EAST-WEST CONFLICT: RADIO "BATTLE"

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 22942, 10 May 1949, Page 4

EAST-WEST CONFLICT: RADIO "BATTLE"

TTHE radio “battle,” the latest phase of the East-West conflict, will be regarded with dismay by all persons of goodwill who had hoped that with the lifting of the Berlin blockade this week tension between Russia and Western Powers would be eased. On the contrary, the new development is likely to prolong it. Attempts by Britain and the United States to inform the Russian people of the lifting of the blockade have brought to a head a dispute that has been on the horizon for a long time. Although the Russian radio for years has poured out blatant propaganda for home consumption and also in an effort to convert the “reactionary” West, Russia no less than Hitler’s Germany has been equally energetic in preventing the dissemination, of news from outside. The reason given is fear of a Fascist revival in Europe. Russia is right and everybody else is wrong. . . That fear, as the British Minister of State, Mr. McNeil, pointed out at the Geneva Conference on Freedom of Information last year, is no excuse for the Russian use of newspapers,, radio. and newsreels as instruments of Government propaganda. An idea is not killed by suppression nor a proposition refuted by denying facilities for its discussion. Mr. McNeil said it was a “violence to the. normal uses of language that we of Western Europe to whom no ideal is so sacred that it cannot be discussed should be described as reactionaries while those who, having plucked from Marx, Lenin or Stalin, imprisoned or silenced anyone who thought he might modify or improve on it, are described as progressives.” For months the -rulers in the Kremlin have been trying to block from their people news of the European Economic Recovery Plan. Now, the ban has been extended to information on the lifting of the Berlin blockade. Having been portrayed as a great success, the Russians cannot at this stage be told that it has failed to achieve its object. Such is the price of dictatorship. Britain and the United States, using a barrage of powerful radio transmitters, are endeavouring to force home this truth, but whether it will be believed by the Russians even if it does get through is another question. New Zealanders who met Russians during the war found most of them to*be incapable of believing anything that was not in the Soviet textbook. The young Nazis were the same. Herein lies the danger. If in Russia misunderstanding is to be capped by misunderstanding and if there is to be created a “vested interest in prejudice and distortion,” it will pave the way to hatred and eventual war.