ZEALOUS YOUTH

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22911, 19 June 1936, Page 24

ZEALOUS YOUTH

has created a youth who believes this system is the road to the political, social, and economic promised land. VIEW OF CAPITALISM. Of capitalism they know only of the depression, bread lines, strikes, and imperialistic rivalries. They see it in terms of hostile nations dominated by exploiters planning a war against the world's first proletarian State. They are serious and earnest, these young people. And they are bright. They are not bewildered as they face the world’s problems. If anything, they are too cocksure, although doubtless that is a source of strength on their part rather than weakness. Apparently they arc having a good time, too, although almost everything they do. from sports to social gatherings, is calculated to increase their value in national upbuilding and defence. In sport they learn to fly aeroplanes, make parachute jumps, ride horses, hit bulls’-eyes—in their spare time with free equipment and instruction—and do a dozen other things of direct military value. Their social life centres largely around clubs, where they are subject to the same “conditioning’’ they have received all their lives. Soviet Russia is already becoming a country of post-revolutionary youth and of youth that feels itself to be invincible.

PRODUCT OF RUSSIA In no field, not even in their creation of a gigantic industrial structure and a strong army, have the Bolshevists been cleverer or more successful than in their cultivation of youth (writes Harold Denny from Moscow to the New York Times). From the beginning the Bolshevist regime has realised that its future lies in the hands of the young, and it has strained its resources to give them advantages and rear them as miltiant partisans of the Soviet system. The foresight of the early leaders of Bolshevism is already beginning to pay dividends, as anyone could see with his own. eyes if he observed the enthusiastic delegates to the recent Young Communist Congress in Moscow. They are zealots for Communism. And behind them are 5,000,000 members in every part of this vast Socialist empire who leaven the whole mass of Soviet young people. These youths, such ns those at the meeting in Moscow, remember the old regime only vaguely, if at all. The oldest of them are only 26. They have been “ conditioned” for Communism almost ns compVlely as Aldous Huxley's bottle babies. No extraneous influences have touched then). The Soviet Government, controlling every line that is printed, every word that goes forth over the radio, and every idea that appears on the stage or the screen,