NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume 78, Issue 24070, 15 September 1941, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

ANGLO-SOVIET RELATIONS "We in Britain have never concealed our antipathy to the Communist creed." said Lord Cecil, speaking in the House of Lords. "All political parties alike have condemned it as utterly alien to those principles of free democracy for which Britain stands and for which it is now lighting. We are poles apart, both in matters of politics and religion. But Soviet Russia and Britain, so different in all other respects, have to-day this in common: They are facing the same ruthless foe; they are the objects of the same insatiable ambition: the defeat of either will mean increased peril for the other. To that extent, at any rate, we and Soviet Russia have a common interest. To ignore that would be folly. It is for this reason that His Majesty's Government, as the Prime Minister has already announced, has decided to give the Soviet Government all the assistance in our power."

DIPLOMACY AND ARMS "Since 1918 perhaps some of His Majesty's Governments have forgotten the self-evident fact that foreign policycan only be really effective if it has behind it the backing of force, and they may have pursued a foreign policy which had not the requisite backing since they had allowed that force to dwindle. Foreign policy pursued under such conditions is based really on bluff, said Lord Perth, formerly Ambassador at Rome, speaking in the House of Lords. He was supported by Lord Stonehaven (since deceased), torrnerly Ambassador at Paris, Cairo and Vienna, who declared that diplomats could only play the hand that was dealt to them by the Government at home, and they had had a mighty raw deal for a good many years past. The majority of the mistakes that had cen made had been made here at home, by politicians, and not by the Diplomatic Service.

FREEDOM AND DISCIPLINE The watchword of humanism has been a rather unintelligent idea of freedom, which lost sight of human nature's practical need of discipline. The results have been worked out in the liberal democracies of our time, states the Rev. H J. S. Guntrip. writing in the Congregational Quarterly. Having fought for and won a large measure ol freedom, we have been discovering, as Walter Lippmann says, that "a man's worst difficulties begin when he can do as he likes." Democracy can so easily peter out into a multitude of warring factions that are powerless to do anything. Germany and Italy found democratic freedom too much for them and tied into the arms of dictators. France under democratic government has lost or failed to achieve that unity that means strength. Britain with a longer political experience of democracy has managed better, though that is also due in no small measure to the fact that our democracy has been more consistently informed by Christian aims, and led by Christian men of all parties. Yet here, too. the rot had set in. After the last war our liberty was turned to licence in all the personal aspects of life. All religious and moral convictions were impatiently flung aside as baseless restrictions, and young people with

little in tliein to express went in recklessly for self-expression. Some of the criticisms made by Fascists and Nazis have been all too true. Our democracies have tended to be masses of selfish. easy-going, and complacent people, stressing then - rights to pleasure, scornful of plain living and high thinking, avoiding responsibility except when they fought for their own private interests. and throwing up leaders who were timid and indecisive and often loved political power more than their country. Fascism and Nazism, seeing in the democracies the lack of that strength that discipline gives, have rushed to the wrong solution. Thev have fallen hack on the cast-iron, external, and primitive discipline of brute force, which crushes the personaliiv out of man. Christianity insists on the discipline of the flesh by the spirit, a discipline that works from within by free acceptance.

ERRORS OF VERSAILLES The charge against Hitler's new order, says the Times, is not that it has made a large part of the Continent into a single economic unit, but that it has created this unit on a basis not of free and equal co-operation, but of exploitation in the interests, and for the military purposes, of a single country. That some new order is an essential condition of the future peace and prosperity of Europe few will now be found to contest. The danger is that revulsion fioin Hitler's methods and achievements may, at the moment of his defeat, carry us back into the anarchy of a Europe divided against herself by a multiplicity of strategic and economic frontiers, and tempt us to renew the cardinal errors of 1919. That danger can be averted only if we constantly remind ourselves of the lessons which the war lias brought home to us. Another error of 1919 which is particularly present to our minds today was the elimination of Russia from the settlement. Little foresight should have been needed to realise that a settlement of Eastern European affairs, made without regard to Russian interests and at a moment when Russia could not make her voice heard, was unlikely to endure. That error at any rate will not be repeated.