"We Will Be Wiser To Forget Utopia And Remember Czechoslovakia"

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXVI, Issue 14656, 27 April 1948, Page 3

"We Will Be Wiser To Forget Utopia And Remember Czechoslovakia"

oT n PEACE STILL A LONG WAY OFF, fOB SAYS SIR PATRICK DUFF

(Special to The Times) Gisborne, April 26 ( , TT p, lightnings are. flickering ominously up and down •I’s thunder-dark horizons,” said Sir Patrick Duff, in tjie •W° rlc « r address to the Gisborne Chamber of Commerce course 01 this Britain and for all British peoples, both for the ‘i r oy/n continued existence as well as for the sake 0 °! Ljssion for the world, until the era of world peace of s ell f. p problem is: how to strengthen the national character habit of- preparedness to .native fortitude in W -S’’ continued the High Commissioner. e r a of world peace is a long way away. Wo will be /forget Utopia and remember Czechoslovakia. #Vg c b peace a*s the world enjoys today appears to depend much*on the will to peace as on war-weariness and extol so m , ‘ i-’ fl2 f ac t that Euin stands sentinel on sc many taustion ana on frontiers.

' ith ccncern today that, fe ?om national antipathies ■ far {r °,L a they are being $ reS ,° an ew between- great powers The attitude of rf P „ rd 3 the comity of f 3 ' and the fifi 3 she imposes on hex -Sours is tragic- But the ;3il n f 1 mind which it betokens is fer her,” Sir Patrick firent times in history Russia herself was attacked "Ls played a manful and a i» as PL a partner m resistance « ileon or a Kaisor or a 5 N P Rut apart from these Is of collaboration, Russia, for is* 5 P hundred years, in spite lly Successful effort of Peter KS Orientate her ideas, 1 at her face away from the thought and the line _ot iipnt oi Western Christian Sfon. It is alien to them; and Wp it In more recent times, fvinegar of the doctrines of Marx Lenin glories 111 b , emg i e of mixing with_ the oil -cf I? civilisations ox which Britain, Zealand, the rest of tne Bnf Commonwealth and Empire, dher with several countries m. £n Europe, the Imited Mates America South America and ■•flf he rest of the world, are

structivc work, but so that it may enable the masses to destroy the bourgeois State machine and Parliament itself from within. “To resist the rabid infection of the death-struck creed of Communism it is necessary for alt wholesome good-nsighbouidy and pacific societies to draw together. A Moraely Illustration “Have you ever seen places in the fair land of- New Zealand where at some time devastating fires have consumed all the vegetation and where, since then, the rabbits have got the upper hand; reinforced, as in some parts of, say, Central (ptago, by d severe climate?” the speaker asked. “The local rabbit boards formed to combat the rabbits are not always—though it sounds a funny thing—contiguous; with the result that there are gaps where the enemy can create reinforcements in security and return in renewed force to the attack. And sometimes the rabbits get inside the wired paddocks. “ As I was contemplating not so long ago - bare barren grey hillsides with every vestige of vege- ' tation consumed by rabbits and fretted away by erosion, they seemed to me to be an epitome of our stricken world. The devastating fires of war have consumer muc hot the world’s longnurtured, kindly, substance. The economic blizzard, war’s aftermath, and “the coid war” make” it difficult for the new growth to raise its head, “Meanwhile, on the impoverished remains and on the struggling new growth, the Communistic hordes nibble and gnaw and push forward, here a little and there a little, purposefully to - fret and to consume away all hopes of recovery. We need a fence to keep them back. We need to see to it that, none of their ethic of conspiracy corrupts our own garrison or acts within our own society like poison in the well and ashes in the bread. Preserving Our Pastures “Britain has taken the lead in seeking by means of the Western Union to create a fence which will preserve sweet sound pastures, war-ravished though they be, from the corroding onsiought of Communism. As Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery has said “In the nsnas of sirength are the keys of peace.” “But it would be_ a pretty passive and complacent attitude on the part of those who are exposed to the common dangers if they were content to sit back and watch Great Britain’s people always and practically unaided be the shock troops of the free world’s battle for survival. These are, after all, the people who so recently, and at such unimaginable cost, held the fort: these are the people who, so recently, women and children _ and everything they possessed within twenty miles of the„enemy, fought earliest, fought longest and fought hardest,” Sir Patrick Duff added before outlining‘the difficulties now being faced by the people of Britain.

to Civilisation fle should have no complaint wever on the score tnat it did £ But, at the present time, 'antagonism has become so live as witness the sepuli fate'which has been imposed the Soviet on Poland, Bulgaria, goslavia,* Hungary, Rumania, ijnia, and, within the last month so Czechoslovakia; as witness .fifth columns actively and m■ously inspired within so many ■a States; as to constitute a purjjful challenge to all peoples iose civilisations are based on stern Christianity or on any bets others than undiluted Marx--3 and the Police State. “The attitude of the Soviet pe is a challenge which either we members of the tifish Commonwealth and apire nor the great and free-ii-loving democracy of the lited States of America, nor, ted, free peoples anywhere, never much we all yearn for ace, can ignore. And this Bude ?,nd fflic tactics which

fe effect to it, are not, by any inner of means, new. listen to this Resolution cf the ! Comintern Congress _in 1928. Bimunism rejects Parliamentarism as a form of future society; rejects it as a form of _ class Worship of the proletariat; it eels the possibility of the slow ipest cf Parliament; its fixed sis the destruction of Parlia-

alary Government. Therefore ■e can only be the q”esi’on_ of Using bourgeois state institutions Si the object of destroying them, i Communist Party enters such Mons not in order to do con-