Greymouth Evening Star. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1947. Communists In Hungary

Greymouth Evening Star, 4 September 1947, Page 6

Greymouth Evening Star. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1947. Communists In Hungary

JN November, 1945, Hungary decisively rejected the Communists in elections which were fully acknowledged to be free and fairly conducted. The Smallholders Party received about 60 per cent, of the votes, the Socialists 20 per cent, and the Communists 15 per cent. Elections were again held on Sunday, and this time the Communists emerged as the strongest party (97 seats, compared with 70 previously). but with far from an absolute majority over all the other parties. The seats total . 411. The total poll was about 5,000,000. It should have been about 6,000,000 but in the weeks prior to polling day about 1,000,000 voters were removed from the rolls. They certainly were not Communists.

That is the essential fact of the Hungarian poll. Such is the practice of democracy under the auspices of the Soviet Union. The Communist-controlled Government’s first act in the election drama took place months ago when it set out by a series of trumped-up charges of conspiracy to smash the Agrarian Party. Since then arrests and imprisonment of opposition leaders and prominent party men have followed with monotonous regularity. The power that the Communists have been unable to obtain democratically they have attempted to gain by foul means. In this regard the recent declaration by the head of the Freedom Party, Air Sulyok, will be recalled. Hungary, he said, was an “undemocratic police State, in which the wildest and most objectionable terror reigns.”

There have been grave allegations of widespread abuse of the laws in Sunday’s election. Some of them are no doubt exaggerated ; others are backed by sufficient evidence as to suggest that they are largely true. The main feature, however, is that the election was condemned in advance, on substantial evidence, by both Britain and the United States because 1,000,000 voters had been removed from the rolls, apparently for the purpose of ensuring the Communists of victory. It is the pursuit of these tactics by the Communists in South-Eastern Europe that no doubt led President Truman to declare at the Inter-American Conference in Brazil that many countries in Europe and Asia were today living under the “shadow of armed aggression.” The people of the United States engaged in the recent war “in the deep faith that they were opening the way to a free world,” he added, but now found that a number of nations were still subjected to “the type of domination which we fought to overcome.” Those people—and they are many—who take consolation in the eomplaeent belief that the nations will somehow muddle through to a solution of the basic ideological conflict —between the rule of the gun and the rule, of freedom —would do well to take heed of Mr Truman’s words.