WHY BRITAIN IS FIGHTING

Southland Times, Issue 23932, 26 September 1939, Page 9

WHY BRITAIN IS FIGHTING

Spirit Of Aggression SEEKING NEW WORLD ORDER In the hurry and, confusion of day-to-day events it is hard to reflect calmly upon the underlying forces at work; but, at a time when the British Commonwealth has entered a great war not of its own making, we all have a duty to think clearly and unemotionally of the objectives for which we have determined to fight, writes H. V. Hodson, editor of The Round Table, in The Sydney Morning Herald. First, let us be sure what are. not our objectives. Obviously, not national or Imperial aggrandizement. The nations of the British Commonwealth have no territorial ambitions or imperialistic claims against any country. Equally certain, but in greater, danger of being forgotten, is the fact that we have no quarrel against Germany because she •is Germany, or against Germans because they are Germans. “Prussianism” we all recognize and detest, but the idea that all Germans are militarists and bullies, or that Germany must always be a danger to the peace and contentment of Europe, is a myth which is contradicted as flatly by common sense as by history. Germans have played and will play a great and honourable part in the progress of Western civilization; and Germany has her lawful place in the European community, the place of a leader and not of a serf or satellite. CHALLENGE TO AGGRESSION It is well to remember these things, because in the heat of war hatreds are engendered which distort judgment, tend to prolong the fighting and lead to unwise treaties of peace. The desire to punish the German people for bringing the world into the bloody vale of war twice in a generation must be barred from our minds on grounds both of political horse-sense and of Christian charity. Defeated in a general war, the Germans will be taught that “aggression doesn’t pay,” without having the lesson rammed home by pains and penalties that would evoke not repentance but revenge. By the same token, the nations of the British Commonwealth have not taken their stand on the unalterability of treaties or of the existing frontier settlements. The concept of “peaceful change” has all along played a leading part in British foreign policy and the attitude of British public opinion. But the change must be justified in equity on the free showing of all the peoples and parties involved, and it must be peaceful in method, whatever the merits of the case, or it may be far more dangerous than the continuance of an existing flaw in frontier-drawing. It is aggression, therefore, that we challenge—the spirit of aggression and its persistent practice, not merely its isolated appearance in the letter. We challenge aggression, not because of some high-falutin’ theory of international conduct or pharisaical British piety, but because the spirit of aggression itself challenges the way of life that we have laboriously built up and now prize above all else. Amid aggression and the rule of force, freedom cannot survive, and for us freedom is the salt of life. SPIRIT OF FREEDOM Our national freedom, the independence of the British Commonwealth, and of the different nations that compose it, would certainly be destroyed in the end if the steam-roller of aggression were allowed to gain further momentum. Our individual freedom would as certainly be sapped and eventually killed if totalitarianism were allowed to advance further across the terrain of European civilization, even though we were to buy off war by one concession after another.

Freedom of utterance in speech and writing, which all our history has shown is vital to “government by the people for the people,” is intolerable to Fascist dictators, not only among their own citizens, but also in other countries. The story of the past few years in Europe proves that plainly. Once Dictatorship had the power to choke our private freedom in the British Commonwealth, it would do so mercilessly. And with freedom of utterance would go all the other vital elements of the free life as we know it —freedom from spies and informers, from concentration camps and secret police; equality of all citizens before the law; economic freedom; respect for the rights of minorities. The threat to these things is a knife pointed at the heart of the British Commonwealth, quite apart from any territorial or other national losses that it might be obliged to undergo if it allowed agression to march further. It is not merely our coasts and borders that matter, as the object of defence, but what ,lies behind them—not our possessions, but how we use them. THE POST-WAR WORLD That is why, through all the dust of these days, we must not forget to question ourselves and our own policies. Has life in our British democracies been as free, full, secure, and wholesome for the ordinary man as we could make it? Have the British nations, severally and jointly, made all the contribution that their assets enable them to make to the welfare of the “underprivileged” in the world community? What can and should they put into the pool for the sake of a lasting world-wide settlement, at the end of the war? Above all, what should be the character of an ensuing world order, and what should be our part in it? The last world war, fought by the British peoples as a war to end war, produced the League of Nations. What will come out of another world war, fought by the British peoples to save freedom? The League failed because with the one hand it exhalted national sovereignty, while with the other it asked of sovereign States more than their nature enabled them to give. One article of the Covenant required decisions of the League Council to be unanimous; another, in effect, required every member of the League, automatically and without independent choice, to be at war if any of their number were attacked

This system didn’t work in the past 20 years, and it won’t work in the future. Some sacrifice of national Sovereignty is essential as the basis of a new world order, and in this the British nations must be leaders. The fundamental lesson of the post-war years is that nationalism is the enemy of -our civilization.. This dark hour is at once its peak of triumph and its tortured deathbed.