"TOTALITARIAN"

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 91, 17 April 1943, Page 4

"TOTALITARIAN"

TRENDS IN BRITAIN

INDIVIDUALISTS' WARNING

A frontal assault on "totalitarian" tendencies in the United Kingdom was made by Sir Ernest Benn in his presidential address at the inaugural meeting of the Society of Individualists in London on January 21. The road to totalitarianism, he declared, led from democracy through bureaucracy, and it was a broad, easy speedway which had attractions for many well-intentioned but wholly misguided people. Lord Leverhulme, who presided, said that comparatively few people wanted to see Britain become a totalitarian State, but the British public might be persuaded into accepting, step by step, a programme of State planning, which might ultimately mean control by the Government of every phase of national life. In the name of "planning, industry, for instance, would be controlled and the consumer would have to be controlled too. The society embodied the belief that the State existed for the individual and not the individual for the State. "Parliament Threatened" The totalitarian State, said Sir Ernest Benn. was the lowest form of degradation. Numerous forces now at work, many of them operating from Whitehall itself, must be boldly and publicly arraigned as the agents of totalitarianism. Some people thought of that term only as a matter of the Gestapo, rubber truncheons and the persecution of the Jews. They forgot that it started with a long catalogue of social reforms, including the "people's motor car." In Britain, the powers so freely delegated for war purposes now threatened Parliament itself. When Sir William Beveridge said that he "hoped to retain something of the present Parliamentary system" all doubt of the serious threat to public safety was removed.

Totalitarian State management must be resisted because it was wholly alien to the British character, and also because they could not hope to keep themselves alive that way. Hitler, the most accomplished and experienced of planners, had already allotted to Britain a population of 16 millions. He (Sir Ernest Benn) accepted that figure as approximately accurate under any planned economy, whether the plans were made in Whitehall or in the Wilhelmstrasse.

The "freedom from fear" offered in the Atlantic Charter could best be secured if Governments refrained from setting up vast State interests in raw materials and markets, for these in the hands of Governments offered a constant and positive invitation to the spirit of aggression. The State alone could wage war, and it followed that every addition to its functions, interests, powers or resources added to the reasons for, and consequently the possibilities of, war. 'Little Bits ... of a Designed Whole' the society, said Sir Ernest, were the strongly entrenched vested interests of officialdom. In addition, there were large numbers of well-meaning people, from archbishops downwards, who, selecting specious little items from the catalogue of the planners, all of which could be found in Hitler's "Mein Kampf," failed to understand that those little bits were portions of a designed whole, and could not be, in practice, separated from the complete totalitarian structure. The society therefore called upon all men and women of goodwill to join their ranks, boldly to proclaim themselves individualists, and to do their utmost to avert the collapse and calamity which lurked in the wake of collectivism.