mr. H. E. Hol-| land, M.P., was of quite a different char-| acter, and it seems to us that the utter-' ances of the Leader of the Labour party on this occasion are so significant as to deserve a little serious public considera-. tion and criticism. Mr. Holland devoted some attention to the origin of the recent war; and true to his Marxist traditions, he stated his belief that "the late war arose out of a scrambling on the part of the internationalist capitalists for territorial expansion." Possibly if Mr. Holland were not a Marxist and had thus been able to give the subject of Capitalism , some unprejudiced attention, he would know that simply because war dislocates and destroys the machinery of production and distribution and exchange toy which the capitalist makes his wealth, therefore the greatest of all capitalistic interests is peaoe. The capitalists certainly know it, even if Mr. Holland does not, and they have generally done 'their best to maintain peace for that very reason. But this eccentric view of Capitalism is a very trivial matter compared with his alternaJt.ve explanation of Britain's share in the Great War. "We were in the war," he said, "solely because we were pledged to France 'by an' agreement made __ecTetly in lOfti Ln respeclt to Morocco. France was in the war because of an agreement made with i Russia." Now, we venture to say that. it would ibe difficult, in so few words, to j give a more hopelessly false and per-! veTted account of the real origin of the Great War than Mr. Holland here sup-, plied. For he never even mentions Germany as a factor in the war; he never by a single word suggests the all-impor-tant and indisputable fact attested now by countless historical proofs that Germany, in Hardcn's words, "willed the war"; that she had planned and organised 'the war for many yeare before "the day" came and that in 1914 she merely utilised the dispute between Austria and Serbia to precipitate the struggle .for which she had so long prepared and to strike her blow for "world-power or downfall" at her own chosen time. ■No doubt Mr. Holland can find in stupid and ignorant productions such aa "Bed Europe" the ridiculous assertion that Russia'forced Germany to fight by mobilising her armies; and no doubt he can find in Mr. E. D. Morel's unscrupulous distortions of the Morocco question some plausible excuse for his reference to the alleged "secret" Anglo-French pact. But has it never occurred to Mr. Holland and men of his type to consider that the right way to explain a quarrel

is not to start with tbe middle or at the end, but at the beginningt France and Russia wen; driven into each other's arms through fear of Germany, and Britain and these Powers formed the Triple Entente to protect themselves against German aggression, simply because Germany's conduct had convinced 1 them that their only hope of safety lay' in the possibility of concerted action. To put it quite briefly England was "iji the war," as Mr. Holland phrases it, pimply in self-defence, and Russia and France were "in the war" for precisely the same reason. Mr. Holland and many of his Labour colleagues during the war misunderstood the whole situation so completely that they did their best to discourage everybody on this side of the world from taking part in the war— l>eing apparently quite oblivious of the fact that those who were risking their lives on the side of the Allies were fighting to protect England and New Zealand from the fate that befell Belgium and Serbia, and were incidentaly shielding Mr. Holland and stalwarts of his class from the kind of treatment that the Kaiser and the Prussian militarists thought good enough for Socialists in Germany. We say all this not because we have the least hope of convincing or converting Mr. Holland, but because it seems to us a mistake to allow such gross and outrageous perversions of fact and truth as Mr. Holland has indulged in to pass unchallenged, and we object very strongly to the "no more war" movement being stained by them.