HOLDING OUR OWN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 November 1942, Page 3

HOLDING OUR OWN

BRITISH PRIME MINISTER’S DECLARATION ATTACKED BY MR WENDELL WILLKIE. ADVOCACY OF ECONOMIC INTERNATIONALISM. NEW YORK, November 17. Sharply critisising Mr Churchill’s recent declaration that the British Empire would hold its own. Mr Wendell Willkie, addressing the New York “Herald-Tribune” forum urged that the United Nations should immediately develop a plan to make the materials of self-development available to all nations after the war. Mr Willkie said this could not be accomplished by mere declarations of leaders as in the Atlantic Charter, when one of the two principals thereto in the last few days seemingly defended the old imperialistic order and declared to a shocked world “We mean to hold our own.” Mr Willkie said: “Unless the people in the United States, Britain. Russia, China and all the other United Nations agree on their purposes, the idealistic expressions of hope, as embodied in the Atlantic Charter, will live merely to mock us as did President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The Four Freedoms won’t be accomplished by declarations of those momentarily in power. They’ll become real only if the peoples of the world forge them into actuality. Political internationalism won’t accomplish them. Real freedom must rest on economic internationalism.” Mr Willkie continued: “Our most immediate common need is, of course, a united military plan arrived at by a strategy board representative not only of Great Britain and America, but representing likewise our other Allies. Even such obviously essential co-oper-ation has not yet been brought about. “We cannot fight this war in silence. Whatever our experts say, it is the utmost folly —just short of suicide — to say that citizens should hold their tongues because if we fight in silence those same experts will in the end, even winning the war, win nothing I but blood and ashes.” !