BRITAIN’S DETERMINATION

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21189, 12 August 1940, Page 7

BRITAIN’S DETERMINATION

READY FOR ANY ATTACK DELIVERANCE OF OPPRESSED PEOPLES SURE “PUT AN END TO THIS EVIL HORROR” (Official Wireless) (Received Aug. 12, 11.30 a.m.) RUGBY, August 11 Speaking at Blackpool this afternoon Mr L. C. Amery, Secretary of State for India, said: “ The close of the first year of \var finds this country left to face the coming storm alone. We are prepared and ready for whatever form the attack may take, for whatever new devilry the enemy may have prepared. The trial of our endurance will be stern. “ One thing I do know. If Hitler thinks our spirit can be broken by a mass attack from the air upon our industries and shipping he will find himself grievously mistaken. He has got to achieve far more than that to win the war. He has got to come over and take us and break us, as he has taken and broken others. “Let him try. If he does he will fail disastrously, and his failure will bring the end nearer than anything else could possibly do. But if the stakes are too high for him and he gives up the attempt, that, too, will be failure. All the world will know that the tide has turned, and that sooner or later his fate is sealed. “ He may hope as a second best plan, if he cannot destroy the British Empire here at its heart, to lop off some of its limbs. He may send his bombers and air-borne troops to stiffen his half-hearted Italian allies in the attack on Egypt and our whole position in the Middle East and Africa. If he does his men will meet not only a warm climate but a warm reception.

“ In any case nothing he can do in that quarter can protect the health of Germany from our growing strength in the air. Thanks to the superior skill and daring of our airmen, thanks also to the superiority of the men who designed and made their machines, we already, with greatly inferior numbers, have inflicted far more damage upon the enemy than we have suffered.

“More and more, week by week, as our resources in the air multiply, we shall seek the enemy out in his own home and destroy one by one the factories upon which his war power is based, the transport by means of which his armies and the life of his people is sustained.

“Meanwhile no continental conquests of his can shake off the stranglehold of our blockade. He may extend his empire for the time being, but more and more her conquered and oppressed peoples will look to us to deliver them alike from political enslavement and from dire material need.

“ Then, masters of the sea and the air, with our armies equipped and trained for a task no longer of defence, but of deliverance, we shall—by what approach, with what allies, no one can yet say—seek out the dragon in its lair and put an end to. this evil horror which today obsesses the world.” t

Cruel and Brutal Purpose Mr Amery proceeded to justify thisdescription of Hitlerism. “ Behind this terrible German engine of destruction, behind these armoured divisions, millions of infantry, these air squadrons and lurking submarines, whose efficiency we cannot but admit,” he said, “their lies a purpose as cruel and brutal as it is senseless—the mere lust of power as a means for yet further aggression. 44 The Nazi creed which inspires that purpose exalts cruelty and brutality and despises mercy, tolerance, fair dealing and justice. It denies all rights to the individual as against a handful of gangsters who claim to represent an omnipotent State.

44 It has often been said that the victory of Nazidom would mean the destruction of all the spiritual and moral heritage of Western civilisation. So far as Europe is concerned that is true, but ours is not the only civilisation. It is my privilege to serve in the British Government the of the Empire of India. The 350,000,000 people of India can claim a civilisation more ancient than ourfc. They belong to religions which differ from ours in many respects, but are at one with ours in their recognition of the spiritual value of the individual soul, their reverence for a moral law which knows no boundaries of race and applies alike to rulers and ruled. Nazism v. Islam 44 There is no common meeting ground between Nazism on the one side and on the other Islam, with its profoundly democratic sense of equality, with its emphasis on mercy and pity for the poor and weak, or Hinduism, with its concentration on the spiritual side of life, its rejection of violence. It is not only our, civilisation, and religion here in Europe, but all civilisation, all true religion, that is threatened by the barbaric forces of the spiritual even more than the material destruction whcih is embodied in Nazy Germany today.”