Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, 1941. A STATE OF SIEGE.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 March 1941, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, 1941. A STATE OF SIEGE.

r JpODAY civilisation is in a state of siege everywhere outside of the American continent, and it may not be long before the latter will have lo face the menace of Hitlerism. In some countries it is already reduced to something like an underground existence; yet it possesses more tenacity than one might liave believed possible. Nothing is more striking or more encouraging’ in the private letters received in New Zealand from our soldiers in England or from residents there, than the evident determination to carry on normal social and intellectual enterprises without regard for the torrent of destruction from the air. We in New Zealand are full of the spirit of the people of England, and we will, if the crisis ever occurs, emulate their example. If civilisation has been literally driven underground to the bomb shelters, in England, and yet continues to flourish, it has been driven underground in another sense in the lands o! violent dictatorship. Yet here, too, the plant ol civilisation has been more tenacious than one might believe from appearances. In Soviet Russia there is an absence of public protests against acts of inhumanity sponsored by the government, t his is equally true in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Ihe explanation, of course, is not that such protests are not voiced in sopie form, but that control of the printed and public spoken word is so complete and inclusive that any attempt at remonstrance is stifled.* One must live in these countries to realise that the impression of solidarity behind the government in whatever it does may prevail to some extent but is by no means universal. It is bitter sometimes to make comparisons with a not distant past and to recall that in 10*28 there was not a sentence of capital punishment in Germany. But what man has once achieved, man may again achieve. One must hope and believe that civilisation will prove sufficiently vital to withstand even its present ordeal.

Germany will yet learn in this war that civilisation refuses to be crushed and that in those countries occupied by the Him today there will arise forces, once the tide of fortune flows against the Germans, which, in the name of civilisation, will sweep the enemy from within their borders. That day of reckoning will surely come, and as is the case in Abyssinia today the enemy will realise that civilisation and democracy will prevail again to the niter extinction of the dark forces of Nazism and Fascism.

The British Empire has shown the world what democracy is capable of doing when it has its back to the wall. Britain is fighting for civilisation and the right of the peoples of the earth to live their own lives unfettered and free from the dark shadow of evil as represented by Hitler and his linns. Britain is demonstrating to the world that civilisation will refuse to be crushed when the principles fought for are just and right. On Britain has fallen the duty of protecting civilisation and that trust she will carry out to a successful encl, aided by all the power of her mighty Dominions.