THE LABOUR PARTY AND THE WAR.

Free Lance, Volume XIX, Issue 992, 9 July 1919, Page 12

THE LABOUR PARTY AND THE WAR.

White-washing the Huns.

/L FTER two or three days spent in laboriously constructing a "manifesto'" the Labour Party, under the presidency of Comrade Paul duly delivered itself last Friday of a declaration of its judgment on the war. The "manifesto" in question is surely one of the most astonishing productions of the kind that has ever been published. As a farrago of ignorance and mendacity and impudence it is surely a. prize-winner. We need not analyse it in detail; indeed it bristles with either wilful or ignorance-inspirled misrepresentation and violent distortion of facts in its every paragraph. According to the worthy/Mr Paul and his fellows, the responsibility for the war lies solely upon the wicked "capitalist.' ' Why the wicked capitalist, - who in ordinary times is painted by the Red Fed. as "heaping up a colossal fortune by fattening upon the toil of -the hardy toiler," should deliberately have plotted and planned a war which has paralysed the very industry upon which he was wont to "fatten," etc., etc., it is somewhat difficult to understand. **'" * * * * But all this, by the way. The one salient feature of this extraordinary "manifesto" is its curious omission to allude to any of the crimes by which Germany affronted' and affrighted the civilised world. If she is to be blamed at all, so these worthy Solons of the "Labour" Party seem to argue, she is not one whit more blameworthy than are the Allies. As to reparation for her crimes against civilisation our "Labour-' friends will apparently have none of it. Seemingly the destruction of the Belgian towns, and the ruthless vandalism of which the French were the_ victims are to Comrade Paul and his associates, a mere detail, quite prdinary circumstances inseparable from a "eapitalis>ts' war."

The reference to " the poor, misrepresented, shamefully ill-used Bolsheviks" are really so absurd as to be beyond serious comment. And all this frightful piffle, this egregious rjxbbish, is solemnly set forth as the gravely thought-out and officially pronounced verdict of the "New Zealand Labour Party" on the war. We can imagine the returned soldiers reading this canting, hypocritical—and to put matters plainly—this lying manifesto and iV'oliug justly indignant that men who all through the war never lifted a hand or spoke a word to help the boys at the front and the sacred cause for which they were fighting, should now come forward, and with smug complacency pose as judges of the great conflict and its origin and its results. On second thoughts, however, derision rather than indignation would be the more fitting attitude.