The Conspiracy of Silence

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 10, 9 March 1905, Page 18

The Conspiracy of Silence

In our leading columns of last week there occurs the following paragraph :•— ' In the meantime M. Guyot de Yfclleneuve is continuing, in the French Chamber of Deputies, his sensational documentary revelations as to ipe far-reaching character of the spying and denunciations of officers carried out by the War Office through the instrumentality of the Freemason lodges.. A,nd still the secular pre?|s of New Zealand is' dumb. The Legion of llpnav, miany leading members of the League of the Rights of Man, the Republica-n Democuatic Alliance, and otJher nionCatholic associations are preparing or have formulated protests! againpt the infamies of the spy system. But to this moment our secular dailies have not given a whimper, not a breath, about the underground scandals which have shaken France from the Belgian frontier t 0 the Pyrenees.' We added that the secular press in this counttry hfcul no worti of condemnation for ' the organised underground plotters who have covered themselves with such deep and indelible disgrace in Continental Europe,' and that it r shuts up its shell in the presence of the colossal Masonic scandal which has thrown the French

Ministry out of power and has shaken the country like an earthquake of national dimensions.'

The/ editor of our local evening contemporary sends us, in connection with our article, the following courtco^iq reminder : ' The learned editor has surely o Aerlookdd tjhe " Star's" article of Jan. 20 last, in which we denounced Combis's policy of Spying.' As a matter of fact we read the ' Star ' article at the time. We re-iead it on receipt of the note just quoted above. Our gjood friend of the 'Star ' has obviously mistaken the whole drift aiM contention of each and everyone of the three articles written by us upon ' the conspiracy of silence ' in regard to the discreditable part played by Freemasons in connection with the scandals of ©spicnage in the French army. The Dunedin ' Evening Star ' was almost al(o,ne, among New Zealand papers, in denouncing ' this infamous business of spying,' which ;,(it added) the Combesi Ministry had raised to ' the dignity of a policy.' But that is not the point raised by us in our articles. It ip t|he mysterious unanimity with which 1 almost every secular newspaper in the EnglishMSpeaking world ' concealed from tjheir readers the ignoble part which the dark-lantern fraternity, ' t-Jie underground plotters,' played in this scandalous business— ' officers and getotlemen ' of the Craft selling themselves wholesale as Ministerial spies, a proceeding which (as the, ' Star ' in effect remarks) is revolting to the sense of any Englishman gifted with a normal sense of ttecency and honor. But from beginning to end of a lengthy and generally very fair-minded article, the ' Star ' was absolutely ' dumb ' as to the paxt played by French Freemasdns in those discreditable proceedings. There was 'no whisper, not a breath,' about the ' (underground ' nat'urje of the scandals ; there was no hint as to the ' instrumentality of the Freemason lodges ' in the spying and denunciations ; not a word was said to indicate that it was a ' Mascnic scandal,' or a ' cowardly and traitorous crusade organised by the ' darkl'antern fraternity against the honor and the efficiency of the country's army.' And thus, up to the present time, our statement us, so far as we aie aware, only too true, that no secular paper in New Zealand has given s-o much as a hint as to the part played* in the great French scandals by ' the oath-bound and uniformed League of P'reemason spies ' ; cot one of them has published the faintest criticism of the proceedings of the Craft in tihe army of the Third Republic ; and they ' ha\e not among them all sp much as a dog-whip to lash the rascals naked through tTie world.'