TOPICS OF THE DAY

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20992, 20 December 1939, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY

Alternative to War “The aggrandisement of Germany, giving her first full sway over Central and Eastern Europe and then domination over the Western nations as well, would be far worse for civilisation than a protracted conflict. Liberty would become as dead in the whole heart of the Occident as it is in Berlin, Vienna and Prague today. Manufacture and trade, politics and government, letters and art would be inexorably compressed into the same iron mould. Writers and scientists would flee all Europe. Espionage, repression and torture would be in the saddle, and might long remain there. The spread of such a blight over Europe, a blight that was growing all too fast and waxing all too formidable, had to be arrested even at the cost of war; Even when the Nazi State has succeeded in producing or keeping an eminent thinker it has perverted him into irrationalism. The springs of thought and even the very springs of morality were being poisoned. A generation was arising which, like its own leader, regarded truth and honesty with contempt, and believed that any subterfuge, any lie, any crime that gained its end was justified.”—Professor Alir.n Nevins, of Columbia University in the New York Times.