CO-OPERATION IMPOSSIBLE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 November 1939, Page 7

CO-OPERATION IMPOSSIBLE

DEEP CLEAVAGE IN OUTLOOK. Nowadays, the most appalling fact which has to be recorded is not the criminal and wasteful piling up of armaments everywhere—mankind is sufficiently able and energetic, and the world is rich enough for us to scrap all this and restart along a better road —but rather that the differences in outlook between the totalitarian and the democratic countries are so great that co-operation seems almost impossible, writes Mr J. Emlyn Williams, American correspondent in Berlin. It is not that they are speaking different languages—some medium of interpretation could then be sought —but that using the same language, the identical words carry such different meanings when used by the opposite sides. Formerly, however much the European nations fell short of them in practice, there were ideals to which the whole continent aspired. Today, it appears that this identity of thought has been temporarily broken and that the necessary clay is not here to remould it. The political successes of the Hitler regime in the foreign sphere have naturally led many to accept success as the only standard of action and the dictum ■‘the end justifies the means" is frequently quoted today. The German voices which murmured some weeks ago about the annexation of BohemiaMoravia are now busy justifying it on grounds of efficiency. This divergence of outlook between Germany and the democracies has developed so far not simply because of the propagation of a new counter-doctrine, but also because the means adopted for excluding contacts with the democratic world have worked. The Ger“tain fo-eign exchange regulations .-> ; -r - ! n something more than —• ~- m VyA “r