Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, APRIL 24, 1939. A DAY OF LASTING MEMORIES.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 April 1939, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, APRIL 24, 1939. A DAY OF LASTING MEMORIES.

TT is more than twenty years since the Great M ar came to X an encl—a. war in which the youthful manhood of New Zealand and some noble representatives of its wo ™ a " l } —like those of many other countries m and beyond the’ ni P —answered the call sounded in a great emergency and the path of duty in what many of them hoped was a war to end war. On the eve of another Anzac Day, New Zealandeis and the people of democracies throughout the world are bem called upon to organise against the possibility of an even more; ten ible war—a conflict in which, if it comes to pass, free be fighting for their existence and against an effort to destioj, not liberty and justice only, but all liberal enlightenment. Grimly and tragically as it falsifies for the time being the hopes and ideals in furtherance of which many lives were spent heroically in the Great War, the state of the world today m no ■way dims.the glory of the anniversary that ias T Australia and New Zealand their greatest of all days of national commemoration. Holding in grateful memory the New Zealand soldiers, sailors and nurses, and their comrades and allies who fought and served in many theatres of war, the people of this country are paying tribute to qualities of valour and of citizenship tliat are needed at all times, in war or m peace, and never more than when the international skies are overcast and threatening. The faithful and sincere observance of Anzac Day most assuredly involves no glorification of militarism and war. Indeed, the tradition of Anzac could not be expressed and extended better than in untiring efforts to establish world peace on firm foundations. That tradition does demand, however, that true ideals should be defended and upheld at all costs and most certainlv demands that the spirit of service and sacrifice it enshrines shall not be allowed to grow dim in days when democracy, and all that it means to humanity, are menaced perhaps « more formidably.than ever before. Steady courage and disciplined effort were never demanded more imperatively.of peace-loving and democratic peoples like our own than at the present time, when great nations have submitted themselves to the control of dictators whose single aim is to substitute a rule of brute force for that of law and morality. The facts and the gravity of the. existing world position are minimised by those who concentrate unduly on the underlying economic causes of international friction and stiife, and equally by those who maintain that genuinely earnest efforts to bring about understanding and concord between the nations could not fail to succeed and to sweep away the dangers of war. In this well-intentioned advocacy, it is overlooked that the German and Italian dictatorships, for example, which exercise a despotic and suprdine authority in their respective territories, have no desire whatever to reach understanding and concord with the democracies, but on the contrary profess to regard democracy as something effete and outworn, which must be swept away. Those who maintain, as some British statesmen were maintaining very recently, that we should look tolerantly upon systems and methods of government adopted by other nations, forget that there are differences of opinion and outlook that are fundamental and irreconcilable. The German Nazis and the Italian Fascists have alike rejected and denounced the principles of democracy and have substituted for it a crude, debased and overbearing tyranny which they aspire Io extend to world domination. The Nazis are attacking not only democracy, but all that is most vital to the Christian faith. As an English writer put it recently:— It is fundamental in the Christiafn philosophy that anyone who sincerely so desires can become a Christian with the same hopes of heaven and the same rights on earth as anyone else. It is fundamental in the Nazi philosophy that a man whose blood is tainted by non-Aryan elements cannot by any act of faith or act of will rise above the inferior status which was his for ever at the moment of his conception. Between these two points of view there is no conceivable reconciliation. In the estimation of all good democrats, lot alone good Christians, the Nazi and Fascist ideologies are outrageous and abominable. There can be no firm compromise between the democracies and dictators who are thrusting their own nations and others back towards the abyss of barbarism. We are enough yet from having attained conditions in which general ‘ understanding and peace between the nations can be approached. At least, however, we cannot be in doubt that the qualities upon which our own nation and other free nations must depend in whatever emergency or ordeal fate may have in store are precisely those that animated the men and women to whose memory a national tribute is paid on Anzac Day.