NAZISM'S RECORD

Evening Star, Issue 23834, 14 March 1941, Page 9

NAZISM'S RECORD

As the chosen weapon of Hitler’s warfare, an indiscriminate bombing from the air, has raised destruction to a now level, so tho symmetry of his power is strange in the ancient history of empires, whether it be those of whom no witness remains but a broken arch, or the long-lived systems of the Homan and the Mogul. To war with “ armed opinions ” is nothing new, nor is there anything in Lebensraum which cannot be matched in the Revolutionary doctrine of “ natural frontiers.” Confessional hatreds or ideologies have swept across continents before this, carried by Moslem or Crusader or Spaniard, whence men have crucified each other in the name of their God. And Europe has been through many ’4S’s before, when a general infection of unsatisfied desire ran through its arteries. Unlike to any of these is the tyranny of Hitler, which has turned to sheer evil and negation all that history bad accumulated, whether of science or of power, and which threatens not a part, but the whole of its spiritual treasure. Millions stretched out their hands to Revolutionary France. Even Goths and Avars part-filled an orderless void, Rome carried with her an equal and majestic law. By the lights of his time Charlemagne reconciled an old world and a new. But there is not a voice to welcome the Nazis, not a lonely soul to bless them as they go. Where the men of 1815 taxed themselves to abolish the slave trade, these men have restored slavery in its primitive form, in the shuffling of the caravans which tear human beings in thousands from their homes, to be penned like beasts in a compound or to work as helots for their oppressor. They have revived in its crudest shape the egoism of nationality, building it wholly upon the legend of a superior race. Their political device has been to inflame and to divide by exploded hatreds, staking .Slovak against Czech, Ukrainian against Pole, Croat against Sorb. They have marched not to release, but to imprison, they scorn tho equal justice of this world, and have no faith in the doom of the next, acknowledging no deity but their race, and no law but their sword.—‘ Observer.’