REDS AT GENEVA.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20316, 26 January 1928, Page 13

REDS AT GENEVA.

FANTASTIC PEACE PLAN. LITVINOFF DENOUNCES THE LEAGUE. COMMISSION REFUSE TO BE TRAPPED. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, December 14. Members of the Preparatory Commission for the Disarmament Conference were not unprepared for the foolishness of the Soviet delegates who took their scats for the first time. The chairman (M. Loudon) welcomed the new members to the commission, and recalled the work done at preceding meetings, pointing out that though the aim in view was the progressive reduction of armaments, most States would hesitate to risk reducing considerably their armaments without a certain preliminary measure of security. For this reason the Assembly had asked that a Committee of Arbitration and Security be set up, whose work would be to facilitate the second reading of the draft convention drawn up by the commission last April. Shortly after the inaugural peech by the chairman. Jonkheer Loudon, the stage was occupied by Soviet Russia. I'he chairman had proposed that the Assembly should proceed to the nomination of a committee for the study of every phase of disarmament and arbitration, whereupon Litvinoff jumped up and demanded that before this was done the views of the various Governments should first be heard. It was politely intimated that these had already been formulated scores of times during the last few years, whereupon Litvinoff again rose and made a statement of the Soviet’s position. « “ Certain people will stigmatise our programme as propaganda.” he roared in broken English, “ hut if this is not the proper place to make a propaganda for peace, then we have come here under a misapprehension.’' With increasing vehemence he denounced the League and capitalistic Powers for alleged reluctance to nut into practice the policy of disarmament. COMPLETE DISARMAMENT. Therefore, to bring matters to a head, the Soviet Government was making a pror posal for general and complete disarmament. Litvinoff then proceeded to read a long list of the things to be abolished: — 1 (a) Dissolution of all land, sea, and air forces, and the non-admittance of their existence in any concealed form whatsoever. (b) Destruction of all weapons, military supplies, means of chemical warfare, and all other forms of armament, and means of destruction in the possession of troops, or military or general stores. (c) Scrapping of all warships and military air vessels. (d) Discontinuance of the calling up of citizens for military training, either in armies or public bodies. (e) Legislation for the abolition of military service, either compulsory, voluntary, or recruited. (f) Legislation prohibiting the calling up of trained reserves. (g) Destruction of fortresses and naval and air bases. LEGISLATIVE PROHIBITION. (h) Scrapping of military plants, factories, and war plants in general industrial works. (i) Discontinuance of assigning funds for military purposes, both on State Budgets and those of public bodies. (k) Abolition of military, naval, and air ministries, the dissolution of general staffs and all kinds of military administrations, departments, and institutions. (l) Legislative prohibition of military propaganda, military training of the population, and military education, both by State and by public bodies. (m) Legislative prohibition of the patenting oT all kinds of armaments and means of destruction with a view to the removal of the incentive to the invention of same.

(n) Legislation making the infringement of any of the above stipulations a grave crime against the State. (o) The withdrawal of corresponding alterations of all legislative acts, both of national and international scope, infringing the above stipulations. In the case of the capitalist States rejecting the immediate abolition of standing armies, the Soviet, in its desire to facilitate the achievement of practical agreement on complete disarmament, is prepared (said Mr Litvinoff) to make a proposal for complete disarmament ‘o be carried out simultaneously by all the contracting States by gradual stages, during a period of four years, the first stage to be accomplished in the course of the coming year. The audience listened in amazement to this flow of honeyed words from the mouth of one who represents a regime which has sent to their death countless thousands of innocent, peace-loving citizens, and the deep silence which greeted the end of the peroration testified more eloquently than any words could have done to the resentment felt by all those present who have been earnestly labouring in the cause of peace. COMMISSION EVADE THE TRAP. Instead of the commission falling into the trap and rejecting the Soviet’s proposals with scorn, it tactfully decided to adjourn further discussion on them until the meeting of the commission next year. Lord Cushendun, the British delegate, said in an interview: “According to the strict rules of procedure, Litvinov was entirely out of order. The whole Soviet proposal was quite irrelevant. The general view, with which I entirely agree, is that it should be postponed until the whole matter of disarmament has progressed much further.’’ Speaking in the Chamber of Deputies on disarmament, M. Briand, the French Foreign Minister, said that the Soviet Government, which was proposing general disarmament, was maintaining very considerable forces. He thought the question should be asked whether nations like France, which sincerely desire peace, should be the first to disarm before other nations which perhaps nourished ulterior intentions. RUSSIA MISSES ITS CHANCE. “ It lay in the power of the Soviet delegation,” says the Daily Telegraph, “ to signalise its entry by putting forward proposals of which it could he said that here was a fresh and a useful contribution to the debate upon disarmament, an approach to the subject from a new angle, something that entitled its initiators to be respectfully regarded in at least this branch of their international activity. But what did M. Litvinov do ? Ho produced a schema under nine beads for the immediate and complete abolition of all armaments and of the means of procuring them. To say that precisely such a scheme might have been formulated by any schoolboys’ debating club would be unfair to a rising generation whose minds are much less immature than those of its forerunners. NOTHING SILLIER. “ The Soviet proposals, however, created no astonishment, for it had already been m.ade clear by official and serni-oflicial utterances that the delegation was charged with the duty of so stultifying itself and principals in Moscow. It was known that the commission would he invited to agree to the immediate destruction of all arms, munitions, warships, and fortresses, the abolition of all military training, suppression of all military budgets, and the rest. There may have been, perhaps, some little surprise at the suggestion that the nations should do away with ‘ all factories which, though industrial in time of peace, may be converted to the production of munitions in time of war.’ With the chemical and engineering industries, to name no others, swept out of existence throughout the world, the face of civilisation would he changed even more completely than Bolshevism, in its pristine revolutionary enthusiasm, imagined its being. That one detail of the proposals would suffice to stamp them as a mere gesture, conceived with the carelessness of men who are

thinking not of disarmament hut of scoring a point, ho it never so insubstantial. Acc6pt all these things so van I\T. vinov’s argument—or the world will know what are ‘ the real aspirations and true desires of the capitalist States in regard to disarmament.’ The League of Nations ‘ has systematically evaded setting the question in a practical light ’; behold us doing so! The Soviet Government has long been ‘ endeavouring to get the question of disarmament definitely and practically formulated ’ : and this prodigy of hard thinking is the fruit of those unremitting labours. We repeat, that a child could have produced nothing sillier."