NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23966, 16 May 1941, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS

CRITICS' USEFUL FUNCTION "i maintain that the critics have rendered great service to the country. Wo critics are as anxious to win the war as the British Government, and will not permit it to decide when criticism should be allowed." said Mr. E. Shinwell, M.P.. speaking in the House of Commons. "Criticism is the life-blood of democracy, and that is what we are fighting for. If opinions are to be held in check wo may as well close down Parliament, suppress the newspapers and establish a Fascist State. It is a foul slander to suggest that when anybody indulges in criticism of the Government: he is playing into the hands of the enemy. If it had not been for criticism we should never have changed the Government; Mr. Churchill would not be Prime Minister, nor would we have succeeded in stimulating the Government on many questions where it was obvious that drastic change was necessary." DESIRES OF COMMON MEN "The great mass of common men the world over are not deceived by the Nazis' talk of a new order," said the new American Ambassador to Britain, Mr. Winant, in Ill's first speech in London. "They realise that there is no order or security in tyranny. They want what the British people want. They want what the American people want. Thev want a friendly, civilised world of free peoples in which Christian virtues and moral values are not spurned as decadent and outmoded, a world where honest work is recognised and a man can own himself. They have not lost their faith in individual liberty and the democratic way of life. They are not content to be deprived of those freedoms which they know to be essential to the welfare of man. They desire freedom of speech and expression. They desire freedom to worship God in accordance with their own conscience. Thev desire freedom from want. or. if .1 may borrow the words used by Mr. Churchill in a broadcast to America spoken more than two years ago, they desire a 'world of increasing hope and enjoyment for the common man, the world of honoured tradition and expanding science.' Lastly, they desire freedom from the fear of armed aggression." AMERICAN TREND America may, indeed, be slower and more reluctant than some other nations to embark on war, writes Mr. W. Dwight Whitney, the New York barrister, in his nook, "Who Are the Americans?" All must remember how difficult it was for the British and the French to bring themselves to that point. It is a special weakness of democracies to go on hoping against hope that some miracle will save them from the necessity of disrupting their pleasant, prosperous, peaceful daily existence. Perhaps the Americans are oven a little more reluctant than the other democracies to face up to the ultimate issue of peace or war. Their diversity of racial and spiritual allegiance, their semi-tropical climate, their cult of comfort and luxury, the predominance of their feminine element—all these militate against the final

plunge. But if the die ever comes to be cast, there is 110 doubt but that the Americans are one of the virile races of this earth, and that if the Germans or the Japanese think the contrary they are in for a surprise second only to that which the British people gave to Hitler and Mussolini in the summer of 1940. In conclusion, we can venture this summation. So long as American policy rests on the basis of aid to another country—that is, so long as it is a charity policy and not a national American policy—that aid will be forthcoming in driblets only—slow, inadequate. and grudging. But once it has become a national. policy to destroy Nazism, the American force will be overwhelming. Whether that will he the ultimate decision in America it would be foolhardy to predict from this side of the water. Suffice it to say that the most capable isolationists, such as Senator Hiram Johnson of California, the senior Republic member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States Senate, believe that, contrary to their own views, the entry of their country into the European conflict is inevitable. VERBAL DETONATIONS "It is an overlooked fact that, when the rival bombing squadrons set out upon their tasks, they are riding amid a continuous storm of verbal as well as material detonations," said Mr. Ivor Brown, the dramatic critic, in a recent broadcast talk. "The aerial photographs of sky ablaze with 'fink' and with the lines of tracer bullets have their parallel in the vision of an ether perpetually raked by the flash of news and propaganda. Totalitarian nations deny their subjects and serfs the right to listen to alien broadcasts, so that many of the mental missiles may never reach their proper target. But there is a good deal of illicit listening and, just as forbidden sweets are the most tasty, so the secretly snatched news and views make most impression. Thus this bombardment, with its intensity and duration, may welt be a decisive factor in victory and as potent as any discharge from the bomb-racks and the guns. History, for example, will have to determine how far the microphone contributed to the breach and overthrow of the mighty Maginot Line, and also, we may be sure, how far it drove beyond the tyrants' ban into the consciousness of the German people and the rebellious hearts of Germany's enslaved."