"MEN AND WOMEN OF BRITAIN"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 108, 18 July 1941, Page 3

"MEN AND WOMEN OF BRITAIN"

Dorothy Thompson Speaks Again (Condensed from a Recent Broadcast)

EN and women of Great Britain,-You have asked me many times to speak to you again from America since first I spoke last July as a private citizen, but I have hesitated to do so until it was more certain what the policy of the American Government would be. Now, after the President’s speech last month, the sinking of the Robin Moor by a Nazi pirate submarine, the closing of the German and Italian Consulates, and the President’s message to Congress last Friday, I feel freer to speak. I find, too, that there is an occasion for speaking, for it is almost exactly a year since France collapsed, leaving Great Britain absolutely alone. Your Great Leader When I think how your great leader, Winston Churchill, must have felt when France collapsed a year ago, I wonder at the people who could produce a man who, under such circumstances, resolved, nevertheless, to go on, because he knew that not to go on would mean with absolute certainty the end of Britain as a great nation, the end of everything that Britain had ever stood for.... You, the people of Britain, have gone through a terrible year and the end is not in sight, but, still, when we strike the balance one year after the fall of France, the picture is very gratifying. And Now Russia I wrote this broadcast yesterday, away up in the country, and I arrived in New York this morning after a night on the train to read that the last appeaser has found out finally what appeasement amounts to. All along the line, "Hitler," we read, "has declared war on the Soviet Union," till really one begins to wonder what Hitler’s propaganda will be next. . . « The most significant thing in this latest move is Hitler’s recognition that he cannot beat the West unless he is sure of Russia. I am sure I don’t know what the German people are thinking this morning. They hailed the Russian pact as their salvation. Nothing Hitler pulled out of a bag was more popular with them than that. Now they find they must die fighting Russia as they died in the Balkans. And, meanwhile, the political situation in Europe is dreadful. Whatever their governments may desire, or their "stooge" governments, the peoples of

Europe hate Hitler with an overwhelming hatred, from one end of it to the other He has raped those that were neutrals and plundered all of them, and there is this about plunder, you can only do it once. Someone once said that you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them, and Hitler has to sit on them and produce under them, and there’s not a Pole in Poland or out of it that will not hate Hitler as long as there’s breath in his body. ... From the tip of Norway to Gibraltar masses of the people pray for a British victory and for the fall of the conqueror’s Empire whose rise has meant their degradation. Over here we complain because things have been so slow, we are most of us completely dissatisfied with the national efforts, but when I compare the situation now with a year ago I must say that the United States has accomplished a miracle, and has accomplished in a year what it took Hitler six years to do. "We Were The Shylocks" The Nazis have never been able to understand the English-speaking people. They believed Britain would not fight, but could be bought off through trade opportunities, hung like a carrot under a donkey’s nose, and they believed that the United States was a nation of moneygrabbers who would not deliver a scrap of anything unless assured of payment in gold. We were the Shylocks; the gold worshippers of the world. But Hitler must have realised that he had gone very wrong in his estimate when the United States decided to give its resources to Britain, to lend them, to lease them, and to leave money entirely out of the question. Now in this war the advantage lies with resources and with mechanics, with technical developments in industrial production. America has by far the greatest industrial plant on earth. She has more resources near at hand than any other country. Her ocean position makes it possible for her to reach all other raw material sources that are accessible by sea, and nearly every single war instrument that the Germans are using is of American invention. And there are 130,000,000 -, and they are all members of one nation. Democracy’s Arsenal President Roosevelt has said that we will make this country an arsenal for democracy. He said that a year ago, nearly a year ago, and he meant it, and we've done it. It is an arsenal to-day. And we know that you cannot industrialise a nation along mass production lines overnight. Germany couldn’t do it, Russia couldn’t do it. We started modern mass production years ahead of anyone else and we know the technique. German uction and Japanese will do without erican machine tools. There will be no more machine tools from America for the Nazis, and what we are building is reaching you, and it will reach eo A have the President’s word for it. eee Pp Something else is happening over here. We are giving a good deal of seri-

ous thought to a kind of world we are going to make altogether when this war is over. We've done a lot of thinking about it, some of us. We know that we have done many things that we should not have done, and left undone much that we should have done. A great many of us think that we have put too much trust in money in the last 25 years, and now that we are all discovering how very much we love our free institutions, and our democratic ways, how dear to us is the civilisation where you cannot be pushed around by storm-troopers, and how perfectly awful it would be to be pushed around by somebody else’s stormtroopers; now that we are seeing this clearly we begin to wonder what we were doing with all our time and our brains and our emotions in the interest of socalled peace. For one thing we’ve made up our minds that when this fighting is over there’s got to be a new world, a new world for all of us. We remember what Theodore Roosevelt said: "This isn’t going to be a good country or a good world for anybody unless it is a good country and a good world for everybody." And we remember what Lincoln said: "Let us so cultivate the natural world without and the moral world within that we may find freedom in the brotherhood of life." The brotherhood of life seems to us a marvellous idea. We see such a brotherhood arising among English-speaking people. You have our affection, our complete collaboration, our undying friendship, and we are hoping that the close friendship springing up between ourselves and all parts of the Englishspeaking world will extend to many, many other people not of our speech, and show that federation, not domination, is the way with the future. "We've Been Thinking " And we've been thinking of all the empty spaces on the globe that have been left undeveloped and uncolonised, partly because no private persons and perhaps no one nation could figure out how to make money out of trading with parts in the middle of vast areas of malaria and yellow fever. And we wonder why such things must be left to private initiative when so many millions of people are crowded into slums, and why such developments should be the cost of any one nation which happens to have sovereignty over these areas, and we look ahead to a great collective activity for peace. We've been thinking of certain commodities, of the fact that people burn fuel and waste oil and metals in one part of the world and go without in another, and we are determined that;this shall not happen any more when this war is over. : We will put nationalism in its proper place by recognising that nations exist in justifying themselves in services to their own people and to humanity at large, and in that new world that you are fighting for and we are producing and atming to make, there will be the new Britain, that your sufferings and your valour have assured you,