WAR THE ENSLAVER

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23121, 20 August 1938, Page 14

WAR THE ENSLAVER

If the official newspaper of the Vatican is referring to modern war, then few if any will dissent from its dictum that "nothing could be more disastrous than the terrible delusion that war is a liberating force." Fascists and Nazis have sought and are seeking to justify their practice of power politics by attempting to indoctrinate their peoples with this idea. History may afford them some support, but then history knows nothing of the "total war" for which they arc organising and of which the Great War gave only a foretaste. Future wars, to judge by the signs all over Europe, will be "all-in" wars in which the whole people, young and old, and all material resources will be conscripted and enslaved by the State to serve the national effort. Tho individual will be merged in the mass, his individual self obliterated, his liberties destroyed. Actually this is happening in some countries now, in preparation for war, and on its outbreak every nation in the struggle to survive must seek to create a single national will to man tho national war machine. And after the war? Whatever is gained or lost, liberty will bo irretrievable. The State will not let go the hold won over the individual on the plea of emergency. Individual freedom lost ground in the Great War (and also in the economic depression) and has mado little progress toward regaining it since. Meanwhile the pretensions and scope and power of central government have grown relentlessly until in many countries to-day it seeks to order not only the human body and mind but also the very soul itself. That is why democracies have so much to fear from war, for its sequel would not be liberation for, say, China and Spain, but the final enslavement of the citizens of all nations through the aggrandisement of the State.