TALKS ON RUSSIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 797, 29 October 1954, Page 5

TALKS ON RUSSIA

Sir,-May I reply briefly to my various critics? Mr, Malton Murray’s long quotation from Lord Acton was a damp squib, because I regard the great historian’s Liberal philosophy as erroneous -a canonisation of his 19th Century prejudices. In reply to Mr. Novak, I need only say that I was unaware of Mr. Bertram’s talks on Czechoslovakia. Mr, Bell makes the weird accusation that I do not favour discussion, when the point of my criticiym was that the NZBS was allowing only one side of the story to be heard. Mr, Collins denies that he was a sympathetic traveller in Russia and in the next breath argues that we should no more judge Soviet life on its slave labour camps than we judge New Zealand on its juvenile delinguency, as if there were not a world of difference between *the two phenomena. "It is good," Mr. Collins declares, "that the NZBS looks for understanding of peoples and situations," doubtless implying that his talks contributed to this understanding. This I deny. Mr. Collins does not know Russian and his itinerary was very circumscribed. So his report on Russia was only too reminiscent of the blind man’s report on the elephant. However honestly Mr. Collins may have reported what he saw and heard, he did not see much, and what he heard was mostly propaganda, like the statement: "Thare is no nersecition of the church today." His diagnosis of our spiritual ills is substantially correct, but this does not warrant the conclusion that "Communism is not our enemv."’. For Communism will, aggravate those ills and make their cure far more difficult than it is at present.

G.H.

D.

(Palmerston North).