PEN-PORTRAIT OF HITLER

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 109, 1 February 1941, Page 13

PEN-PORTRAIT OF HITLER

Britain And America’s Task

GERMAN STRATEGY AND NAPOLEON’S

“Hitler, acclaimed as Germany’s god. of salvation, contemptuously dismisses democracy as a rabble, a prelude to bolshevism. He scoffs at Christianity as food for babes and weaklings. He despises man as a prey to terror or avarice. He deities brute force as the only dominant factor in this life. He avows paganism and identifies God with the racial consciousness of Germany. His way of despotic gangsterdom has been laboriously elevated to a philosophy, a religion, and already belts the world.’’ This was how Mr. Frank Milner, rector of Waitaki Boys’ High School, summed up the Fuehrer in an article dealing with British and American co-operation in the present world crisis. The combined might of the British Empire and of America, he stated, came in to redress the balance and guarantee a future for the race and a peaceful civilization wherein each people might develop its individual gifts and contribute its genius and its resources to the communal welfare. ' “This is a transcendent ideal which can never be achieved by emotional acquiescence in credulous pacifism and idealism,” he added. Gangsterdom will be only too quick to exploit either quixotic generosity or sentimentalism. “The history of Germany and specially that of Prussia affords no hope whatever of eradicating predatory nationalism and vindictive fanaticism in our time. There before iis lies the record of a people who came late to Christendom and who missed the cultural formative influence of the Roman Empire, and failed to achieve unify till four centuries after their European western neighbours. There we have the chronicle of their 33 national forays across the Rhine in the course of the last 2000 years. “There in writing of blood and fire is the story of the ‘macht-politik,’ of ■their power-lust, their treachery,_ their sublimation of war as the highest national virtue, their cruelty to their victims, their ceaseless frontier forays, their regimented militarism, their

love of dominating as a nation and yet of beiijg dominated as a people, their contempt for Christianity, their inevitable resurgence after apparent defeat, and their fatuous cult of the blonde Germanic super race destined to dominate the world.” Supreme Significance. From that blight, from that curse and all its reversionary horrors, went on Mr. Milner, man must be freed or degenerate into a helot and robot. Therein lay the sppreme significance to the world and to the future of civilization of British-American co-operation and union. If that failed us, nothing else of practicable worth was in sight. “The spirit, the traditions, the resources of these two great peoples are equal to the task. They have the ideal.ism, they have the will, they have the resources. What we ask of them is that they subordinate every issue to this commanding task, to this transcendent duty. “What we enjoin upon them is the marshalling of all their resources and forces, the pooling of their bases and possessions in safeguarding the decencies of human life and the age-long heritage of freedom, justice, and the tolerance which is their joint possession.” That, said Mr. Milner, was no idealistic project, no wraith of a visionary. It was plain horse sense, and the only basic cardinal thing which could salvage civilization from “this buzzard of atavistic cults and fetishes and horrors.” Both England and America fought for their preservation against a common foe. Both fopght for an even greater end than that. They fought that democracy might live, that liberty might endure, that man’s life might be a free evolution in peace to the full flowering of personality and the highest standards of abundant life. Hitler and Napoleon. Mr. Milner’s manuscript began by asking: “Does history repeat itself?” He proceeded: “The confident assertion that history never repeats itself needs substantial qualifications. For instance, the parallelism between certain major aspects of the Napoleonic Wars and the present domination of Europe by Hitler is close enough to qualify this aphorism. “Both struggles were due to the aspiration of continental rulers for world domination. The ultimate object of both protagonists was the same, namely, the dismemberment of the British Empire as the necessary preliminary to world conquest and reorganization. In both struggles England loses her continental allies and depends ultimately on sea power for the strangulation of her foe. To evade the silent, remorseless and irresistible power of the Royal Navy and its blockade, we see both aggressive despots, after vainly attempting to cross the Channel, swing their forces to fresh territorial conquests so as to rehabilitate their tarnished prestige.” As Napoleon sought fresh laurels at Austerlitz, so Hitler embarked upon his Balkan campaign not merely to seek Mediterranean submarine bases against the British Fleet, but to emulate Napoleon’s grandiose oriental campaign, went on Mr. Milner. Hitler’s strategy had in several respects repeated Napoleonic features. Silent invincible forces spelt bis doom, no ma: r what spectacular territorial diversions he and his satellites might yet compass. “He cannot break the iron ring of Britain’s blockade, nor can he escape the frightful flagellation from the air that will be his Nemesis this year.”