Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, MAY 10, 1939. THE DUKE’S BROADCAST.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 May 1939, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, MAY 10, 1939. THE DUKE’S BROADCAST.

« —. — THERE was a time when the Duke of Windsor might have spoken with great and far-reaching authority and effect, to his own nation and others, on questions of international, moment. That time, however, plainly has passed and cannot return. .It is now clear to all beholders that in abdicating, the Duke of Windsor, as he then became, passed into a ; neutraltinted retirement in which he is insulated inevitably from any oreat part in national and international affairs. It is a question whether the Duke did not place himself in something of a false position in accepting the wide publicity given to his broadcast address in the United States and in some other countries, although he professed to be speaking wholly for himself, simply as a soldier of the last war “whose earnest prayer is that such cruel and destructive madness shall never again overtake mankind.” ( It is desirable, undoubtedly, that men of goodwill, and not least those who fought in the last war, should make themselves heard in advocacy of peace, but it also needs to be considered that any widely published utterance by the Duke of Windsor is liable to have other results than he himself would desire. _ Well-intentioned as it may be taken for granted they .weie, .some of the Duke’s observations at Verdun rather obviously are’ not calculated to assist a safe handling of critical, international issues. The address as a. whole cannot be classed as a. powerfully helpful contribution to the cause of peace. To a good many people it may look more like a strangely obstinate refusal to face the, issues by which the world is faced. The Duke no doubt is perfectly right in being convinced that “no people want war, whether German, British or French.” He was on firm ground* also, in maintaining that the true basis of international relations is to be found in the harmonious adjustment of individual relations, and in affirming that: “The greatest success any government could achieve for its own national policy would be nothing in comparison with, the triumph of saving or contributing fo save humanity from’ the terrible fate which threatens it today.” It must be said frankly and in plain terms, however, that the Duke descended to puerility and futility when he deplored “the use of such words as encirclement and aggression,” since . they “can only arouse those dangerous passions it’ should be the aim of all to subdue.” It is not the name, but the fact of aggression that has plunged the nations of the world into an insane race of armaments and threatens to plunge them into a final catastrophe of conflict. The problem raised is not that of inducing the people of Britain, France and other countries to refrain from easting the reproach of aggression at Germany, nor of inducing the people of the Reich to cease from hurling , charges of attempted encirclement at the European democracies. It is aggression in working practice which threatens to lay the world desolate. Any purposeful effort for peace must take account of the fact that the governments now exercising despotic authority in Germany and Italy are organised to carry predatory aggression to its practicable limits and have achieved, by the use and threat of force, considerable success in their designs of conquest, exploitation and domination. No use of gentle language will re-establish the liberties of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Spain and other victims of aggression. It is no doubt true that the bulk of the people of Germany and Italy, like those of other countries, desire peace. Meantime, however, the people of Germany and the people of Italy are obeying without effective protest the dictates of governing gangs which make a. mock of honesty and fair dealing between nations, which have used brute force successfully in defiance of law and morality, and which proclaim their intention of extorting further concessions. No one should know better than the Duke of Windsor that the nation over which he once ruled, and the other European democracies, honestly desire-peace and that any Government, in Britain particularly, which attempted to engage in warmongering when the alternative existed of promoting peace would be overthrown with promptitude and dispatch. It is, of course, well known to the Duke also that the British Government, in the recent past, went unwisely far in a policy of conciliation and concession to the totalitarian dictatorships, and so encouraged them to proceed to new extremes of aggression. It is not a service to peace to speak as if these albimportant facts did not exist and to assume, in effect, that the reality of aggression will disappear if it is not called by its name.