SUBVERSIVE PROPAGANDA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24424, 9 October 1940, Page 6

SUBVERSIVE PROPAGANDA

The incitement that is being anonymously offered to members of the National Reserve to refuse the military duty for which they have been called up merits contempt and reprobation. It is not by Mr Semple, Minister of National Service, that the persons or the organisation responsible for the widespread circulation of subversive propaganda of this description may most appropriately be stigmatised, but the robust terms in which he has condemned the attempt, feeble though it will prove to, be, to pervert the reservists certainly express the views of all loyal members of the community on the subject. It may be doubted, however, whether there is, as Mr Semple thinks, a large organisation at work in the disseminatidn of pernicious stuff of a kind that is directed against the war effort of the Dominion. If there is a large organisation it should not be beyond the power of the Government to drag it into the light and to suppress it. But it is at least likely that the anti-war propagandists, who are necessarily pro-Axis pro-

pagandists, in the Dominion do not number more than a comparatively few misguided individuals. The measure of their fanaticism is indicated by the zeal which they are displaying in pursuing a cause that runs contrary to sentiments that are almost universally entertained in New Zealand. If they have received any encouragement in following the course they are taking, it may have been provided by the Government itself in refusing or neglecting to make use of the emergency regulations for the disciplining of persons who have admittedly committed breaches of them. The reluctance to prosecute in these cases must have engendered a lack of respect for the regulations, and an effect may conceivably be discerned in a bold defiance of the authorities such as is evidenced in the circulation of the documents by which it is vainly hoped to cripple the design to bring the Territorial Force up to a war establishment strength.