POLITICAL REGENERATION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 April 1941, Page 3

POLITICAL REGENERATION

DEMANDS OF DEMOCRACY. In July, while the free nations were still stunned by the fall of France, people believed, as they had done after the World War, that peace and security might be attained by some form of political reorganisation, writes ‘'Argus” in the "Christian Science Monitor.” Today there is an increasing feeling that democracy needs more than reorganisation. It needs a thorough regeneration. However lawless and aggressive the Germans may be, Europe, it is felt, could not have crumbled as it has done but for some inherent weakness in the democracies themselves. Hitler may be brutal and contemptuous of the decencies of civilisation, but that does not alter the fact that his system maintains a powerful and vitalising hold over the German: people, while the democratic peoples had sunk into a state of apathy and distaste for exertion that left them an easy mark for the outlaw. Can political reorganisation then—by way of federal union, League of Nations or otherwise—be considered sufficient? A union of feckless democracies trying to control a violent, dynamic fascist community might merely repeat the past sad experience. The cry is being raised therefore for the regeneration of democracy. It is being echoed from both sides of the Atlantic by business, professional and labour circles almost regardless of political creed. One British philosopher writer who has penetrated deeply into the need for regeneration, Mr Christopher Dawson, has come to the conclusion that the Nazi conception of an all-powerful state, uniting in itself the political, religious and cultural aspects of the national life, has supplied something that the people yearned for. It is, he thinks, responsible for the almost fanatical zest that has been at their leaders’'command. The democratic governments, being purely secular and divorced from the religious needs of the people, tend to lack elements of appeal to the popular imagination, and this lack is not made good by the abundant individual freedom they allow.