A WAR OF CREEDS

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 282, 26 August 1939, Page 10

A WAR OF CREEDS

Below the surface of the events from which the war crisis in Europe has developed is a conflict of political ideas in which the control and management of human affairs is vitally at stake. This conflict has made it impossible for questions at issue between the totalitarian States and the democracies to be treated satisfactorily and successfully by the usual methods. these have been tried. Extraordinary patience and forbearance have been exercised in dealing with the totalitarian leaders in the hope of creating an atmosphere of goodwill, mutual understanding, and compromise. Failure has been due. not to the intrinsic difficulties of the questions at issue, nor to any spirit of intransigeance on the side of the democracies, but to a complete divergence of outlook on the world and mankind. On the one side there is the democratic ideal, founded on the principles of liberty, political equality, and government by persuasion ;on the other, the philosophy of power-politics, . the basis of which is the triumph of force and the so-called “survival of the fittest.’’ According to various writers on the subject, ‘‘power-poli-tics” in the totalitarian sense has nothing to do with international relationships and group alliances. It refers to a political system in which all the authority and power of the State is centralized in a single individual or group, and the citizens reduced to mere anonymities. The totalitarian State seeks to impose its will on other States either by force or threats of force. It acts on the vicious principle that the end justifies the means. As one writer expresses it:

A lie. a broken treaty, an injustice—these are all alike good if they subserve the aims of the leader or the nation that emplovs them. Ou this theory the adds), justice within the State must yield to tiie interests of the Government, while hi foreign affairs the safety or the needs of the nation are held to be sufficient warrant for any piece of duplicity, or any blow at a neighbour.

This description of totalitarian philosophy has been exemplified over and over again in the speeches and actions of Herr Hitler. Power - politics in Germany has degraded education into propaganda. It has seized and diverted all the agencies and instruments of culture to serve a single end, the power of the State, which is Heir Hitler. Its exponents have declared quite frankly that idealism, humanitarianism, liberty, are a delusion and a sham, fitting people for a world of. unreality. It is impossible for any Christian, any believer in spiritual values, to reconcile this philosophy with the humanities of a civilized existence. The two creeds are incompatible; there is no room, in the Nazi philosophy of force for the British spirit of compromise, tolerance and magnanimity. Consider the persecution of the Jews in Germany. Searching for motives for this reversion to mediaevalism, Professor Gilbert Murray discovers three—revenge, plunder, and a tyranny complex. Discussing the third, he notes that “the Nazi fanatic is obsessed by admiration of war and warlike virtues. He loathes and despises those softer yirtues which most of us call Christian, but which he thinks of as slavish and Jewish. It is good to be hard, good to be inhuman, good to be conscious of your natural superiority to the rest of the hutnan race. These qualities have their best field in war, but in the meantime it is good to have some inferiors to practise upon.” It is almost incredible, that Professor Murray in these words is referring to a nation which, in its history, has given most valuable contributions to the culture of the world. Strictly speaking, lie is not. It is the philosophy adopted by the leaders of Nazi power-politics be condemns, not the German people themselves, who are compelled to submit to it. who have been deprived of the privilege of free speech and public criticism, and who are now in imminent danger of being led into war against a nation which has no enmity in its heart against them. Thousands of New Zealand soldier with the army ol occupation on the Rhine after the Armistice have pleasant memories. ol friendly intercourse with the German people. . Thousands of New Zealand tourists and others who have visited Germany in the period intervening since then and the. present crisis have returned with similar impressions. It is a tragedy that the British and German peoples should now be facing the prospect of warring with each other through the destructive policy and methods of Nazi power-politics.. In this matter Britain’s conscience is clear. As Lord Halifax said in his world broadcast yesterday, “We have never had, nor. have we today. the remotest intention of attacking Germany. If German pohev could only he directed to restoring confidence by willingness, to negotiate, we ask nothing better than to help her to resolve. her .difficulties, our own. and the world problems which need a solution.