“TROUBLESOME RACE”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 October 1939, Page 7

“TROUBLESOME RACE”

CAUSE OF TWO MAJOR WARS IN 25 YEARS. MISTAKES OF THE PAST. Two Great Wars in 25 years strikes me as being slightly redundant. Ti makes one recall the cocksure omniscience with which, when the politicians thought they were settling the peace terms in 1919. the War Office quidnuncs assured us there would be no more real fighting for at least 60 years (says an English authority)-. For that little error of 35 years 1 personally am blaming the military prophets less than the aforesaid. 11 Germany had won the last war. there would certainly not have been another just yet awhile. The Germans would never have permitted us to default on a thousand million war indemnity, and quietly spend seven times that sum on getting ready for another scrap. But recriminations over the irretrievable mistakes of the immedial,c past are now worse than useless. Wc must gird our loins for the new ordeal that lies right ahead of us. And dedicate every effort to winning through to another victory which shall, unless we are really squinting lunatics, prove much more solidly ferro-concrete in its peace foundations. But please observe that already, before that next victory is within sight the dear souls who encouraged Germany to evade the last stranglehold are already writing letters to the news ■ papers, urging most fervently that wi must repeat our fatal mistake. JULIUS C/ESAR’S OMISSION. Only at great cost, to ourselves and still more to some other decent Europeans. have we managed to get anything like ready for this second Great Wari It behoves us to take every precaution to be ready for the peace that must eventually follow it. And to do this we must clear away all those pretty notions about the German people being an entity distinct from their Government.

Maybe w’e do not admire the Nazi regime. But the hard fact remains that an overwhelming percentage ol the German people do. This doctrine of popular irresponsibility is in direct conflict with the axiom that every nation gets the Government it deserves. It is also diametrically in contradiction with imperishably classic history. Europe is suffering now from Julius Cassar’s unfortunate omission to conquer and subdue the Germanic tribes. That omission has caused the German people of today to be at least three centuries behind the general standard of European post-Roman civilisation. Caesar has himself paid unmistakable tribute to the caveman characteristics of the Germans. He tells us that they rejoiced in his day in having, bordering their habitat, the widest possible expanse of howling wilderness. They held that such conditions bore striking and flattering testimony to the inability of neighbouring tribes to withstand their puissant might! HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF. This is not Goebbels’s propaganda but authentic history written by a contemporary Roman lawyer-soldier. Nor does Julius Caesar stand alone. Tacitus records in polished Latin how the Germans regarded with contempt and. derision anyone who by husbandry and honest sweat gained things which might more easily and quickly be obtained by bloodshed and battle. These are the “nice neighbours” who have been troubling Europe for several centuries. These are the people whose political incapacity and spineless subservience on the home front have plunged twentieth-century Europe into two Great Wars in a-quarter of a century. Though perhaps we should take a longer and more historically accurate view, and regard this as merely in sporting terminology the second half of the 1914-18 Great War. The Allies after winning the first half, have been considerate enough to allow defeated Germany a 21-year interval to recuperate and re-equip for the second half. All I am urging - now is that we should carefully disregard those, emotionalists who, when the time comes, want us to repeat that calamitous and ruinous folly. But personally I put much faith in the grim realism of the French. They will probably see next time that adequate precautions are taken to curb effectually the ancestral proclivities of the Huns.