MR SHAW’S INFERENCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 December 1941, Page 7

MR SHAW’S INFERENCE

’HITLER’S WAR CAMPAIGN. . I do not think Hitler’s figures of prisoners and casualties in Russia justify us in calling him a liar. They are., not plausible enough for that, says Mr Bernard Shaw in a letter to the “New Statesman.” Liars always take the greatest pains to be plausible. The reasonable and civil conclusion is that the Fuehrer is kept as carefully misinformed as to his military position as Napoleon 111. was in 1870. He has evidently no suspicion of his danger in the East. It is not my business to enlighten him; but I will ask our Old School Ties to remember that, like Hitler, they made a howling mistake about Russia, and must be careful not to make the same mistake about India. From all this I cannot infer that the Fuehrer is quite so long-headed as the people who fear him most imagine. I must point out to them that instead of making the peoples he has subjected glad he came, as Julius Caesar did, he has made the enormous mistake of making no better use of his victories than to raise up implacable enemies behind him as well as before him. Fighting on two fronts, or on half a dozen, is all in the day’s work nowadays; but fighting on half a dozen backs is another matter.