A NEW SHAPE WILL BE GIVEN TO THE WORLD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 133, 9 January 1942, Page 8

A NEW SHAPE WILL BE GIVEN

TO THE WORLD

Says Professor Harold Laskhi in this recent talk in the BBC series,**Calling New Zealand"

HE treacherous infamy of Japan has brought the whole world into the area of conflict. It knocks now at the very gate of New Zealand. Your fate has become doubly linked with ours: in the tremendous drama of the Pacific Ocean, a new shape will be given to the contours of civilisation. It is now indeed total war, but because we can now look to the immense resources of the United States, we must be careful not to relax our vigilance. If we have a new ally, we have also a new enemy -powerful, relentless, well prepared. On any showing, it will take many months before Americans are really equipped in trained men, in arms, in munitions. Japan will never be so powerful as now, so that the next period is bound to be critical for us all. It. is going to exact more sacrifice, it will demand even more efficiency. None of us in Britain-no, none of you in New Zea-land-can hope to live his or her nor-

mal life. We have to adapt ourselves to the call for increased effort on an unprecedented scale. Why Labour Joined You will remember that the Churchill Government came into being for exactly ‘this purpose. The Labour Party did not enter it to secure Socialism; it entered it to see that no form of sacrifice was ruled out, no method of efficiency excluded, on party grounds, if it could be shown that they were necessary to victory-swift victory, complete victory, the kind of victory that enables us to feel that this time the foundations of enduring peace are unbreakably laid. That is why Parliament has just given new and immense powers over our lives to this Government; given them unanimously. It is not that we are satisfied that the Cabinet has not made mistakes. "Clearly it has. It is not that we do not think it cannot do better. Clearly it can. It. is not even that we think it has cut through the tangle of vested inter-

ests and red tape which still hamper full production. We are certain it has not. But when the last criticism is made against the Churchill Government, three things can be put to its credit. It has built among ‘the people an unbreakable will to victory. It has made the transition from those grim months from Dunkirk, when the Commonwealth stood alone, to the majestic combination of all the free peoples of the world in a way that has renovated the spiritual foundations of our age, and it has built bridges: from the old order to the new by the relations it is creating with the Soviet Union, which have in them a path to new hopes. For if we learn from this friendship the power to blend what is creative in each of our systems, we may hope to combine the driving energy of the old individualism with the massed power of collective effort. New Horizons That union would open new and immense horizons. We need those hori-

zons. The more fully the habits of our enemies are explored, the more clearly the nature of their purpose is revealed. They represent quite unmistakably the principles of the counter-revolution, Beneath the mask of modern technology, the features we can discern constitute above all a denial of everything for which the modern world has come to stand-national freedom, individual self respect, democratic government-and of the method by which these are fulfilled, international co-operation by consent and not by coercion. These, I think, are the ends we seek to realise, and each of them is deliberately and consciously rejected by our enemies. Not only do they reject them; their method of rejection refuses to rely upon the power of reason to persuade. It organises brute force to destroy. It lives by the fears it can evoke, the poison it can spread, the terror it can impose. Those over whom its authority extends cease to be men in any sense in which humanity has had (Continued on next page)

THE NEW WORLD (Continued from previous page) meaning in the two thousand years of our civilised tradition: the stab in the back, the treacherous conspiracy, the organised and calculated lie, the reading of right and wrong by the test only of success. These are the procedures upon which they have relied. No Choice But to Fight Do you wonder that men to whom the very notion of war is abhorrent have felt that in this struggle they have no alternative but to fight? Can you be surprised if, almost in a day, the whole American people awakens to the understanding ‘that no internal differences matter compared to the abyss which separates the things they value from the ends our enemies seek to establish? Is it not obvious that all the free peoples, we in Britain, you in New Zealand, the Russians, the Chinese, are united in a common cause for the defence of which there can be no sacrifice too great? There is much in our) British way of life that I seek to alter. There are things in our policy that I dislike. There are habits in this Government which seem to me to show lack of the audacity the hour requires, absence of the imaginative insight for which the problems call. Yet, when I put my criticisms against the paramount need, they seem to me to weigh nothing in the balance. There is a special reason why I feel this. Some of you in New Zealand who hear this talk know that I am a socialist, deeply concerned to help to alter, if I can, the economic and social foundations of Britain. I note that in the war there is no hindrance to that effort. My right to criticise the Government is unimpeded, my power to associate with my colleagues of the Labour Party to press for this change and that is unaffected. No doubt, the war has greatly altered my own personal way of life. I can honestly say that the restrictions which it has compelled the Government to impose all seem to me, by and large, reasonable restrictions. If I had a complaint to make, it would be that there is still too much power to do as one likes, that the power to secure ease remains greater for many of us than it ought to be. There are realms of conduct in which I think the Government has been too tender to existing interests, too careful to let what was normal before the war remain normal after it. I am not always sure that it has grasped at all fully the central truth, that totalitarian war is revolutionary in its impact. The Past is for Antiquarians Believe me, the world we knew on September 3rd, 1939, belongs now to the lumber room of history. Antiquarians. may investigate it, but statesmen cannot recall it into life. We are fighting the counter-revolution. We are seeking victory over men who want to take us back to an epoch when the very concepts of the rights of man were devoid of meaning. It is to establish those rights everywhere that we, and you, are fighting. Whether we know it or not, we are bringing a new society into. being. The last war was a stage in its travail. So was the Russian Revolution of 1917. So will be the universal tevolt of the subject peoples that will

begin the moment that we are in a position to strike a decisive blow at our enemies, We Make the Future Now, the establishment of rights means the recognition of duties. None of us can contract out of this war. We have all got to choose. We have even to understand that the refusal to choose is itself a choice. We cannot proceed at this time as though the future was no concern of ours. We make the future. Our Leaders-Mr. Churchill in Britain, Mr. Stalin in Russia, Mr. Roosevelt in the United States-draw their strength from our understanding of that future, our willingness to impose upon ourselves the discipline its evocation demands, What they require from us is what they give us-resolution, courage, imagination, audacity. These are the dynamics of freedom. But to exercise their authority they have to spring from within ourselves, to be part of the spontaneous contribution we make to the united effort.

It is the policy of giving to the common stock more than you knew you had it in you to give that is the source of democratic power. It is the ¢quality Pericles spoke of in the Funeral Speech at Athens, the quality Lincoln used in that majestic utterance at Gettysburg. You get its inner essence if you read the citations for bravery, whether of fighting men or civilians, in the London Gazette. The record of achievement by mostly ordinary people called beyond and above their normal habits by the supreme occasion. My point is that for all of us, all over the world, every day now is a supreme occasion. Every one of us by working harder, and thinking harder, can give to the common stock more than he knows he had it in him to give, and what he gives to the common stock he gives to himself, because its weight and power are the measure of his freedom. History Not a Straight Path Some of you may say that you need more assurance than you have that the

announced purposes are the real pure poses for which we fight this war. You see things that are wrong, you are aware of mistakes in policy, of defects in administration. I understand this outlook, but I remind you of two things it is vital to remember. History is not a straight path to an inevitable goal, and it is not in human kind either to avoid error or to attain perfection. We have to think of the price of defeat. It is only as we do all we personally can do to make that impossible that we can begin to think of the use of victory. There were some in Britain who thought that victory did not matter until the Soviet Union was attacked. They think differently now. There were many in the United States who insisted that this war was not their concern. The attack on Pearl Harbour brought them a sudden and tragic awakening. This is, as no war has ever been, a people’s war, Its purposes will be shaped, as its triumph will be assured, by the common man. His task is to prepare himself for the responsibilities it implies.