Freedom—British And German Versions

Northern Advocate, 31 January 1940, Page 5

Freedom— British And German Versions

LONDON, January 29. Three brief interruptions which occurred during the first part of Mr. Winstone Churchill’s speech i'n the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, oh Saturday, when three men in different parts of the hall, but all apparently adherents of the British Fascist leader (Sir Oswald Mosely) each in turn shouted some slogan, have aroused interesting and pertinent comment in the “New York Herald-Tribune.” It draws a contrast between the conditions in Germany and in Britain. The paper remarks that while Fascists are in a position to tackle Mr. Churchill, Germans are told that they must not listen in to foreign broadcasts. Not Afraid of Words. The Ministry of Information, in its daily survey of world comments, gives the fallowing extract from the “Herald-Tribune’s” the British believe in free speech they respect the power of words, but they are not afraid of them. “The Nazis have no respect for words—so they say—but they are apparently terrified by the magic properties which they themselves assign to them. Now the Nazis are taken in by their own necromancy, and do not consider death too harsh a punishment for anyone to contaminate his Nazi soul by listening-in to foreign incantations and selling his chance of entering the proNazi Valhalla by yielding to the devil when he offers him an earphone and secretly spreads the carnal world of other broadcasts before him.

Staggering Compliment

“The idea that any radio broadcaster could disseminate his personality so fully that death alone can be considered an adequate antidote is a compliment to the profession so extreme as to be staggering in its implications. “With death or a penitentiary hanging over Germans, they are aparently listening-in to every bit of Allied propaganda which gets through, and every bit which gets through must, for this reason, be twice as effective because of the horror which the Nazi regime professes to entertain concerning the

voices from abroad. “One can well understand Mr, Churchill’s impulse really to test the strength of a. system which is put together with such fantastically unnatural bonds as these.”