AIM OF THE REDS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3846, 18 September 1928, Page 2

AIM OF THE REDS.

DESTRUCTION OF SOCIETY. “LIFE AND DEATH STRUGGLE.” SPEECH BY MR. W. M. HUGHES. “Communism, like carrion, has entered the fair body of the Labour Party and its movements which give* the party the semblance of life,” remarked Mr. Wl M. Hughes, M.P., for North Sydney, in an address to members of a branch of the National Association in Sydney recently. “The aims of Communism are to destroy society. The method to overcome it is by fire and sword. Smite it hip and thigh. Pluck it out like cancer,” he added. Mr. Hughes said that he did not charge the Labour Party with being the tool of Communism, or with knowingly having absorbed its poisonous doctrine. But, despite this, it was controlled by the Reds, and there was hardly one industrial organisation with the exception of the Australian Workers’ Union, which had had the courage to come out into the open and throw down the gage of battle.

If the Nationalists could be infused with the energy of the Communists in six months there would be no Communists. But the rank and file of the organisation did not bother. The Government had taken spasmodic and almost futile action by arresting certain men for alleged offences. Whether it would go any further he could not say. There would never, be peace for this country until the matter was tackled effectively. The undermining influence of the Reds was responsible for the complete change in the Labour Party m the last few years. The Communists were in deadly earnest. They believed with the belief of men who would go to the stake for their belief. The sjpirit of relativity had come over the Labour Party. The spirit which moved it to-day was the spirit of Communism. Mr. Lang and Mr. Garden had denied that they were Communists, but if that were true, what was a Communist? It was idle and, absurd for those who had been given executive positions in the movement by the headquarters of the movement to deny that they were connected with it. Mr. Hughes recalled how in 1910 at a Labour conference at Adelaide, the then Prime Minister, before the business commenced, moved that a message be sent to the King expressing the loyalty of the party. The motion was earned unanimously. “If you did that, to-day,” added Mr. Hughes, “they would bite you.” (Laughter). The men in the Labour Party had not altered, but had fallen under the domination of an influence which they could not shake off. There was going on in Sydney a life and death struggle comparable in its desperate intensity to that waged between the Allied forces and the Central Powers in 1914-18. Every organisation was subject to attack by these earnest, desperate men who called themselves Communists. Their civilisation was as divergent from ours as was that of a savage race, and although they were but a handful, they were slowly gaining ground. They must be met with a united front and obliterated.