ALLIED WAR AIMS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXV, Issue 73, 23 February 1945, Page 4

ALLIED WAR AIMS.

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —Our war aims, professed by all parties and summarised in the Atlantic Charter, stressed the right of all peoples to self-determination. At Yalta we arbitrarily disposed of thirteen million Polish subjects as though they were cattle, without reference to their desires. For all that has been made known to the contrary, we also acquiesced in the disposal of some twenty® million Latvians, Esthonians, Lithuanians, and Bessarabians regardless of their wishes. We have smeared the map with irredenta and left millions who suffered in our cause burning under an intolerable wrong. I cannot construe this tragic business as anything but a betrayal of our war aims. It may be that Mr Churchill, confronted with uncompromising Russian demands backed by Russian armies, could do nothing else. If this was the case, it is a great pity he has not said so, instead of embarking on a hopeless and shameful attempt to justify injustice. This would, at the least, leave us with cleaner hands and a clearer conscience to face the war which settlement by power politics will inevitably cause. The prefont most remarkable union between Tories and Communists, aimed at the destruction of a number of SocialistDemocratic States for the furtherance of Russian Imperialism, may acquaint Mr Churchill (and possibly Mr Sternberg) with the following passage from the Collected Works of lenin the father of the Soviets, who at page 100 of Volume 18 writes: “It. is nobody’s fault if he is born a slave But a slave who is not only alien to the the struggle for his freedom but also justifies and eulogises bis slavery—for instance, by calling the throttling of Poland a defence of the fatherland of the Groat Russians —such a slave is a knave and a. scoundrel who arouses a just feeling of indignation, contempt, and loathing.”—Yours, etc., IMPRIMATUR.