BRITAIN AND RUSSIA

Hokitika Guardian, 9 December 1924, Page 2

BRITAIN AND RUSSIA

AUSTRALIAN AND N.Z. CABLE ASSOCIATION THE SOVIET AND CONSERVATIVES. BERNARD SHAW’S VIEWS. LONDON. Dec. 7. Mr Bernard Shaw has given the “Dailv Herald” an exclusive copy of the letter he sent hv request, to the Moscow "Izvesta.” Shaw writes that as the economic will finally dominate the political situation it is quite possible the Soviet will ultimately get better terms for both commercial treaties and guaranteed loans from the present Conservative Government than Labour dared oiler; hot the Soviet will do well to dissociate itself from the 'I hud Internationale. Zinovielf must choose definitely between serious statesmanship and the cinematography of his sehool!m)v nonsense. “I do not l'eler. says Shaw, “to the forged letter, hut to the constitution of the Third luleriiationa . Its bourgeois idealism, and its childish inexperience of men and affairs have ,riven a serious shock to the Soviet s friends ill England. From the viewpoint. of the English Socialists. the Third Internationalists do not know the loginning of their business Ihe proposition that the world should take orders from a handful of Russian novices. who seem to gain their knowledge of modern Socialism from the pamphlets by the Liberal revolutionists of 1818-1871) make even Lord Curzon and Air Winston Churchill appear to he comparatively extreme modernists. I'ntil Moscow learns to laugh at the Third International, and realises that wherever Socialism is a living force, it has left Karl Marx as far behind as modern science has left Moses, there will he nothing hut misunderstandings and a dozen negligible cranks in Busin will correspond with ditto in England. liiit 1 1 convinced that they are the proletariat, revolving God knows what else. I sound this alarm, because the Soviet must wake up to Western realities unless it wishes to become the main bulwark of the capitalists of Imperialism in Europe and America. Al. Zinovielf and the Third International did not intend to wreck the English general elections in the interests ol capitalists, and tlierchv make the Sudan a. present to the British Empire and the River Nile a present to the Sudan Plantations Svildieato: hut this is precisely what they did by their inopportune literary romancing, which it siuts „ur governing ela-ses lo pretend to take seriously.”