Wairarapa Daily Times (Established Over 60 Years.) TUESDAY, 15th SEPTEMBER, 1936. EUROPE BOILING MAD.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 15 September 1936, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times (Established Over 60 Years.) TUESDAY, 15th SEPTEMBER, 1936. EUROPE BOILING MAD.

“Europe Under the Terror” is tlie sufficiently revealing title of Mr John L. Spivak’s impressions of the Fascist countries, gathered in a, leisurely tour of six months. As the foreign correspondent of an American newspaper, he found that to reside in any one place— Berlin, Rome, WarsaAV, or, for that matter, Vienna—meant that he would have no chance of getting the truth out of the country even if he could discover it, journalists being subject to irksome official surveillance and their messages to censorship. They must send as news merely what authority wishes them to send, which is naturally of a nature favourable to the Government. But the Avandering journalist is alloAved to do very much as he pleases, so long as he does not break the rules; he may, as Mr Spivak did, meet and talk Avith Communists and other revolutionaries, Avith the people at large, and store up material for future use. And, really, the fact can no longer be concealed that there is vast unrest throughout Europe, due to oppressive Government, the collapse of the economic system, and hunger. Mr Spivak tells of children shot doAvn in Poland because they ventured, under adult direction, to ask for their rights; of

peasants in Czechoslovakia who are so thoroughly taxed that they cannot even afford salt, and in consequence often murder the tax collectors; of riots in Vienna; of deserters from the Italian army, unwilling to face the Abyssinian campaign, which was a desperate move on Mussolini’s part, escaping into Switzerland and Austria in great -numbers; of Nazi racketeering and the sorrows of Jewish ex-soldiers in Germany—many horrible stories, but all obviously true. That Europe has reverted to mediaeval barbarism and mutually antagonistic disunity is shown by the fact alone that imprisonment and sentence without warrant or trial, brutal suppression of protests, fostering of race and political hatreds, are rife. Mr Spivak believes that a tremendous collapse is imminent. “I talked witli rulers of vast political and financial Empires, and found them utterly bewildered as to what to do to save their crumbling possessions . . . and in their bewilderment they aye stumbling towards an even more frightful war than the last in their despairing efforts to get out of the crisis, ’ ’ he writes. In every city the underground parties, Communist, Socialist and others, are armed and waiting. But in them, nevertheless, rests the only hope of preventing war, for they are agreed, everywhere, not to fight for their present rulers.