“Two Forms Of Tyranny Threatening World Today”

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29262, 21 July 1960, Page 9

“Two Forms Of Tyranny Threatening World Today”

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, July 20. The world of today was in one of the flood currents of history and it was impossible for anyone to be dissociated from it, the United States Ambassador (Mr Francis H. Russell) told the annual conference of Federated Farmers of New Zealand in Wellington today. This flood turbulence had its genesis in two forms of tyranny —the ancient tyranny imposed by poverty, hunger, and disease, and a tyranny over the spirit. This second tyranny was attempting to deprive mankind of the rights it had laboriously worked for over the ages—the freedoms of thought, religion, speech, expression in the various arts, movement from place to place, choice of employment, and national freedom of choice between different patterns of life. An examination of political conflicts. international meetings, and defence agreements showed all had their inceptions in problems created by one or the other of

these tyrannies, and the free world had to carry on the fight against both forms at the same time.

Poverty was a world problem because there was no country in the world today that was selfsufficient. A well-off minority of the world could not hope to prosper if most of the rest of mankind was living in desperate want. Islands of plenty could not exist in oceans of misery, and times of misery and despair were also times of anarchy and war. Communist Dictatorship

Assisting the undeveloped countries was complicated by the fact that a second form of tyranny threatened the world, Mr Russell said. The pattern which the men in the Kremlin and Peking sought to impose upon the world was not a hew one. Its shape had been laid down hundreds of years ago and there had been little change. It was rigid and doctrinaire, a closed regime, rightly called a dictatorship because it was opposed to open society that was constantly changing and moving forward.

“But just as this challenge ‘is without precedent so are our resources to meet it,” Mr Russell said. “The countries of the world who are free to determine their destiny have a higher productivity than any people in history, t “We can greatly expand all Ws production. Never has there been a more highly trained or broadly educated people. There is a more widespread realisation of the nature of the conflict and ryhat is at stake. Why should we not be hopeful? General Threat

"But there are things to do. We must, for one thing, avoid the temptation to regard the struggle at any given point as between any two particular countries. When the threat was against Greece and Turkey it was not only against those two countries. When the pressure was in turn directed against Berlin, Iran, Italy, and Korea, or when currently it is turned against India, the United States, or Britain, it is not a threat merely against those particular countries. They merely happen to be the sector of the world at which the campaign is being concentrated at the moment. It is never a conflict between one power and another.

“It is always against f us—all of us. It is between two opposing attitudes towards human life. We are all involved in the outcome.” An all-out effort .was being made to frighten, coerce, lure, impress or divide, and the task of the Western world was to show that it was unafraid, unified and as determined in peace as if faced with a show of physical force. The free world must maintain a solidarity that wduld convince the Soviet Union that it was in its own interests to help to create a healthy international atmosphere.