IF GERMANY WON

Southland Times, Issue 24162, 26 June 1940, Page 8

IF GERMANY WON

Complete Subjection Of The Conquered

DEMOCRACY MUST FIGHT In the event of a German victory, Europe would be completely subjected to the Nazi policy and the national life of conquered peoples would be totally obliterated. That has happened in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and in this article, a second extract from the second War Number of The Round Table, London, the German methods are explained.

“She (Germany) would control-India, whose steady evolution to self-govern-ment would end abruptly just as it had neared its climax,” continues the article. “She would take what she chose of the present French and British colonies and so determine the future development of most of the tropical world and specially of Africa. . . .

“No more would be heard of ‘trusteeship for native interests’ or ‘selfgovernment based on representative institutions.’ Nor, the step once taken, would there be any turning back. Modern armaments secure a government in possession, and by their use a ruthless and determined nation can control its neighbours as easily as its own population. It has only to disarm them, to forbid rearmament, to maintain its bombing planes and use them without hesitation, and its defeated opponents are permanently at its mercy. “Once Germany is in the saddle, no horse will throw her. Democracies may waver through conscience or indecision, but nothing in German history leads us to expect such irresolution from her. For - us, for France, for Europe—and beyond Europe—a German victory would have no morrow. “The German ideal is nothing new. It is an atavism, a reversion made possible, like other characteristir vices of modern civilization, by the weakening of those ideals which Europe has professed for 1500 years. We are back at something which Greece and Christianity and the great religions of Asia did much to tame. But barbarism is not so terrible when it is the savagery of Goth and Hun and Tartar. Then it is brutal and unselfconscious. Graft it on a highly intellectual stock, with all the resources of science and civilization, and turn it from a primitive instinct into a theory of life, and it becomes infinitely more terrible and dangerous.

HOW TO MEET THREAT?

“How is it to be met? Partly with the weapons by which, when it comes to war, all disputes must be decided. It is an armed force, to be met by arms. But it is also an ideal, to be met and conquered by the ideal which it challenges, and it is the more important to be clear what we are standing for . . .-as St. Augustine said, ‘Banish justice, and what are empires but brigandage on a large scale?’ Christian and Greek and the philosophers of Asia are here agreed. Power is not enough. The State is not enough. Above the State are higher laws by which both States and individuals are judged. That is our creed; but it is not Hitler’s. “The essence of liberal democracy is respect for human personality, for the intelligent and the stupid, the forceful and the inert, the healthy and the sick, even for the knave and criminal, for members of every race and nation, white or coloured, British, French, Jewish, Czech, Polish, German or Russian; the sense that the meanest of human beings is still a human being with rights of which nothing can deprive him, capacities of which something can be made, and obligations toward his fellows which he can be trained to fulfil.

“This belief in the rights and duties of man, first divined by Greek thinkers, was confirmed, enriched and deepened by Christianity. Though the word democracy does not occur in the New Testament, its essence is in the superb saying that not a bird is forgotten in the presence of God. “These ideals are far more difficult of achievement than those of totalitarianism. Anyone with sxxfficient intelligence and power can tyrannize over tlxe bodies and minds of men. Democracy demands both of political leaders and the ordinary man virtues not needed undei - an autocracy, and indeed out of place there—fairmindedness, fair play, restraint, compromise over cherished aims. It lives in a perpetual dilemma between putting too much or too little faith in the individual’s sense of responsibility. It is exposed to defects incidental to its natxxre —short sight, ineffectiveness, irresolution, plausible selfishness. And all the time it has to fight with the intractable nature of man, with his brutality, pride, ambition, acquisitiveness, his instinct to assert himself and have his own way. DISCOURAGING TASK “To work democracy, or to take democratic ideals as a principle of action, is a discouraging task. It is easy to talk about justice but hard to practise it. The obstacles are many; the general distrust between nations and governments; the feeling that concessions will be taken advantage of, and that one’s neighbour is ready to ask but not to give in retxxrn; the way human beings have of demanding in the name of justice something to which they are not entitled, or which they are incapable of using, or which can only be granted to the detriment of more vital and essential good. “How tempting to regard a difficult task as hopeless, to say that morals have no place in politics and to desert the cause of human civilization! And yet it has not been deserted. For more than 2000 years, slowly and with many checks and reverses, a spirit has been at work imposing on Exirope and in the New World a political order resting on something other than force and with a higher aim than power to dominate and exploit. Now it is struggling for its life. If it were to fail, how fatal for humanity! How shameful if those who believe in it were not prepared to fight for it, to fight for it to the end!

“Our business is to fight . for oxxr ideal; but also to blow it into a flame in our own hearts. One great need at the moment is to use our full military and economic strength; another need is to remember oxxr cause. Separated, each will be ineffective, for though the idea without, the act is powerless, it is ideas that produce acts; if we did not know that, the recent history of Russia, Germany and Italy would have taught us.”