The New Zealand Herald AUCKLAND, SATURDAY. OCTOBER 37. 1845 THE MASTER RACE

New Zealand Herald, Volume 82, Issue 25344, 27 October 1945, Page 6

The New Zealand Herald AUCKLAND, SATURDAY. OCTOBER 37. 1845 THE MASTER RACE

The indictment served on the Nazi leaders alleges among other charges that the accused "promulgated the master race theory, which taught that it was a noble and rightful thing for all Germans to wage war against 'inferior' races, and, it necessary, exterminate them." Justice is at last seeking the German evil at the roots. For 150 years the Germans have been persuading each other that they are a unique people, destined to rule the world. Diseased minds and dishonest scholarship have never been lacking to implant the doctrine in each appearing generation, and of such sowing Europe has reaped from time to time the sanguinary harvest. The German race theory, more than any othei single cause, led to the Second World War. The promulgation of an idea is a crime if that idea promotes and encourages criminal action. Ihe crime passes pardon ii an idea is seized upon with cynicism, and without regard for truth or science, in order to facilitate a ruthless and aggressive policy. II lesser wits, like Hess and Streicher, believed the creed, their misdeeds perpetrated in its name remain, and the indictment will serve as a warning to all who in the future attack the well-being, the convictions and the personality of other men in the interests of a party ideology. The 21 Nazis are fairly charged. The pity is that Treitschke, Nietzsche, Banse and a score of other militarists cannot stand beside them. "Nordic man," the "Blond Beast" of the German philosopher, the ideal of Hitler and Rosenberg, first appeared as a curious incident of the French Revolution. In 1789 the French nobility were in full flight before the insurgent peasantry and the revolutionary mobs. Pedants, who are never absent from such movements, sought- to explain it all historically. The Gauls, they proclaimed. rising after 14 centuries of servitude, had driven back their Frankish conquerors across the Rhine. The riposte from Coblenz was unexpected. "Precisely," answered Count de Gobineau for his fellow-aristocrats, "the Gauls have expelled their lords. But they fail to realise, they of the tumbril and the guillotine, that they have ejected that which made them great. The men of the north have always brought strength to the feebler nations of the enervating Mediterranean." Such political by-play, put forward at first with scant sincerity and less science, 'was given plausibility by the contemporary studies of philologists. It is possible to demonstrate the kinship of most of the living and dead languages of Europe, and a fair inference from .linguistic phenomena that they derived from one parent speech. Enthusiasts passed from this safe ground to the quite illegitimate conclusion that this proved the existence of a pure "Aryan" race, which, in the dawn of history, burst from the northern steppes conquering and to"conquer. The migrations are fact. Their beneficence is another matter. It is clear enough that they brought a Dark Age to at least two advanced centres of human culture. A little, however, is enough to those who "think with the blood." Nordic man, like the missingiiink, was found. In the hands of German philologists Prussia, even, became the ancient Aryan hunt-ing-ground. In thp wild imagination of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Nordic man became the flower of humanity and the father of all art, philosophy, religion and literature. For this strange Englishman the Second Reich was history's finest achievement.

Such nonsense might remain as a literary curiosity but for the avidity, long discounted, with which Germany seized on it. Nietzsche's crude teaching needs no recalling. The Kaiser's war reminded the world of it. Nietzsche was to be outdone by Hitler and his Nazi theorists, striving with loud words and turgid argument to offset the inferiorities of defeat in the nation which was to be their instrument. The record and bibliography of their utterances is a sickening document. Slow to believe that the mind oi man can be so played upon, the democracies allowed a perverted generation to grow up, convinced of its superiority to all lesser breeds. Such faith accounts for Belsen. The pits contained but carrion, sub-human Poles and Jews. Only minds perverted by this foul doctrine could bear what the German Wehrmacht bore unflinchingly the sights of massacre, agony, and cruelty, the horrors of Nazi rule and reprisal, and the wide ruin of a continent. The civilian shared the soldier's hardness, and drew inhumanity from the same dark spring. He bore with equanimity the stocking of his home with intimate stolen things, and the sight of slave labour uprooted and unhappy. The Nazis have damned the mind of a generation. The chief enablement of their policy was the doctrine of a Herrenvolk. It is right and proper that the harbourage and teaching of such a thought should be written down as crime.

RETROGRADE PROPOSAL # The public has every right to be resentful and suspicious of the changes which the Government proposes to make in the method of appointing representation commissioners, who determine the boundaries of Parliamentary electoral districts. This is a task which, in its result, inevitably affects the fortunes of individual candidates, and therefore of their parties, every time a readjustment is made. It must be carried out with judicial impartiality, and no suspicion of political bias or manipulation should ever be incurred. The legislators who designed the present system many years ago saw this clearly and provided effective safeguards. It was laid down thateach of the two representation commissions should consist of three Government officials and two other persons, not being members of the General Assembly or the Public Service, to be nominated by the House oi Representatives from time to

time. The official members of the North Island commission are the Surveyor-General and the Auckland and * Taranaki commissioners of Crown lands. In the South Island commission they are the Westland, Canterbury and Otago commissioners. Thus in each case the exofiicio members, impartial and expert, are in a majority. The new bill is to change all that. There will be a single commission, consisting of the Surveyor-General and four Parliamentary (i.e., Government) nominees. The reason has not been stated. If it were anything but a desire to inject party politics, the single commission would have been made up on the old and satisfactory model, to consist of the SurveyorGeneral, one Crown lands commissioner from each island and two Parliamentary nominees. In setting up new nominated bodies of all kinds, the present Government has made it a principle to entrench Labour supporters as a majority wherever possible. Will it resist the temptation this lime?

OUR ASIATIC INTERESTS British elder statesmen in the House of Lords have readily endorsed the claims of Australia and New Zealand to be consulted about the control of Japan under the terms of her surrender and to participate in the general settlement in the Far East. Speakers in the debate all appeared to recognise what the final resolution affirmed, namely, the two Dominions' vital interest in the Far East as a whole. To both of them it is in actual fact the "Near North." They are in a unique position as the outposts of Western Europeanism lying closest to the most thickly-populated, areas of an Asia where the colonial era is certainly passing. Whether parts of these areas are to come under a different outside dominion, that of the U.S.S.R., is another matter, but the interest of Australia and New Zealand in the changing future there will become even more vital as the years go on. So far as concerns the immediate task—controlling Japan's internal affairs and preventing further aggression—the two countries seem to have been given an adequate share and to be in as good a position as any others. They have seats on the Far Eastern Advisory Commission, which is to open its sittings in Washington on Tuesday, and New Zealand, at any rate, will be represented by a brigade in the British Empire garrison force which is to be sent to Japan. Many thorny problems lie ahead, perhaps foremost of them the great difficulty of cooperating with Russia on any reasonable basis, either in Europe or in the Far East. At any rate, both countries will'have an opportunity to give their counsel, which seems to be valued, and their moral support in the efforts that will be made to shape the destiny of Asia's millions.