THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1948. ONE CLEAR CALL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26904, 16 October 1948, Page 6

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1948. ONE CLEAR CALL

It is difficult to consider without disgust and amazement the statements of British Labour politicians of the Left on Mr Churchill’s Llandudno address to the Conservative Party —and to the people of the democratic world. And perhaps it is not necessary to restrain the natural feelings of indignation that are aroused by the comments of these blind and stupid men. In the eyes of Mr Aneurin Bevan, a Minister in His Majesty’s Government, Mr Churchill is doing “ deadly harm,” his speech was “ a national and international calamity,” he is “ the leader of the reactionary forces which sold the European peace in 1938 and connived at Hitler’s rise to power.” The British Minister of War, Mr Shinwell, finds the speech “full of half-truths, insinuations and downright lies,” and if he is to be allowed to talk like this, Mr Shinwell is “not standing for it.” To the even more irresponsible Mr Zilliacus, a Labour M.P., Mr Churchill’s speech proves that the Conservative Party wants a third world war. These statements are obviously intemperate, they are even blatantly scurrilous. Is there any truth in them?

The charge of Mr Bevan, that Mr Churchill is, or was, the leader of the forces which “ sold the European peace ” and exalted Hitler, can be dismissed contemptuously. If his charge is against the pre-war Conservative leaders, in the black days of Munich, it still does not bear examination. There was no peace to “sell” in 1938. The post-war revelations of Hitlerism’s mad career are wasted on Mr Bevan if he believes that war could have been avoided, except on the dictated terms of a paranoiac. And—have Mr Bevan and his fellow artists in invective forgotten it?—Mr Churchill never made any mistake about Hitler’s aims. Mr Shinwell’s accusations that Mr Churchill is warmongering, that his testament at Llandudno is a lie; and the statement of Mr Zilliacus that the Conservatives “ want ” another world war, are more difficult to refute, because they have no visible basis to be demolished. It is perhaps sufficient to say they are incomprehensible and incredible. Not even the • Communist Party in Moscow, it is fair to assume. “ wants ” a third world war. But when Mr Churchill accuses “the fourteen men Jn the Kremlin ” of holding half Europe in thrall, in breach of treaty, and of seeking to extend the net of thraldom, the truth of what he says'is .self-evident, written in turmoil and human subjugation across the map of Europe. The mistake which the forces of the Left in British Labour make is in believing that the Soviet leaders are different in kind from the leaders of Nazism—in trying to differentiate between dictators who have the same aims and the same political system for forwarding those aims. The mistake with which Mr Churchill charges the British Government—which has Bevins as well as Bevans in its composition—is that of thinking that the Kremlin understands the language of democracy and earnest goodwill. And this could be a mistake fatal to the free world. It has not yet been proven that war with Russia is inevitable; but it is (becoming so. The events of recent months—the stubborn irrationality of the Berlin blockade; the engineered Communist demonstrations, the disingenuous and, by turn, insulting sophistries of Mr Vyshinsky—allow no hope that Russia can be persuaded from her purposes by a show of peace. The alternative is a show of force —of united determination, backed by arms and armies, to challenge the Russian aggrandisement and absorption policies. The forces of argument which the West can marshal against the Soviet include the atomic bomb, to which, for a precarious year or so, Russia has no effective answer. If it is warmongering to declare, as Mr Churchill does, that Russia is behaving as an aggressor and an outlaw, to recognise that the “ cold war ” is but the preliminary to hostilities, unless the Soviet changes its policies, then the policies of retreat, appeasement add betrayal which were pursued in the League of Nations and with Hitler prior to 1939 will be followed again to their dreadful cpnclusion. The alternative, as Mr Churchill argues it,'is-to force the Soviet to make the retreat. There is at least a chance that this can be accomplished without war. \ ZOO'S WHO'S WHO The aristocracy of the animal kingdom in its natural state is not the aristocracy of the zoo. In its own habitat the lion is the “ King of Beasts in captivity it is an abdicated monarch. An indispensable item for any zoological garden, it is not the most popular animal nor the most valuable property. Lions are not exacting inmates—they arp comparatively easily cared for, and they breed. But there is another reason. The lord of the jungle is highly photogenic and camera-conscious, to use the language of the film world. In its native majesty it will pose for the modern game hunter who is armed only with a camera—and is surrounded by a corps of servants with heavy armaments —and behind the bars of a cage it will still rear an impressive profile. So, in the zoo, the lion is taken for granted; he is so much like his pictures. The zoo has an aristocracy of wealth, for the size of the purchase price and the cost of housing and maintenance are the qualifications for membership. The title of “King of the Caged Beasts,” if there were one, would be claimed by Bushman, a magnificent black gorilla in the Chicago Lincoln Park Zoo, which is valued at £25,000.

A lion or a tiger may be offered to an American zoo for as little as £25, but in New Zealand the supply is more limited and import difficulties for which Mr Nash is not responsible cause considerable differences in the local market prices for these and most other animals. To-day a member of the Australian Society of Zoos can buy a kangaroo

for less than the ordinary man would pay for a well-bred household pet. According to a statement made recently by the curator of the Wellington Zoo, the price of these animals has been reduced from £2O to twenty shillings. But if the kangaroo has joined the new poor, the hippopotamus is weighty with added dignity and may now cost up to £2OOO. Formerly it could be purchased for a quarter of that amount. By what process “ rhino ” comes to be a slang term for money has not been explained by etymologists, but a zoophilist knows that a rhinoceros is worth £IOOO. A South American bird, the quetzal, at £IOO is almost worth its weight in gold, a standard of values which fortunately does not apply to the elephant, which may cost £ 1500. As the market quotations for kangaroos show, the aristocrats of the zoos suffer many fluctuations of fortune, and the most drastic of these are caused by war. Camels, which formerly sneered at the visitors to German zoos, were sold a year or two ago as steaks, a lamentable fate which overtook almost the entire population of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris during the Franco-Prussian war. Moralising is'almost inevitable.