It hat Readers Think Letters to the Editor

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVI, Issue 21363, 5 June 1939, Page 12

It hat Readers Think Letters to the Editor

TIMARU’S CENTENNIAL MEMORIAL

Sir.—l have heard a rumour that the Borough rates are to be increased by at least a halfpenny, and if this is true it is time for the business people of Thnaru to enter an emphatic protest. We are already rated too heavily, especially in the business area of Stafford Street, and any further increase will be intolerable. I understand that much of the proposed increase is due to the Council’s decision in the matter of the centennial memorial. This decision was forced on the public by what was practically a minority decision of the Council, as three councillors were absent, and the proposal was only carried by four votes to three. Under these circumstances I consider that we should demand a poll of the ratepayers to decide the question, as was done on a previous occasion when the clock tower was built, i think Mr Rule's suggestion for a simpler memorial without recourse to the rates is an excellent one, and I am certain that the majority of the ratepayers would approve.—l am, etc., RATEPAYER No. 2. Timaru, June 3. THE PEOPLE’S STRUGGLE IN SPAIN Sir, —Quite a common reaction to statements of proved fact and unanswerable arguments is the angry and unrestrained flow of invective. And this seems to be the right description of the contributions of "Democrat” and Mr McKee—all the old “dope" about the greedy, goldgrabbing church dominating the land, trampling on the bleeding necks of the* starving poor, making dead sure that the babies will not happen to learn the A.B.C. And all this backed by quotations from one partisan authority in one case and none in the other. But I have not been concerned with this aspect of the question. I submit that in my previous letters I clearly showed that Russia played the leading part in manufacturing turmoil in Spain. I have never accused the so-called Spanish Government of being openly Communistic. Red tactics are too clever for that. But I have reiterated the aim of atheistic Communism—to transfer power to the Left Wing and then devour the Left Wmg —an aim which never hit its mark better than in Spain. Even leading Republicans came eventually to see how cleverly they had been deceived. Dr. Gregorio Maranon. for example, who was imprisoned for his radicalism under the dictatorship .of Primo de Rivera, at a time when Caballero was drawing a handsome salary as Councillor of State to the same dictator, has made the following moving statement, which your correspondents can easily verify if they seek outside the shelves of the Left Book Club:—“l have been misled. I have been mistaken. In all the hotels in Paris and in the large towns of France you will find political refugees from Spain. All of them are people who have escaped from Red Spain. Not cne of them has found it necessary to escape from Nationalist Spain. ... At bottom only one thing matters, and that is that Spain, Europe, and mankind should be freed from a system of bloodshed, an institution of murder, the advent of which we accuse ourselves of having prepared while labouring under a I tragic misapprehension."

Recently a Timaru audience was addressed by a dcctor who on his own word was with the Republican forces in Spain. There were other foreigners there also. Now, here is a fact which may surprise even protagonists tor Atheistic Communism. Have they heard of the International Brigaders’ Anti-Communist League which has been formed in England by formermembers of the Brigade, who discovered while serving in Spain that what they had been led to believe was a fight for Democracy was nothing but a useless and shameful sacrifice of British lives for the purposes of the Communist International? This fact can be verified from a reference to English newspapers occasionally. Thoroughly disillusioned, these men have resolved that the machinations of the Communist International, with its so-called peace movements, its popular front and its Left Book Club activities, shall be unmasked. One means adopted by them has been poster parades through the streets of London. In one parade the men carried the bill-boards of the familiar sandwichman, bearing captions such as: “We fought for Red Spain and found out,” “We who fought in the International Brigade give you the truth,” “Why silence about Communist Spanish atrocities?” and so on. Among their revelations, which have been published in English newspapers, may be read: “No one was allowed to hold any official position, civil or military, in so-called ’Government’ Spain unless he was a member of the Communist Party.” "The official army salute was the Communist clinched fist.” “Whenever the ‘Government’ forces took a town orders were given at once to destroy everything connected with the churches and religion.” “Prisoners were shot at once. We were told that there was no point in keeping rats.” At last we are getting the truth about Spain, and that from people who went to fight in the "democratic” cause, not from the parlour sympathisers who stayed at home and lapped up the ink from the Red printing press.

Much capital is being made now by Red sympathisers of the "refugees” who fled before the "tyrant” Franco. The real refugees, a mob of dangerous criminals, surely do not need the hardearned money of the New Zealand working man. What of Russia? Is there not room for them in “Democrat’s” Utopia? or is it that the Soviet, its plans dealt a crushing olow, has abandoned its tools? Let me draw a moral from a news reel which I saw at a cinema on a recent evening. It seemed to typify the Bolshevist rabble for which I have sympathy, though your correspondents are not expected to believe that. There was a Communist demonstration in London and one of the demonstrators —she occupied most of the screen—was an unfortunate woman. Wildeyed, she ground her teeth and brandished her clinched fist. She did not symbolise Communism. She symbolised the madness of it, the madness directed by the conspirators. She was a dupe. It is as well to

remember always that dictum which its author, the pseudo-scientist Wells, so often forgets: “The real enemy of mankind is not the Fascist, but the ignorant fool.’’ Franco has had a double victory in Spain. He has crushed the attempt of Russia to form a godless servile State in Spain, and he has also given the death blow to that “liberal” Masonic regime which brought Spain into poverty and ignorance and prevented to such an extent the establishing of the reign of Christ in the hearts of individuals and in families throughout Spain and in State affairs. In the new Spain, Christ reigns. And while the dust from ruined church and the smoke from burning convent still mingle in the dawn of a new Spanish day, the death-cry from the hidden force that wrecked and burned and plundered for three long and weary years arises from the ruins: “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!”— I am, etc., SPAIN REBORN. Dunedin, June 1.