The Bay of Plenty Times TUESDAY MARCH 15, 1949. SOVIET JUSTICE AND PROPAGANDA

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXVII, Issue 14927, 15 March 1949, Page 2

The Bay of Plenty Times TUESDAY MARCH 15, 1949. SOVIET JUSTICE AND PROPAGANDA

The truculence of Hie twelve Communists at present on trial in America, under the democratic pattern of justice, makes an interesting contrast with the extraordinary similarity of the selfabasing confessions made by men of religion in Hungarian and Bulgarian Courts, after a few weeks' confinement of the defendants behind Communist prison walls.

The former have been allowed defending counsel and the greatest latitude to make the utmost use of the law’s delays. To what horrors .the latter-have been.subjected, we can only guess. With cynical disregard for the sufferings of their victims however, the Comunist overlords of’these and other Central European countries have extracted from their alleged “confessions” the .last ounce of propaganda value.

Soviet propaganda concentrates.not, on evidence but on assertion. The fathers of Communism know what Hitler knew, that the bigger the lie, and the more persistent its repetition, the more believers it will win. Radio broadcasts in the United States some years ago, and in Venezuela recently, found thousands of people so credulous that they believed that the Martians had invaded the earth. Such gullible people abound everywhere, so propaganda of the smear and counter-smear kind will never die cut for lack of believers. “If charged, smear back!” That is the Soviet propagandist line, and all the writers of the Ilya Ehrenberg type have to toe that line. Therefore the call of the Union of Soviet Writers for a world peace congress in April again to concoct a peace which Russia persistently rejects, is loaded with unsupported assertions • that the persecutions charged against Russia belong only to the West. Besides drilling the Russian writers, the Soviet Government, through its artistic gauleiters, dictates to the Russian composers the kind of music they shall compose and dictates to the geneticists the emphasis they must place on environment, as against heredity in determining human character. Communism can control environment more easily than it can. control heredity ,and therefore wishes Russians to believe that they must sway with all Soviet environmental squeezes, including squeezes on prisoners awaiting trial. In this way startling results of recent environment are revealed in the utterances and conduct of prisoners in the Russian, Hungarian and Bulgarian Courts. The peace, conference asked for by the Union of Soviet Workers is a gesture which costs the Soviet Government, nothing and which may buy a good deal of mistaken sympathy among gullible persons, erne of whom, it has been said,’ is born every minute.