GANDHI AND HITLER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23887, 15 August 1939, Page 7

GANDHI AND HITLER

Writing in the New York Times, Mr Henry Lyndhurst draws a contrast between Lord Halifax's meetings with Gandhi when he was Viceroy of india and his interview with Hitler in 1937 With the scrawny ujrk-skinned Asiatic, Halifax could reason and discuss calmly; with the fiery European he had difficulty in achieving any mental contact at all. Gandhi quietly exchanged ideas with him; Hitler treated him as if he were a massed audience in the Sportspalast, and made >oud speeches to him which he could not understand until an interpreter repeated them Between these two meetings there was an amazing and significant contrast. One might have imagined that when a Yorkshire squire faced an Oriental mystic differences of background and mental habits would interpose insuperable barriers; but that the same squire encountering another European—who normally would be much closer to him in race and culture—would at least be able to converse to some purpos . Yet precisely the opposite proved true Ghandi, for all his zealotry was a civilised man who preferred reason to violence: and in this sense it i: literally true that Gandhi proved a better European than Hitler—a fact which speaks volumes for the state to which Europe has fallen.