Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, JUNE 16, 1941. THE WAY TO ENDURING PEACE.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 June 1941, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, JUNE 16, 1941. THE WAY TO ENDURING PEACE.

JT may be believed with all confidence I hat the meeting’ at St St James’s Palace in London on Thursday of the representatives of fifteen Allied countries —amongst them nine of the countries now enduring the brutal despotism ol the Nazis —will be remembered in days to come as an epoch-making event in the history of mankind. The meeting was one of true representatives of nations, bond and free, but all alike determined to establish their freedom on firm foundations when an end has been made of the foulness and desolation ol Nazi oppression. These representatives met, in Nr (’hiirchill’s words, to proclaim the high purpose a nd resolves of the lawfully constituted governments of Europe whose countries have been overrun and to cheer the hopes of free men and free peoples throughout the world. Taking' no narrow or limited standpoint, the conference representatives not only proclaimed their determination to continue the struggle against German or Italian oppression until victory is won, but declared that the only true basis of: an enduring peace is the willing co-operation of free peoples in the world, and that “it is their intention to work together, and with the other free peoples, both in war and peace, to this end.” At the most direct view, the unbroken resolution of the peoples that are free or are determined again to be tree is a weapon of power and a portent of doom for the Nazis and their jackal and Quisling accomplices. There is a wealth of testimony from all the invaded countries that, under the vilest excesses of ferocious repression the spirit of their people is unbroken and that, sorely as they are tried, these victims of fate are living for the day of their liberation and redemption. The polluting Nazi flood has spread far and wide over Europe, and may spread further yet. If this spread had to be regarded as a measure of real conquest, Hitler and his gang would be formidable indeed. But the truth is that there is in these conditions no element of lasting conquest. On the contrary, the truth is, as the British Prime Minister said, that:— In every country into which the Germans have taken their Nazi policy there has sprung up from the soil a hatred of the German name and a contempt for the Nazi creed which the passage of hundreds of years will not efface from the human memory. A stage no doubt will be reached at which the hatred and contempt of the oppressed peoples for their oppressors will facilitate appreciably the task of the democratic forces organised to overthrow and destroy Nazism. It is even more, however, as it bears on the outlook for the world after the war that the conference of last Thursday seems likely to take a great and noteworthy place in history. At no preceding international gathering has the vital need of co-opera-tion between nations “as the only true basis of enduring peace” been asserted so clearly and emphatically, and it may be believed that this is a beginning on which much of benefit to mankind will follow. On various grounds, some proposed schemes of international federation are rightly suspect. It has been argued plausibly that in the rigid form in which it has been proposed, this organisation would amount, to economic and political domination of smaller nations by one or more powerful nations, and that, an ostensibly voluntary federation might be able to maintain itself as a whole only by a forcible domination of the rest of the world. Objections of this kind and the genuine difficulties on which they rest will, not, be overcome easily, but, if the bitter tragedy of this war is not to have been endured in vain, nations that desire to live in peace must, achieve the measure of co-operation that will enable them to deal unitedly and in good time with the threat of any new abomination like Nazism. It inspires hope for the future that the vital need of cooperation between nations to safeguard their mutual .security is perceived now as clearly by reasonably enlightened minds in the most powerful of the democracies—the United States—as in the little European countries the Nazis have trampled under foot. There is no question here of vague and fanciful theory. It is recognised in the United States, for instance, that a Nazi dictatorship triumphant in Europe would have no great difficulty in mastering the vast. but. weakly-defended Latin republic of Brazil and so paving the way to the conquest of all. South America and decisively undermining the security of the whole Western Hemisphere. In its policy of aid to the Allied democracies, the United Stales is definitely defending its own security, and that security never can be maintained henceforth otherwise than on a basis of international co-operation. It is the great redeeming feature of the ghastly conflict in which free humanity is now fighting for life and more than life that illuminating light has at last, been cast, on the truth that “the only true basis of enduring' peace is the willing co-operation of free peoples.”