THE NAZI REGIME.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 76, 30 March 1935, Page 8

THE NAZI REGIME.

"NATIONALISATION" OF THE PRESS. (To the Editor.) I quite agree with "-Maori Mac" that your paper is showing a line spirit in allowing me to state my case in full, but I also maintain .that if it did not permit the fullest expression of opinion, then the celebrated "freedom of the Press" would mean merely the right of newspaper proprietors to bring the unreasoning public to their way of thinking. As it is, "Maori Mac's" tribute to the tolerance of "any British paper" is, in my opinion, far from being deserved. However, to pass on to Nazism, let me remind my opponent that public opinion is often influenced by wording rather than by ideas. For instance, let it he said that Hitler has "destroyed the liberty of the Press," and we are at once convinced of the enormity of his action. On the other hand, suppose we were to say that the German Press had been "nationalised." This does not sound so bad: the thought comes to ua that, after all, the newspapers might as well express the national will as the opinions of their proprietors. In actual fact, of course, Hitler has not gone as far as the nationalisation of the Press; a great deal of political critic-ism is still allowed. Thus in its issue of January 19, 1934, the "Vossisclie Zeitung" declared that "to-day the same cut-throats as before are still sitting in the banks," a criticism that for violence of wording and intensity of feeling could hardly be paralleled in any British paper. "Maori Mac" blames Germany's rulers for trying to dodge the provisions of the Versailles Treaty: 1 blame the Republican statesmen for attempting to fulfil them. As a patriotic Britisher, 1 would be sorry to think that any British Government could so demean itself as to submit as tamely to a similar foreign tyranny; We must remember that under the Republic anti-war agitation often meant repudiation of patriotism, with the result that the average ex-soldier, proud of the magnificent endurance of the German Army during the war period, but also fully mindful of the horrors of the battlefield, could not conscientiously take part in it. There is nothing hypocritical about the Nazi protestations of peaeefulness. In answer to the charge that the Nazis did not formerly clamour against war, Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, gives the following reasons: "In the past my voice would have been intermingled with the voices of those who had betrayed their own nation. It would have been associated with those who fell upon our fighting soldiers from the rear. It would have been intermingled with the voices of those Germans who have the Treaty of Versailles on their conscience." True internationalism will never be founded on the repudiation of nationalism: only through justice will world peace be assured. PRO-NAZI.