Wairarapa Times-Age Tuesday, November 21, 1939. A RECKONING IMPENDING.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 November 1939, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age Tuesday, November 21, 1939. A RECKONING IMPENDING.

IT must be hoped that Mr Jan Masaryk is right in believing that there is not yet any great revolt against the i\az.i a regression in the Czech protectorate and that his countrymen in the main will bide their time. For the present, the demonstrations by Czech students which the Nazis have repressed with brutal ferocity are not even in the category M a lorlorn hope. As matters stand, the Czechs are a people disarmed and in the o-rij) of a formidable military power. It has been san! justly that an uprising in such circumstances is a tragic and pitiful thing, and there is the less reason why the Czechs should thus invite new horrors of Nazi terrorism since it is not in doubt that their time, as Mr Masaryk has affirmed, will come. Impressively as they hear witness to heroic patriotism that will not be repressed, the student demonstrations in Prague and elsewhere have provided the Nazis With an excuse lot engaging in a new orgy of butchery and wholesale arrest ol victims to be consigned to concentration camps. Hope, lor the Czechs and. for other oppressed peoples is not in anything they can meantime accomplish for themselves, but in the fighting power of the Allies and in the fact that world opinion is being mobilised more and more decisively in condemnation 01. Nazi gangsterdom. The Nazi Government, as Mr Winston Churchill declared the other day, cannot see one friendly eye in the whole world. Even the pact with Russia is a discreditable union, in which the Soviet obviously seeks its own aggrandisement and Germany is assigned a contemptible part; .1 here are signs of a widening cleavage in the Axis alliance which not long ago was declared to he indivisible, and throughout the world there is an increasing rejection of Nazism and all that it stands for. Though they arc unable for the moment to take effective action on their own behalf, the Czechs and other victims, of aggression are in virtue of their mere existence a force helping to weigh Germany down. Nazi rule in the so-called Czech protectorate and other subject territories can only be maintained by forces sufficient to repress any possible uprising. The need of reserving these forces is one of the penalties of unjust conquest and oppression and a penalty the effect of which, in Germany’s case, will be intensified, perhaps rapidly, as the war continues. Much as the overthrow of Hitlerism must depend on Ihe fighting power of the Allies, the weight ol world opinion that is being marshalled against, the present German Government,. its deeds and methods is very far from being of negligible importance. The force of this condemnation appears not only in the almost universal horror and disgust awakened by the ruthless terrorism the Nazis have practised in Poland. Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, but. in the strong feeling that has been awakened in the most peacefully inclined neutral countries. One of the latest indications of that feeling appears in comments in which a Norwegian paper denounced Germany’s ruthless warfare at sea as excluding the aggressor from the civilised community and added : —■ Such matters can only be resolved when the nation which thus raises its hand against all finds that every man s hand is against her. One cannot exceed the bounds of humanity even in war. It is more than sufficiently demonstrated that the whole .Nazi programme, in its attempt to enthrone brute force and ruthless savagery, is an abominable reversal of the aspirations of all civilised mankind and that the extirpation of Nazism is demanded, not only for the sake of its present victims, but in order that a deadly menace to humanity at large may be removed.