BRITISH EMPIRE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 January 1940, Page 4

BRITISH EMPIRE

CONTRASTS WITH NAZI RULE EMPHASISED BY LONDON “TIMES.” RALLYING OF THE KING’S SUBJECTS. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, January 13. “The Times” takes the arrival in France this week of the corps of Cypriot muleteers —the first colonial contingent to reach France—as the text for editorial reflections upon the remarkable response of the Empire as a whole and tile colonial dependencies in particular in the hour of crisis, and upon the contrast between the principles of the Government forming the British colonial rule on the one hand and the Nazi claims to dominion over the “lower peoples” on the other. Remarking on the disappointment that this rallying of all his Majesty’s subjects in all parts of the globe has been to the Nazi prophecies of British imperial disintegration, “The Times” says:

“The picture which messages from all parts of the world show is not that which was painted by Dr Goebbels and his caricaturists of subject peoples forcibly held down and groaning to be free, but of proud and loyal citizens of the Empire striving almost passionately to give practical expression to their loyalty.”

The article goes on to exemplify the Nazis’ applications of their racial theories to subject peoples, including the “subjugated” peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. “Their proper function is to be factory coolies for the Germans,” it states. “The Czechs and Poles are being turned into hewers of wood and drawers of water for the sole benefit of their conquerors. The methods and outlook of Nazi Germany are totally incompatible with (lie tenets of Twentieth Century civilisation. ‘No doubt every colonising nation has been guilty of some measure of exploitation of backward races at some time in the past. But those days have been left behind by all except the Nazis, whose mind cannot see beyond the limits of conquest and the maintenance of the conquered .in a state of permanent inferiority. “The Nazi principle is to hold down, but the British is to lead up.”