United Nations
HE purpose of the celebrations last Saturday was to bring the united nations closer together. It was in no sense at all to make them one nation. Union has not been even a remote object of the war in London and New York, and if those who speak the same tongue do not yet want to coalesce it is moonshine to talk of fusion anywhere else. Union in that sense is nonsense. Why then did we wave flags and give ourselves the illusion of unity? Not because we are children and love playing games, but because there was reality behind the illusion. No group of nations since the world began ever achieved absolute unity; nor, for that matter, did any group of individuals. Nations cannot, and should not, shed all the qualities that first made nations of them. That would not be progress but retrogression. They can however come together for mutual protection, and that raises problems of moral as well as of material. It is not sufficient to join armies and make a common pool of munitions. The men who march and the men and women who keep them supplied must feel that they fight in the same cause. Nor are they the friends of one group or the other who make that cause other than the thing it is. Britain, for example, is not fighting for Communism any more than Russia is fighting for Capitalism. China is not fighting for a white Australia any more than Australia and New Zealand are fighting for a New Life movement in Chungking. All the Allies without exception are fighting in defence of the things that they themselves most value, and to protect these they must destroy the same enemy. Therefore they fight together, taking the same risks and sharing the same hardships, but only fools think that victory will find them speaking the same language and wearing the same clothes. They remain united but themselves, and we celebrate their unity, not to beat it into uniformity, but to make it more vital and real. They have all, from the outset, been free partners. No member has_ coerced another or been itself coerced. It is an advance and not a drive, and it is natural and necessary that we should cheer one another on.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 156, 19 June 1942, Page 4
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384United Nations New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 156, 19 June 1942, Page 4
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