WAR OF WORDS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23273, 16 February 1939, Page 5

WAR OF WORDS

propaganda barrage DRAMATISE DEMOCRACY WOMAN WRITER'S VIEWS If democracy is ever to regain the virility that it had only a generation ago, we have got to learn to sell it to our own people, to dramatise it, and to make it tangible and visible to the average citizen, writes Dorothy Thompson in an American magazine. The superiority of the totalitarian States lies only in the fact that their leaders are far better masters of human psychology. They know that people want not only a high standard of living and adequate purchasing power, but also myth, ritual and glory. They want to feel themselves to be part of something which is great and eternal. We have spent a generation destroying our myths and holding our rituals up to ridicule, and we wonder why our youth doesn't love liberty. People who 3'earned to improve our democracy have gone around trying to get the pledge to the flag taken out of our schools, because it is "chauvinistic." Power of Pledge But why in the world any American should not be proud to say, "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all," is something I cannot understand. As a platform for reform it could not be better. Have we liberty and justice for all? No! Then let us go about getting them, because we are pledged to it. Thus you unite tradition with progress, which is one way in which urbanity can be united with change, and the whole process made mentally comfortable. We tell our children that all history is the story of a conflict between social forces. But nobody ever saw a social force in his life. There is no romance in a social force. Nobody ever died for a social force. Lenin believed in the conflict of social forces, but the State that he founded keeps him embalmed under glass and reveals him to the awe-stricken young as a second Messiah. You can see Lenin, whereas you can only conceive of the class struggle. To Reveal Democracy The totalitarian States have not got a single piece of great political literature or great poetry. We have one of the finest political literatures in the world, but our children do not know it. i saw the Declaration of Independence framed on the wall of a boy's room the other day, and the boy knew it by heart. "Isn't it perfectly beautiful!" he said. But he wasn't an American-born child, but a little German emigre. They are studying the Nazi and Soviet primers in American colleges, but nobody has taken the trouble to make a primer of American democracy. It is seriously needed.

Democracy is not perfect, but 1 do not see how we can ever make it more perfect until we know what it is. And the symbol, the ritual, the heroes, the songs reveal what it is to the ordinary person. And the extraordinary, too.