Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 1941. LEGIONS WHO WAIT AND HOPE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 March 1941, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 1941. LEGIONS WHO WAIT AND HOPE

TRUTHS of commanding importance were brought out by the new American Ambassador to Britain (Mr J. G. Winant) when he declared, in his speech at a. Pilgrim Society luncheon in London, that on every continent and in every country, wherever there were men and women who valued freedom, Britain had friends and allies. Even today throughout Europe (Mr Winant said) there were legions who yearned for Britain's victory, which means freedom for them as well. The great mass of common men the world over were not deceived by the Nazis’ talk of a new order. They realised that there was no order or security in tyranny. They wanted what the British people wanted. They wanted what the Amei’ican people wanted. They wanted a friendly, civilised world of free peoples. / These are established and demonstrable truths. From all the countries in enemy occupation, including those in which Nazi savagery is doing its worst, news escapes from time to time which shows that the spirit of freedom is not dead in these unhappy lands. The people submit as they must to brute force, but are awaiting the hour of liberation and, in many instances, the hour in which they will, be able to make their own contribution to that liberation. It is, indeed, self-evident that the spirit of freedom is not dead even in the Reich itself. Ini their own country, as in those it has barbarously victimised, the Nazis have achieved only a conquest of brute force, embodying no element of moral ascendancy. If it were otherwise there would be no need lor the Gestapo, that conglomeration of vicious criminality and misguided youth, headed by the infamous Himmler, which holds Ih€ German people helpless bj r methods of espionage and terrorism. For the moment, the Gestapo is a potent weapon in Hitler’s hand. But it is also a standing admission of the weakness of Nazi gangsterdom—a confession that it dare not invite unfettered, and spontaneous support, or allow even the people of Germany to speak their minds, but must, while it can, use an enslaved Germany as an instrument for the enslavement of other nations. Where the fate and outcome of the war are in question, too much dependence of course must not be placed upon the truths proclaimed by Air Winant that legions of people throughout Europe are longing for Britain’s victory and that the great mass of common men the world over are not deceived by the Nazis’ talk of a new order. In Poland, Czechoslovakia and France, in the Scandinavian and Low Countries and elsewhere, scores of millions of people are looking eagerly and anxiously to the day of liberation. Even in Germany itself, many millions are longing for release from the Nazi yoke. It remains a condition. of the unshackling of this vast mass of potential force, however, that the military power of Nazism should be smashed.

This most certainly does not mean that, the factor of opposition and. deadly enmity to Nazism in countries now subjugated is of negligible importance. It is true that Frenchmen, for example, whose parting cry to British troops in the days immediately preceding the fall of their country was “Save France!” cannot meantime in any full or effective measure strike at their triumphant and embattled enemy. It would be madness on the part of disarmed and oppressed peoples to attempt to rise against the occupying armies. Nevertheless the fact that Nazism is disowned and hated by the rank and file masses even in its own land, and most certainly in the hinds it has murderously invaded and looted is, as has been said, of commanding importance.

This fact plainly means that the Nazis at home and abroad are standing, as it were, on a vast quicksand, in which, sooner or later, they will be engulfed. The ultimate strength of Britain and of those who fight by her side or support, her—the last category now including the 130 million people of the United States of America—is in the almost universal and united determination of men and women that the foulness of Nazism shall be extirpated. Against that mighty aggregation of spiritual and material power the Nazis are able to place nothing else than the precarious domination of a criminal gang, which has imposed itself, like the diseased growth it is, on the European body politic, and maintains itself in power al home and abroad solely by brute force and without a. vestige of moral authority or purpose. The subjugated and oppressed peoples of Europe cannot, save in detail here and there, take the initiative' in attacking Nazism, but when this foul, tyranny begins to falter and fail under military defeat, its victims will iplay no small part in hastening and completing its downfall. The opportunity of the victims of oppression, if it does not come earlier, will come on the day when, aS Mr Winston Churchill said in his speech at the Pilgrim Society luncheon, “the British Empire and the United States will share together the solemn but splendid duties which are the crown of victory.”