WAR ON CENSORSHIP

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 236, 6 October 1942, Page 2

WAR ON CENSORSHIP

TRENCHANT ATTACK

AUSTRALIAN TENDENCY

(0.C.) SYDNEY, October 2. A trenchant attack on the growing tendency of Australian politicians, policemen and magistrates to censor anything and everything of which they personally do not approve, and to set themselves up as the judges of what Australians shall be allowed to read and think, was made to-day in a special article in the Daily Telegraph by Rev. G. Stuart Watts, acting rector of Casino, whose liberal views on modern problems and insistence that the Church must concern itself with them has made him probably the most heard and discussed clergyman in Australia. Mr. Watts says: "When the spirit of liberty, which is the principle of life, dies, it only requires a push from outside to send the whole rotten structure toppling. That is why I hate all forms of literary censorship. If instead of banning Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' and James Joyce's 'Ulysses,' our Customs Ministers had encouraged Australians to learn the lesson taught by those masterpieces, we would have been in a stronger position to-day to resist Fascist aggression from without. Banning of Books "The lesson taught by Huxley and Joyce is the hatefulness Of servility and the glory of independent thought. A nation which has learned that truth may be overwhelmed for a time by the aggressor, but it will never lose its soul. I have long wanted to see Australia honoured as the cultural Greece of the Southern Hemisphere, but we have had too many barbarians in high places for that.

"Long before the betrayal of Czechoslovakia books glorifying Fascism were freely circulated throughout Australia whilst authoritative studies of the great Soviet experiment were banned. Not only that, but midnight raids on libraries took place in which everything suspected of being favourable to the Soviet was confiscated. Small wonder that H. G. Wells, on his return from this country, reported that suppression hung like a malaise all over Australia and that 'a barrier of illiterate policemen stood between the tender Australian conscience' and what the rulers believed to be subversive literature.

'In keeping with this intolerant and dictatorial attitude is the blindness to social injustice which has long disgraced Australian political leadership. If we were a really civilised people we should never allow our best citizens to live in mean, sordid surroundings, ill-clad and under-nourished, the helpless victims of disease and brutal oppression. We should never allow good food to be destroyed and markets cornered, in order to keep prices soaring and enrich a few at the expense of the many. We should never rest until a new and juster social order was fashioned, in which every little child born into this country .have a fair chanoa Jr, """""V*

Mr. Watts thinks that the Labour Movement has failed the country because it has had "neither a soul nor a policy." and that the Church, too, has "fallen down on its job." He concludes:

"Frankly, I am profoundly worried by the rapid spread of intolerance and social reaction in this country. I believe that the situation is* sufficiently urgent to bring together in one defensive and offensive movement all those who still prize the ideals of liberty and justice, whether they are Christians, Jews, atheists, agnostics or what-not. From my observation of what is going on in Church and State, 1 am sure that if we liberals don't hang together we'll hang separately."