RETURN OF THE SCAPEGOAT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 723, 22 May 1953, Page 5

RETURN OF THE SCAPEGOAT

Sir,-IA reply to Mr. Barnard, I have only to point out that the release of the Soviet doctors confirms up to the hilt my statement that in the Soviet Union anti-Semitism is not tolerated. Those who attempted to raise it were removed from their high offices and now face criminal charges because, as.the Pravda editorial of April 6 put it, they tried "to kindle in Soviet society, welded together by moral and political unity, by the ideas of proletarian internationalism, national enmity which is profoundly alien to Socialist ideology." In the. socalled "Western democracies," on the other hand, the racists occupy the highest positions in Church and State and are received in quite respectable society. To Mr. Barnard colour bars do not exist in the British Empire, "save South Africa." Well, that is a large exception for the millions of blacks who unfortunately have to live there. But, in all fairness to the Afrikanders, it should be pointed out that, according to Mr. Basil Davidson, the restrictions on the natives in the British Dominion of Southern Rhodesia are more savage than in the Union. And what does Mr, Barnard make of Kenya, where already 400 natives have been shot-in the good old Gestapo phrase- "while trying to escape"? I am twitted with lack of knowledge of the relations between Maori and Pakeha. On the contrary, I see-after the most sordid armed robbery in_his-tory-a talented people stripped. of fheir lands and reduced to hewers of wood and

drawers of water. I see the Maori babies dying at three times the rate of the white ones. I see the Maori Affairs Department boasting, yes, boasting, that there are 48 Maori University students, overlooking that there are 11,000 white ones. I see the Maori people being offered only 100 of the 3000 state houses to be built. I see the most loyal section of our people being represented at the Coronation by one of the great white chiefs. It is a bit thick for Mr. Barnard to speculate where I stand. That has never been in doubt. Where he stands seems to be a matter of constant speculation in the daily press. Whether the Soviet Union should be exalted is beside the point. But as a state where men can walk the earth as brothers without distinction of colour, class, race or creed it might well- be

emulated.

J. W.

WINCHESTER

(Wellington).