The Wanganui Chronicle. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16, 1946. POLITICAL POT AND KETTLE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 90, Issue 13, 16 January 1946, Page 4

The Wanganui Chronicle. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16, 1946. POLITICAL POT AND KETTLE

—- ryiVERSIONS from the norm of life add colour to our times, ami the Communists in London who demonstrated against the Fascists certainly achieved that end. The spectacle of the Communists demanding that the Government should “Ban Mosley’’ and “Arrest the Fascists'’ was another illustration of the political pot calling- the political kettle black. Fascism and Communism are as poles apart in their antipathy to each other, but in fundamental outlook they have actually much in common. It would be easier for the Communist and the Fascist 1 han for the lion and the lamb to lie down together, but these political groups would make less strange bedfellows than would either of them and a Liberal. The Liberal believes in freedom.

Freedom, when viewed from the historical standpoint, is a new political concept. Dominance by the ruler or ruling cast is as old as the earliest civilisation. The. first of the rulers was Nimrod. Freedom has had to be won, and it is necessary to pay for it to maintain it. Eternal vigilance is part of the price of freedom. Both Fascism and Communism are Hie modern challenges to freedom. and in this extremes meet in a common cause.

Every political philosophy is an attempt to evaluate the various factors which go to make up the good life. Complete freedom would result in chaos: absolute order would result in a complete loss of freedom. The majority of men want neither the one nor the other, but find it possible 1o live comfortably on the middle ground which lies between these two political poles. Sometimes the tendency has been to shift nearer to one extreme, after which a reaction has set in carrying life in the opposite direction. In the main it has been in the periods when men have enjoyed a larger measure of freedom that they have produced the greater advances in well-being. The Renaissance, was a period when human genius broke out into full flowering, but it was followed by a dictatorship which crushed out the bloom of life.

The Communist and the Fascist are equally agreed that free dom is to be discounted because of its high cost, that order is to be preferred because of its greater material results. It is. they believe, through this increasing efficiency in material things that the eventual larger freedom is to be achieved. This common ground should draw the Communist and the Fascist together, and indeed this is what actually occurs. It was the ex-Socialist Mussolini who led the Fascists to seize power in Italy: it was the NationalSocialist Hitler who staged the Nazi revolution, and it was the commercial monopolists of both countries who backed these Socialists. Together they combined to form the Trinity of Power Polities. In Russia it, was Krassin, director of Siemens and Schuckert, who assisted Lenin on the technical side and concluded the Soviet trade agreement with Britain. There is no great obstacle in a Communist becoming a Fascist, but there arc-real barriers preventing either of them becoming a Liberal. Those real barriers are the respect which Liberalism has for the value of human personality and the belief that personality best fructifies in an atmosphere of freedom.

Those who believe in freedom are as reluctant to imprison Fascists as they are to incarcerate Communists. A man is not convinced of his errors by being put in gaol. The concentration camps of Germany were obvious failures when it came to changing men's intellectual conviction*. The demand of the London Communists that ex-Socialist Mosley should be banned springs from the knowledge that Mosley, were he in power, would ban the Communists and probably imprison them. Why these two sets of people, whose doctrines are so similar that it is difficult to distinguish them, should be so antipathetic towards each other is one of the problems of to-day. Their chief point of conflict lies not in doctrine, but in the fear that a Communist success would exclude those in the Fascist camp from any part in the planning, and that a Fascist success would produce a reverse result. Each group is avid for power in order to be able to shatter the world to bits and mould it anew.

This fear complex, which rides both Communist and Fascist is to no purpose, for it is not the politicals who would do the planning were success to attend the efforts of either political group. The planners in a complex society—and a planned so’eiety tends to become increasingly complicated—must have high technical qualifications, and the politicals of this world cannot possess them. Political activity and technical aptitude are mutually exclusive, for each demands the whole attention of its practitioners. The men who are now engaged in directing the technical processes of production under Capitalism must be relied upon to direct those same processes under either Communism or Fascism. It doesn’t matter much to them which group gains the upper hand; it is to the technicians that the real power will be given. These can be relied on to endeavour to make permanent their own positions and to advantage their own children. Thus does dictatorship, of the Communist or of the Fascist, lead inevitably to the erection of a caste system with impassable barriers against the mass of men rising in the scale of usefulness and influence.

The eternal challenge to freedom is the same in essential elements. Be the challenge labelled Communism or Fascism, it manifests itself in the same way. It professes to speak for the mass of men, authoritatively and beyond dispute. It professes to desire to advance the welfare of mankind and, believing this, adopts the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It demands more and more of the individual, claiming that the movement is more important than the man. It is because such a path must necessarily lead to tyranny that the Communists can see the danger to themselves if the Fascists are successful and the Fascists can see the danger to themselves if the Communists succeed. Hence the unreasoned attitude of each towards the other and Ihe banners fly in London with the legends “Ban Mosley” and “Arrest the Fascists.”