HITLER’S EUROPE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 October 1940, Page 6

HITLER’S EUROPE

WARNING TO AMERICAN NATIONS TREATMENT DEPENDENT ON BEHAVIOUR. FUEHRER’S AIM A SHADOW. It is significant that Germany is now warning the American nations, in the columns of one of Ribbentrop’s organs, that the treatment they will receive from Europe, when Europe is organised by Germany, will depend on their behaviour, states a writer in the “Manchester Guardian." Already Hitler thinks he can speak for Europe. His confidence comes partly from his career of success, partly from the assurance that a man acquires when he has definite plans ,in his mind. This has been the great, advantage that the dictator States enjoyed in their struggle with the democracies. Of course, Hitler had a much simpler conception of unity than his rivals, and to this extent his task was easier. He determined to give Europe unity by the imposition of the will and the power of one State; the democracies were aiming at giving her unity by collaboration. He laid all his plans for establishing German rule; they were half-hearted and easily diverted to other purposes. Today Hitler is naturally proud and confident.. He is spreading his power by a combination of cruelty and subtlety, East and West. If France becomes his satellite there will not be a single strong or leading State on the Continent left outside his system. BENEATH THE SURFACE. The strength of his system may well be greater on the surface than in substance, for it is one thing to overcome i peoples by force and cunning, another to compel them to live under the conditions imposed upon them. Few of those who admired or dreaded the preponderance of the great reactionary forces throughout Europe in the twenties of last century could have foreseen the successful revolts that began with the Greek war of independence. Our task in this struggle is not merely that of defeating Hitler, of wearing down and exhausting his power, if swifter methods prove impossible. It is that of giving Europe a different scheme of unity. An American writer has pointed out that the thirteen colonies who managed to create a Federal Union in the eighteenth century had a common interest and a common task in the development of a great uncultivated continent. Europe today has a common interest and a common task in raising the whole level of life and culture; in attacking poverty, sickness and malI nutrition. I REVOLUTIONARY TASK. This involves a revolution which will destroy privilege in forms in which the French Revolution left it untouched. In the nineteenth century the Europe of industry and finance was living on her privileges. The commercial and industrial revolutions had put at her disposal the resources of most of the world outside Europe. It was believed that the mere development of her industrial power guaranteed progress and the raising of the general standard of life. The harsh selfishness of her treatment of the populations of Asia and Africa was mitigated by the efforts of missionaries and humane sentiment; the crude selfishness of the behaviour of European States to each other was mitigated by Free Trade. But fundamentally the system rested on exploited advantages. At the end of the war this general view of efficiency and progress was still in fashion, and it governed and limited all our efforts at collaboration. The world was treated as if it were merely suffering from the shock of the war, whereas it was still suffering from the shock of the Industrial Revolution. It was a world sick with the evils of the war, but sick also with old injustice and distress. When the dictators speak of ihe pluto-democracies their words have a sting, for the silent rule of capital was combined with the instincts of democracy. NEW WORLD IDEAS. Canning, faced with the reactionary triumph in Europe, made his famous defiant speech about calling in the New World to redress the balance of the Old. Something like this has happened today. The first frontal attack on this nineteenth-century system of privilege came from the New World, from the delegates of Australia and New Zealand to the League of Nations Assembly. In 1935 Mr Bruce, the former Prime Minister of Australia, persuaded the Assembly to inquire into nutrition in relation to health, agriculture and economic policy. Two years later, armed with the results, he convinced the Assembly that our economic calamities were due to our failure to adapt our economic policies and our distributive systems to the conditions created by scientific aitd technical progress. These ideas will come into play as soon as the war is over. The policy initiated by the Australian delegates implies the rejection of the nineteenth-century basis. It starts from the needs of man. It aims directly at breaking down the gross in-

equalities on which the old economic system rests. It will, if it enlists enough enthusiasm and intelligence, transform the relations of Europe to the rest of the world, of the powerful populations to the weak, of the rich classes to the poor. The prospects of this revolution are immensely improved by a change of Government and the rule of men with courage and democracy in their blood. For the moment the hour for rebuilding the life of Europe by constructive schemes that preserve liberty may seem distant, and it may be that our first contribution will be by drastic reform in these Islands and within the British Empire. On the success of this revolution depends the hope of Europe as a civilised society.