RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 65, 10 December 1930, Page 10

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events LOCAL AND GENERAL (By Kickshaws.) According to a writer “no knowledge we ever acquire is so Important m a knowledge of what to say and how to say It.” Except, perhaps, a knowledge of what not to say and when not to say it. * * It is debatable whether a mountain can be made to go to the prophet, but it appears to be inevitable, in the end, that a Hill will go to Australia. • • • “C.F.W.” says: “Referring to ‘silly questions’ published in ‘The Dominion,' it would be a good thing to draw the public’s attention to the fact there is no such thing as a general post office in Auckland! New Zealand has only one G.P.O.—that is head office in Wellington—the others being chief post offices; Anyhow, the answer to the wire question is north.” » » • Miss Crossley Batts has discovered survivors of the ancient Chaldeans 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas. Their average span of life is 150 years; they have no diseases; they possess strange secrets, and they speak pure Chaldean. Miss Crossley Batts learned Chaldean in order to speak .with members of this lost tribe. She intends to pay them another visit. Miss Crossley Batts is to be congratulated. She can justly claim to be the only person alive who has heard the spoken word of the ancient Chaldeans, a power on the outskirts of India and in Mesopotamia between 600 B.C. and 540 B.C. It is true that certain learned professors after a lifetime of study have managed to decipher certain Chaldean cuneiform inscriptions. But they cannot claim to converse in Chaldean. Miss Crossley Batts walks roughshod over the beetling brows of these learned gentlemen straight into an unmentioned Himalayan backwater 13,000 feet above sea level. She picks up this c fficult language in a few months or at the most a year or so. Surely the sisterhoods of the world will unite to honour Miss. Crossley Batts.

It is by no means impossible that some relics of the ancient greatness of the Chaldean Empire, made famous by Nebuchadnezzar’s dietetic fancies, are still in existence in out-of-the-way corners of the ivorld. What strikes experts as being unlikely is that any of these relics could have kept their strain pure for, roughly, 2300 years. The Chaldeans were scattered by the Medes and Persians. Unless they alighted in some racial backwater, such as Australia, the chances of their surviving as a race t#> this day are practically nil. The borders of India time and time again have been overrun by invaders. Nevertheless, tho fringes of the Himalayas must harbour all manner of inter-related intermarried remnants of old-time civilisations.

Alexander the Great and his army on his trip to India was responsible for infusing new blood into many of these half-lost tribes. It is said that he discovered worshippers of Dionysus, a somewhat disreputable religion of old time Mediterranean days, in the mountain f-stness of the Indian border. Most certainly he spent much time harrying these mountain fastnesses of little-known tribes with a thoroughness never since repeated. The lost tribes of the Chaldeans even in his day would have been looked upon as something of a novelty. Yet there is no mention of any such discovery. Until Miss Crossley Batts becomes more confiding concerning her unique discovery, and until her fluency in Chaldean has been tested by those who understand the written language, it would be unwise to be too optimistic regarding her eventful plunge into the days of Nebuchadnezzar.

Apart from propagandist reasons, it is difficult to understand all the fuss and bother being made about the present trial in Russia. One might be led to believe that trials, sentences, and sudden death were uncommon occurrences in the law courts of that country. The handful of professors and engineers now standing their trial on some obscure interference with the ways of the Russian Government are but a drop in an ocean of similar sentences. Whatever anybody may think of the erlts or demerits of the huge experiment in Russia, revolution is not a short cut to success. Yet the whole scheme stands or falls upon a foundation of bloul.

The official-figures of the victims of the Red Terror, under Lenin’s regime, are placed admittedly at 4000 persons. The truth is that the number is certainly not less than 100,000, for courtsmartial on civilians were omitted, murders were not included in the list, while mass executions of peasants and workers for some curious reason were considered irrelevant. The fact is that at the beginning of the present regime in Russia so many different authorities were so busy killing so many people there was nobody left to add up the answer.

General Denikin once set up a commission to investigate the truth of the Soviet estimates of the victims who had fallen to their experimental scythes. Possibly this commission’s totals err on the high side as much as the Soviet figures err on the low. The commission collected an enormous amount, of material still lying unpublished at Paris. From this material it was estimated that at least 2,000,000 had fallen victim to the deadly methods of the Cheka. “It matters not,” Lenin used to say, “if 90 per cent, of the Russian people perish so long as the remaining 10 per cent, live to bring about a world revolution.” Moreover, recent statistics show that so far as the Russian Church is concerned these ideals have been nearly successful. At least 30 bishops, 1560 clergymen, and 7000 n us and monks have been sentenced to death up to date.

It is possible to say that all figures about Russia are incorrect. Facts are few and far between. However, so ungovernable has been the lust for death In the last decade in Russia that even the Soviet Supreme Court felt constrained last May to deplore the casual manner in which sentence of death was passed. The circular pointed out that death sentences were sometimes rdered “when actually no offence had been committed!” It was suggested that the practice of “refusing to hear witnesses for the defence and of refusing to hear documentary evidence presente by prisoners to establish their innocence is undesirable.” It is a pity that pawns in the great experiment are flesh and blood, like ourselves. Otherwise we might almost force a sn lie at the idea of wiping out by revolution the equivalent of the whole population of this Dominion so that somebody’s ideas on this or that might b» proved—or disproved.