WAR FOR FREEDOM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 October 1940, Page 5

WAR FOR FREEDOM

MR BEVIN ON BRITISH UNITY MIND OF PRUSSIAN SET ON PLUNDER. AND DOMINATION OF OTHER RACES. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY. October 26. The Minister of Labour,Mr Bevin, speaking in Bristol, confessed that he had never dreamed of being a member of a Government, ‘‘specially one headed by such a doughty foe but good companion as the present Prime Minister.” Mr Bevin said he would have been content to devote his life and energy to building up a great trade union movement, and he would not have left that work but for the fact that he recognised that the growth of the forces of Nazism and aggression, if successful, would claim every great progressive democratic movement in the world. It was significant that Hitler and Mussolini had killed the trade union movement in their own countries and prevented any contact between their workpeople and workers of the outside world. British workers had arrived after long years of effort at a state of spiritual development not able to be understood by the Prussian mind. “We have emerged from a dictatorship,” he continued, “for what does dictatorship mean but State serfdom in one form or Another. If we now accepted the Nazi philosophy we should be going back to an age from which the whole Commonwealth has happily emerged.” The new European order envisaged by the Nazis was one in which the Germans would be the superior race while the remainder, even the Italians (though they were Germany’s allies) would be their labourers. The organisation of the individual into a robot and the doctrine of force to be used to subdue the world had been a Prussian ideal for many years, but. Britain, for more than 100 years, had taken the view that the road to the highest achievements of civilisation and human attainment lay in the expansion of freedom, looking at Europe as an entity. Had there been no Hitler or Goering, the Germans would have invented an automaton to raise the spirit of aggression with the object of achieving their end by war and plunder. “Indeed, I am particularly interested in a speech by Goebbels as far back as 1929 when he developed the theory of the necessity for fighting Communism and how they must organise Germany to fight Russia,” Mr Bevin continued. “So, whether it is a matter of using the west or Russia in the east, the fact is that the mind of the Prussian is set on rape, plunder and dominating other races.

“Europe and the world can never know peace till Germany has learnt finally that her philosophy of gangsterism cannot succeed. The whole burden of combating this philosophy and fighting for preservation of the soul of mankind has fallen ,on the British people alone. And when I say a people I mean a united people.” Speaking of reconstruction when victory had been won, Mr Bevin said it must be secured that Britain did not return to the horrors of unemployment and that every slum and all miseries and poverty be relegated to the limbo of the past. “The molten metal is flowing. It has to be shaped. It will fall on statesmen to design that shape and, in designing it, we shall not allow passion or prejudice to influence us. Neither shall we act with weakness. We shall be conscious of the enormous mass of responsibility which rests in our hands and we shall keep before us the objective of justice and better things for all, not for just a few.”