Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1939. A PRESIDENTIAL DISCLAIMER.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 February 1939, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1939. A PRESIDENTIAL DISCLAIMER.

'ANGER over the publication of exaggerated and allegedly erroneous accounts of his recent observations to the Senate Military Affairs Committee appears to have provoked President Roosevelt into an exhibition of bad temper. Mr Roosevelt, we are now told, “branded as ‘,a deliberate he a report that he had placed America’s'new defence frontier on the Rhine. This presumably relates to the earlier cabled statement:—

He (the President) asked the Senators to i regard France as the actual frontier of America in the apparently inevitable snow down Retween the democracies and the dictatorships.

This is the only statement thus far cabled to this country to which Mr Roosevelt’s denial can relate and'it 'tfill be observed that it does not go by any means as far in some respects as the statement now “branded as a deliberate lie.

Precisely how far Mr Roosevelt has been misrepresented is not clear,' but on the basis alike of his own authenticated speeches and the disclosed trend of public opinion m the Lmtecl States it may be believed that nothing essential that was conveyed in the cabled reports of his alleged observations to the Senate Military Affairs Committee need be regarded as misleading or erroneous. It is well understood and appreciated that the United States will enter into no entangling alliances and would go to war only in the last resort, in defence or her own interests. At the same time, it is entirely reasonable to believe that the American Government will be impelled increasingly to distinguish between the dictatorships and the democracies in foreign trade and other dealings, and particularly in the sale of war materials.

Some details of President Roosevelt’s latest reported statement would almost suggest that he has fallen back upon an isolationist policy and upon a. conception of. neutrality under which no distinction would be drawn between aggressors and the victims of aggression. It is most unlikely, however, that any impression of this kind is justified. The President and his'Ministers have made it sufficiently clear that they condemn aggression and are in full sympathy with the desire of the European democracies to maintain world peace on a. basis of respect for treaties and for the rights of others.

The time, it may be hoped, is coming nearer when the democracies of the world will be able to agree upon a policy of refusing to sell war materials to aggressor nations. In any case the policy said to be advocated by a Republican group on the Senate Military Affairs Committee, of selling aeroplanes and other war materials, “with all nations receiving exactly equal treatment,” is open to condemnation not only on grounds of moralitv, ’but as implying a criminal disregard for the future security of the United States. The American Government is bv no'means in a position to regard Nazism and fascism objectively as merely external phenomena. As the American Secretary'of the Interior (Mr Harold Ickes) observed some time ago

Fascism is on the march. Totalitarianism is insidiously boring from within the temple of our liberties and assaulting it from without.

The known and well-established facts are that Nazi and Fascist agents, instructed and financed by Germany and Italy, are intriguing and conspiring busily in the United States and in most of the Latin American republics. The essential aim oi these agents is to enrol the numerous Germans and Italians in the United States and in other American, countries into organised and controlled groups prepared to take their orders from Berlin and Rome.

Unless the present course of events is reversed, it will be only a, matter of time before the Nazis and Fascists are in a position to start so-called civil wars in the. Latin republics on the lines of that which they have promoted with so much success in Spain. The next step would be intervention by Germany or Italy, or both, in an allegedly domestic quarrel m Latin America. It would then be for the United States Government, to determine whether the Monroe Doctrine should or should not lie-upheld.

That important aspect of the position apart, it has to be considered that while the United States is in close sympathy and accord with Britain and other democracies on the fundamentals of policy, it is as definitely, though not as imminently, threatened by Nazism and Fascism as any other democracy. Germany and Italy alike are meantime in Hie hands of men “who have resurrected the most savage and long dead theories of the heathen and dark ages,” and are the declared and irreconcilable enemies, not only of this or that democracy, but of all democracy. The United States cannot in any particulai smooth the path of these reactionaries and enable them to make headway in their designs of aggression without endangering in. sQßie degree its own future security.