CLAIMS DISPROVED

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22586, 15 March 1948, Page 5

CLAIMS DISPROVED

DEMOCRATIC REGIME

Communist claims to a “democratic” foim of Government in Czechoslovakia are refuted by competent observers as insupportable in the light of the known characteristics of the coup, says the British information service. Briefly, these may be summarised as: (a) Their similarity with Nazi tactics in the past i. 0., the allegation of a plot (c.f. the Reichstag fire) and precipitation of violent action by a highly organised minority body. (b) A Communist Minister was accused of hatching a plot and of connivance in the possession by Communists of illegal weapons. This accusation, which has never been adequately refuted, was itself the original cause of Communist action.

(c) The construction put by Communists on the resignations of nonCommunist Ministers as lacking in patriotism and as desertion of the socalled National Front. In fact they resigned in the face of increasing provocation by Communist Ministers. (d) The manifest inconsistency of references to the “Parliamentary” nature of the new Czech Government, emanating from a party whose declared aims were promulgated by the second Comintern congress of 1920 in the following terms:

“Communism rejects Parliamentarianism as a form of future society; it rejects it as a form of class dictatorship over the proletariat; it rejects the possibility of the slow conquest of Parlitment; its fixed aim is the destruction of Parliamentary Government. Therefore, there can only be any question of utilising bourgeois State institutions with the object of destroying them. “The Communist Party enter such institutions not in order to do constructive work, but so that it may enable the masses to destroy bourgeois State machines and Parliament itself from within.”

If any further proof were required it may surely be found in the uncontrolled activities of a secret police, characteristic of Communist regimes, already rampant in Czechoslovakia.

CZECH COMMUNISTS