BRITAIN AND GERMANY

Southland Times, Issue 23675, 25 November 1938, Page 8

BRITAIN AND GERMANY

To the Editor Sir,—How happy are those. nations which are the friends of Britain! How blessed those peoples which joined the League of Nations at the very beginning! Great shall be their reward m Heaven, even though on earth _ their fate is Hell. Those idealists, how I love them! No arms for you, dear .Abyssinians, no need for them. Britain will protect you. Let Italy prepare! Your bulwark is Britain and her pacifists. Poor, poor Abyssinia! And now the conquest of Abyssinia is to be officially recognized by Britain! Let us how New Zealand will stand firm and prefer insulation, isolation and death to mshonour. And then the dearly-beloved Czechoslovakia! The noble Runciman, of 1912 fame, rushed to Prague to mediate, to get good terms for the poor Czechs. Behind the mediator stood the might and resources of the British Empire. Have no fear, O Czechs, the nation whose word is their bond will protect you. Do not mobilize, trust to Britain, the soul of honour. Shameful, those Godesburg terms! Poor poor Czechs, they have had to submit to far harsher terms with worse to follow. Poor, poor China, the mediators of Britain are pursuing your gallant leader, they have got in touch with nun in the interior of China. This mediator will say, “Trust to Britain, lay down your arms, Britain will see that Japan does not treat you unfairly. All the pacifists in Britain are disarming to help you! It is true that the noble Canon Sheppard is dead, but there still lives on the Peace Pledge Union, trust to Britain and her pacifists and welcome slavery.” Patriotism is a sin. The Council of the League of Nations Union (December 1936) “hesitates to commit the union to approve of the rearmament and recruiting campaign. Britain hesitates to defend herself; so you in China and we in New Zealand are perfectly safe—safe to become slaves. Are the Hearst newspapers far wrong when they say that Britain is governed by a pro-Nazi clique. What but friendship for the Germans and pressure from the capitalists has made Britain so shamefully unfair to the Loyalists in Spain? You glance at the map of the world and you see a small area marked Germany. Why should the talk of the rest of the vast world be of nothing but Germany this, Germany that, Germany is wonderful, Germany could conquer us all, Germany persecutes the Jews, the Catholics, the Protestants, her own democrats, therefore let us ■love Germany, let us fear Germany, let us cower down before Germany, and all cry “Heil, Hitler.” That firm patriot, Clemenceau, wrote in L’Homme Libre in the spring of 1914, these words: “Are we condemned in perpetuity to study the Kaiser’s”— Hitler’s now—“face to know whether we shall be alloWed to live in peace for yet another day, congratulating our-, selves that the moment has not yet come when the gracious monarch will decide that his interest lies in wringing our neck? . May all our pacifists and traitors be accursed!—Yours, etc., J. P. DAKIN. November 24, 1938.