THE WAR SHOWING UP WHO IS WHO

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 141, 9 March 1940, Page 12

THE WAR SHOWING UP WHO IS WHO

Loyalists And Disloyalists PARLOUR PINKS AND CULT OF SOVIETISM (By Observer.) The reference by tlie mayor of Wellington this week to “those who call themselves highly intelligent people—the intelligentsia—persons who have bad a good deal to say about the success of tlie Soviet system” is ref resiling. He numbered them among the elements pulling against the country’s war undertaking, commenting that he considered them of little real use to the community when compared witli those who were prepared to work hard for tlie country’s good. Mr. Hislop’s allusion was, of course, to rhe jiarlour pinks and other whitecollar Leftists who, did they live in Russia, would be professors pottering about in dilettante research or minor State otlicials producing a plenitude of doctrine but little real wealth. Mirny would be harmless chatterboxes: others, born to intrigue, would spend their energies undermining the law because they were anarchists and the law was tlie law. Lately, I am told, the Government has been having a look at who is who in State departments with the object of curbing disloyalty to the war engagement'. Knowing where one or two of these people stand it should not sbrink from dismissing subversive individuals. Taxpayers are finding hitherto unthinkable millions, part of which goes in salaries for State servants. If the opinion of tlie inarticulate mass of citizens backing Hie war effort could lie heard, it would reveal a bitter objection to the expenditure of any portion of these millions to keep ofiicials who are hostile to the war policy in State jobs. Cult of Sovietism. In the larger sphere outside the State service, there are groups who make a cult of Sovietism, thereby denying themselves the title to intellectuality. Theirs are minds locked against, the evidence of fact. Up to Hie Russo-German embrace ami Stalin's inglorious right-about-turn on tlie pacific Litvinoff's foreign policy, all reasonable people watched Russia witli open minds. At Stalin's turn about the reasonable people also turned. Such people, liappjly for tlie safety of this troubled world, are tlie majority. They are tlie salt of democracy. Their education is a continuing process based on willingness to admit the facts and revise their opinions accordingly. Whom then did Mr. Hislop mean in his reproacli of tlie intellectuals? Clearly the supercilious class whose education is complete with the assimilation of propagandist literature about, tlie Soviets—'those whose creed is that: Left is neces'sarily right, ami Right is necessarily wrong. Today we are reaping the harvest of .years of propaganda directed at <"ir political and social institutions. Thanks to tlie sanity of British people and Hieir (•haracteristic of accepting change only after deep questioning, most of the seed of foreign ideologies lias falle.i on stony ground. But not quite all of it. Some fell in tlie fertile soil of the restive and disgruntled, seeding again to find root in minds which want something for nothing and a short ent t> , Utopia. These are the minds which belong to the people who are causing tlie trouble just now. Tlie war is not wholly bad if it has brought them above ground, it will serve, tlie Empire well, too. if it unities tlie mass of her people who oelieve in tlie British way as more jo lie preferred than the Soviet and the Nazi.