HITLERISM DEFINED

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21190, 13 August 1940, Page 6

HITLERISM DEFINED

STATEMENT BY BISHOP FIGHT FOR FREEDOM United Press Assn.—Elec. Tel. Copyright) LONDON, Aug. 11 Broadcasting over one of the United States radio systems, the Bishop of London, Dr. G. F. Fisher, said British determination to defeat Hitlerism was inspired by faith which went deeper than belief in human liberty. “As we have seen one country after another deprived by Hitler of justice, mercy, free speech, conscience, and free Christian living, we have seen more clearly their true value,” he said. “ When Hitler demands living room he means, as his acts declare, that Germany shall be managing director of a European mortuary, in which God’s law and man’s liberty are dead. We are fighting for life—and the world’s life as well as our own.” Dr. Fisher defined Hitlerism as a manifestation of all moral malaise of the pre-war world—its loss of direction and loss of soul, its unmeant but too little regarded insults to the dignity of man. Recovery of Hope “ It is not enough to defeat Hitler,’’ he said. “He is the outcome of a world that had lost the strong impulse of hope and aspiration. There must be a recovery of creative hope in a world order which cannot produce Hitlers large or small, which sublimates those elements of our prewar civilisation which were Hitlerproducing and hopeless, and which sets free all the good elements of that pre-war order and carries them to fulfilment.”

Attributing the failure after the last war to make a success of the great experiment of organising peace to the fact that the League of Nations idea was accepted more as a way of escape than as a creative fact, Dr. Fisher said that not only must Nazism be defeated, it must be discredited and with it all that gave birth to it.

“ Nations must no longer believe in power politics and unfettered selfinterest, still less in propaganda and mass hysteria as instruments of government,” he added. “ General opinion must no longer believe in any system which denies the true worth and brotherhood of man or which subjects him as a slave and victim to any form of exploitation or to the impersonal domination of any industrial, economic or bureaucratic

machinery.”