The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. MONDAY, APRIL 1, 1940. MOLOTOFFS SPEECH.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 77, 1 April 1940, Page 6

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

MONDAY, APRIL 1, 1940. MOLOTOFFS SPEECH.

for the cause thai lacks assistance, For the irrong that reeds resistance, Fcr+pe future in the distance, And the good that tee can do.

The public statements of a Hitler or a Ribbentrop, a Stalin or a Molotoff, cannot be judged by any

ordinary standards. Suek statements are designed to produce an effect (in which respect they do not differ from other statements), but they have this peculiarity, that their authors are completely cax-eless of the truth. Thus when M. Molotoff declares that "Russia does not intend to retake Bessarabia by Avar," or that the Soviet is resolved to fulfil its obligations to Turkey, he tells us nothing; he merely indicates what he wants us to believe. In the past he, or his master Stalin, has said that the Soviet stood always against aggression, that its arch-enemy was Nazi Germany, that it would always respect tie independence and integrity of Finland. These statements, we can see in retrospect, were not statements' of intention, but of what the Soviet leaders at the time thought it expedient to say. Realisation of Soviet bad faith was late in dawning, but since the Moscow pact it has flooded the world, so that of all the commentators on M. Molotoff's speech there is not one who will take his words at their face value.

} Though it is impossible to attach any importance to any specific statement in the speech, it is possible to discern the effect which its author intended to produce. The primary aim of the Soviet Government is not war, or peace, but to maintain itself in power. One of its most effectual methods in so maintaining itself has long been to distract its own people's attention from their miseries hy filling them with fear of enemies without. Continually, year in and year out, the Russians are told that the" capitalist countries are plotting to attack them. Once it was Nazi Germany that was the arch-plotter, until Stalin made a deal with Hitler. Now it is the democracies that are plotting. The invasion of Finland was necessary to frustrate one plot, but others are afoot. It is much more probable that the Soviet had in mind, when it invaded Finland, an attack by Germany in the future, rather than any attack by the Allies in the present. But this talk of conspiracies against Russia is too stale and unconvincing to deceive anyone, except the Russians. That it should be repeated shows the Soviet leaders' anxiety about their own position, which was not! strengthened by the display ofi their armies' incompetence in Finland. M. Molotoffs statement that the Soviet will not take part in a big war is possibly true. The Soviet wants walk-over victories against weak forces —such as it enjoyed, by treachery, in Poland, and such as it miscalculated upon enjoying in Finland. It may lie that by Finland's capitulation Stalin has gained enough to present himself to his countrymen as a conqueror and save his throne, and that he will content himself with resuming the role of the scavenging jackal in the wake of the tiger—but none of his neighbours will sleep quieter in their beds because his puppet seeks to represent others as aggressors.