INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENT

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 71, Issue 6142, 28 September 1945, Page 5

INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENT

Sir,—Each day it is becoming more apparent that the chances of obtaining agreement between the nations are less than they were after the last war. There now appears an entirely new factor, namely, the complete absence of a common standard of truth or morality. What according to our standard is black, Russia declares is white. What we regard as government by fear or terror, Russia declares is democratic. We understand all this sort of humbug, hypocrisy and absence of morals which characterised any dealings with Hitler or Mussolini, but we had great hopes of being able to co-operate with Russia. Just a little thought should have warned us of the utter impossibility of co-operation. Our moral basis of Socialism is something quite different. What advances Socialism is ethical. There is no such thing as objective truth. A lie is a truth if it assists the Socialist cause. Socialist morality is the complete absence of morality. What according to our Christian standards is a crime becomes a virtue if it promotes Socialism. As Lenin put it, “A morality outside of human society does not exist for us; it is a fraud. For us morality is subordinated to the interests of the proletarian class-struggle.” Yaroslavsky, the present head of Russian propaganda, has enunciated the same principles in his book “Red Virtue.” Once we grasp these fundamentals then it is easy to understand why we have seen in Socialist Germany, Italy and Russia in the past 20 years more persecution, oppression and acts of barbarism than at any period of world history. It was inevitable that under the influence of a political philosophy which is both antidemocratic and anti-Christian, the world should be slipping back to barbarism.—l am, etc., M. DARRAN.