THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES THURSDAY, AUGUST 5, 1948. TAINTED SOURCES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26842, 5 August 1948, Page 4

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES THURSDAY, AUGUST 5, 1948. TAINTED SOURCES

It was to be expected that the agents of disruption within the trade union movement in New Zealand would reveal something of the nature of their plottings immediately the question of a national defence force was raised. As was also to be expected, the efforts that are being made to defeat this fundamental approach to national security are being introduced under a smokescreen of misrepresentation deliberately designed to obscure the polluted sources from which they spring. This opposition to a practical scheme of defence is being organised, and cleverly organised, by those very sections of the union movement which, while Communism and Nazism were wedded in a precarious truce, exploited every avenue of subversive activity to hinder the Allied effort and consequently to bring about the deaths of a greater number of the workers who were fighting in defence of real democracy. These are facts that the workers of this country should not forget, facts that should make them examine closely the propaganda that is being employed by well-organised groups within the union ranks.

Sane leaders of trade unionism in New Zealand recognise the danger that is afoot. The secretary of the Auckland Electrical Workers’ Union recently declared flatly that workers who did not resist the efforts of Communism to overthrow law and order were “ nothing short of traitors to this country.” The real traitors, however, are those who, professing the interests of the workers, are striving to surrender this country to a State <which has destroyed trade unionism and has offered its workers only death as an alternating to serfdom. The agents of this State, accepting Lenin’s dictum that “there are no morals in politics; there is only expediency,” are attempting to bemuse New Zealand workers with the same lying philosophies that were peddled to the workers of Czechoslovakia and half a dozen other countries before Soviet rule—which Stalin himself has described as being “ unrestricted by law and based by force ” —was introduced. It would be wise for the workers of this country to remember, when objections to military training are raised, that conscription has been enforced in Russia since the revolution, and that the Soviet now maintains on an active footing the largest military force in the world. The effort that New Zealand can make to defend democracy might not, in itself, be great, but it can be significant, and there should be, no hesitation on the part of the workers in demanding that'the Government should declare its willingness to meet its responsibilities and make this country unsafe for traitors.