"BLACK RECORD."

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 113, 22 August 1941, Page 4

"BLACK RECORD."

Sir-One of the three correspondents in The Listener of August 8 who attacked " Audax" of Auckland for his criticism of Sir Robert Vansittart and his "Black Record," suggested that " Audax" left the book alone because he found its arguments too strong. This is pure bunkum. They are as easy to answer as Dr. Goebbels’s arguments that the Germans are a super-race: In fact, they are in essence the same. I wonder if your three correspondents realise that by supporting Sir Robert and his pamphlet they were supporting that very theory of racialism which Hitler and Goebbels and their crew embrace and which is so repugnant to all free and intelligent people. Sir Robert himself may deny any intention of expounding a theory, but ‘actually he has done just that. He seeks to prove that the Germans are by nature barbarous and inferior: the Nazis, on the other hand, seek to prove that the Germans are by nature superior to all other races, The conclusions are different, but the theory is the same, and the results equally absurd and obnoxious. If he had been content to deal only with the baleful influence of Prussia on Germany, Sir Robert could have made out a case of a sort-though even here it is well to remember that, while Bismarck waged three wars, Louis Napoleon waged four, and that France, not Germany, was regarded as the militaristic menace to Europe in the 17th century, and from the French Revolution up to 1870. But Sir Robert goes back to Tacitus in an attempt to show that Germans are predatory and bellicose because they are born that way, quite forgetting that we British came from exactly the same racial stock, and that the ancestral vices of the Germags must also be our ancestral vices, except that perhaps we added to our skare of original bellicosity by importing a ruling class of Normans! Sir Robert’s type of propaganda is, however, to be deplored most of all, because it plays right into Hitler’s hands by uniting the German people even, more strongly behind him. We may be sure that Sir Robert’s views have been widely circulated in the Reich, in order to make the Germans willing to die in the last ditch rather than surrender. Captain Liddell Hart made this clear when he pointed out last year that the Nazis are able to say to the German people, "If we disappear, the British will give you hell, and the Treaty of Versailles will be a feather-bed compared to a Treaty of Berlin drafted by Sir Robert Vansittart." Fortunately, Sir Robert has now retired from his official position, and I hope it will be found, when the full story is told, that he was encouraged to do so because his activities as a propagandist had proved embarrassing to the British Government and pre-

/ judicial to the democratic cause.-

AUDAX II

(Wellington).

Sir,-Seeing that the argument is slightly onesided, I would like to reply to those misguided individuals who have so far let their super-patriotism carry them away as to swallow Sir Robert Vansittart’s "Black Record," "rod, line and sinker." The text of E. A. W. Smith’s letter rather refutes his supposition that he and other "Black Record" supporters are (to quote him), "ordinary men of the world." The German Minister of Propaganda, a man whom, I presume; Paul Nicklinson and his colleagues do not love, uses the same type of propaganda as "Black Record." We are taught to despise this low form of strategy, and yet, when such a book is published, especially by such a type of man. as Sir Robert Vansittart, we find those who will swallow it without even the proverbial pinch of salt,

As for the suggestion that "Black Record" be used in our schools, I always understood that our nation was fighting for freedom. Nazi children may be brought up that way, perhaps. But in New Zealand I hope it shall never be. Surely those who wish to duplicate the Nazi methods must have some of the Nazi traits within them. Anonymity is poor audacity, as E.A.W. Smith says, and Smith is a pretty hard name to trace.

JOHN F.

JOHNSON

(Sumner).