Evening Post. SATURDAY, JANUARY 18, 1941. A NEW BRITAIN, A NEW WORLD!

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 15, 18 January 1941, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JANUARY 18, 1941. A NEW BRITAIN, A NEW WORLD!

A New Year message to Labour women by the British Labour Leader, Mr. Attlee, who is also Lord Privy Seal in the British National Government, sounds the note of "a new Britain and a new world on a better basis." What does he mean by a new world? Manifestly, he means a world possessing greater freedom. And, equally manifestly1, the Nazis, when they promise a new world, mean a world of lesser freedom. They have left no doubt whatever on this point; and the world is indebted to them for clarifying the issue by the pains to which they have gone in explaining that nonGermans are an inferior folk, to be kept under. If Hitler, in lip-service to his old slogan National Socialism, had kept Socialism in his picture, arid had organised his propaganda along lines of a pretended loyalty to human individual freedom, the "ideological" background of the present war would have been entirely different. In that case, Hitler's pose would have been that of a person out-bidding the democrats to secure sacred human rights. But the Nazis have rendered the democracies the incomparable service of prescribing domination for the German, slavery for all else. The Nazis thus have cast upon Britain the mantle of defender of democratic and international freedom. To emphasise Britain's role, they have spurned that mantle, defiled it, and cast it from them. Such a simplification of the issue makes Britain's cause a loftier cause than any that has been fought over for a century. Loftier, if man is to be regarded as a free animal. But, if man is to be regarded as a slave under a German overlord, then the Nazi cause is the loftier. It is a loftiness that Britons are prepared to leave to the Nazis; Britons are prepared to fight over this radical issue to the death, and cannot believe that free peoples can take any other side than Britain's side. Above all, Uritons are indebted to Hitler for making the line of demarcation so plain, and for crystallising the issue of human self-government so sharply that none can mistake it. When the Nazi Governor-General of Poland, Dr. Frank, tells the Poles that "the greatest gift which Almighty God has given man is to be German, and we are proud to master the world as Germans," the democracies should thank the Deity whom Dr. Frank blasphemes—should thank God for this clearly demarcated cause of human freedom, and for the Nazis' insistence that that cause is ours and in no sense theirs. Every time they abjure it, we grasp it more firmly and gather new faith and strength. Herein is found our new bond with America, added to the old bond of common race. In such a simplified conflict, what side can a freedom-loving people take other than our side? Dr. Frank is one among many Nazi leaders who patronise the Deity and who spurn freedom for nonGermans. The German Minister of; Agriculture, Darre, in a speech in May, spoke of Germany as a nation predestined to rule the whole world . . . struggling for the aim, entrusted to us by God, to master the world for time eternal. . . . All soil and industrial' property of inhabitants of non-German origin will be confiscated without exception and will be distributed primarily among the worthy members of the [Nazi] Party and soldiers accorded honours for bravery in this war. Thus a new aristocracy will have slaves assigned to it, these slaves to be their property and to consist of landless non-German nationals ... a modern form of medieval slavery which we must and will introduce because we urgently need it in order to fulfil our great tasks. These slaves will by no means be denied the blessings of illiteracy. He adds that higher education will in future be reserved for Germans. Compare with this the late Mr. I Chamberlain's statement that any! settlement must "take account of the just claims and needs of all countries." Either freedom is a useless bauble, or else the. war between Britain and Hitler marks a supreme | crisis in the evolution of mankind, and a conflict in which a free people can be on one side only. Analysing the issue in the first three months of the war, the "Round Table" wrote—long, of course, before Mr. Churchill's offer to France of organic national union—that the, issue must be faced of "a new international sovereignty," which would be "a moral question." But Hitler's new international sovereignty would be unitary, imposed by unilateral action, and based not on morality but on force. "Never before," justly observes the "Round Table," "has a war been fought on. go great an issue.'* But Mr. Attlee's new! world may require more than a

British victory. The Prussian tradition, which "has made five wars in eighty years," and which has nurtured war writers, war professors, and incendiaries (Treitschke, Bernhardi, Hitler, etc.), has not hitherto been removable by defeat. After the Kaiser came Hitler, with him Nazism, which is "Prussianism in more brutal shape." The leaven that will dissolve the Prussian tradition is the unknown factor still missing in recipes for new worlds. Just as Britain wills to win the war, so will she strive to win the peace; but the potent question—"ls there something in the Prussian make-up that cannot harmonise with the free spirit of the Western World?"— remains unanswered.