Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1939. A SOVIET PRONOUNCEMENT.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 November 1939, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1939. A SOVIET PRONOUNCEMENT.

ADDRESSED to a well-drilled and subordinated audience, the speech of the Russian Prime Minister (Ml Molotov) which was reported yesterday appears to have made an excellent impression. The Soviet Supreme Council, we are told, adopted M. Molotov’s report unanimously, without discussion, after giving him an ovation. The speech will command no such ready approval where it is considered and discussed by people who are free to make themselves acquainted with the facts of national and international affairs and to think.

Not very much need be said about M. Molotov’s leading contention —that Germany is now striving for peace and that Britain therefore lis an aggressor in continuing the war. This is special pleading of the shoddiest kind. All the world in touch with the facts knows that the terms on which Germany is seeking peace are that her deeds of murder and robbery, of which Czechoslovakia and Poland have successively been made the victims, should be condoned. As Germany’s partner in her latest act of international brigandage—a partner, incidentally, who has laid hands on a major share of the loot—Russia, through M. Molotov, now seconds her partner’s demand for immunity in crime. This may be honour among thieves. It is not on any better ground entitled to serious attention.

The Soviet is posing as the liberator of the people of Western Poland—the White Russians and Ukrainians. If it were sincere in that profession, the Soviet in the first instance would not have invaded Poland and beaten down resistance bv force of arms.

It is possible Io agree unreservedly with M. Molotov that a strong Germany is necessary to European peace. Undoubtedly, 100, it is desirable that Germany should live in peace with Russia and with all other nations. What the Soviet is now doing, however, under the leadership of M. Stalin and M. Molotov, is to weaken and undermine Germany by helping to uphold the rule in that country of a demoralising and degraded tyranny.

As might have been expected, the Russian Prime Minister passed lightly and hastily over the character of the Nazi dictatorship, observing that.: “Hitlerism may be accepted or rejected, but not. through force.’’ The plain truth is that, in the present working alliance of Hitlerism and Bolshevism both parties stand condemned as thoroughly unprincipled, and as denying and discarding in ac/ion their own past professions.

In. the extent to which it amounts to anything more than a lust for power in minds diseased, the Nazi creed treats human beings as so much material to be used in building up and exalting the totalitarian State—a naked expression of brute force. The Communist creed ostensibly puts the welfare of human beings in the first place. Its exponents have claimed that their practice and ideals arc more democratic, than those of the democracies and represent the true antithesis to Nazi and Fascist tyranny.

Now that the Soviet and the Nazis have, joined hands, their respective ideological professions and pretensions have alike gone by the board. As Mr William Henry Chamberlin wrote recently in the “Christian Science Monitor,” the Russo-German pact

demonstrates more clearly than any amount of theoretical argument two facts about Germany and the Soviet Union. The first is the absence of any form of sincere “ideology” in either form of dictatorship. How often German Nazis have denounced the Bolsheviki, how often Soviet Communists have depicted Nazis as the supreme enemy with whom no compromise is possible. Terror and propaganda, it is to be assumed, must have destroyed the capacity for independent thought in both countries. The second is the approach of each country to the social, economic and psychological forms of the other. ...

'Whether the two countries are in fact closely linked, and whether the Soviet-Nazi pact is likely to endure any lasting strain, may be doubted. But it is demonstrated past all doubting that the present rulers of Germany and Russia have entered into an unholy alliance in which principles are ignored and everything else is subordinated to the enlargement of their own power and self-importance.

Accompanied by so much that is insincere, even passages in M. Molotov’s speech which otherwise might have been regarded as holding some promise must be regarded with serious doubt. His denial that Finnish independence is threatened and his statement that Russia does not want, the Aalaud Islands are in themselves, for ■example, to be welcomed, but they are weakened, if not completely discredited, by his incidental intimation that Russia is demanding from Finland a pact similar to those she has made with the Baltic States and protectorates. If M. Molotov considers, as his words imply, that the terms Russia has imposed on the Baltic States are reconcilable with the continued independence of those countries, his assurances in regard to Finland palpably are worthless.

As a. whole, the speech of the Russian Prime Minister evidently is one that will rot make for the establishment of settled peace and' order in Europe. Probably the greatest danger in sight, today is that Germany, as Russia’s pawn, may be reduced to a condition of fatal demoralisation.