NEWS FROM EAST AND WEST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 819, 7 April 1955, Page 5

NEWS FROM EAST AND WEST

Sir,-Your editorial about the need to broaden the flow of information in a divided world is very provocative. An effect of the cold war now being waged so hotly by politicians and journalists on our behalf (or in our despite) is the increasing contraction of the source of news and the field of unbiassed comment. Furthermore, if one had ever doubted the immense power of modern propaganda the proof would lie in the wonderful job that the — self-styled "organs of information" have done in conditioning so many of. the world’s people to the inevitability of war and the powerlessness of peoples to avert it so soon after the "never again" resolutions of ten wears ago. But not all newspapers in all countries share this unenviable record to which you have rightly called our attention. Just recently I have been eating my ‘breakfast with the Englishlanguage newspapers of India and Burma propped against the cruet-e.g., the Statesman, Times of India and Amritsar Bazaar Patrika (India), or the Nation and New Times of Burma. What a contrast’ with the narrow reportage we are used to here! What a contrast, for that matter, with the newspapers (or some of them) on the other side of the alleged curtain. For here is what one hardly knew existed-the stimulation of report-. ing from all over the world with no regard to curtains at all; and editorial comment that-treats the reader as adult, sane and capable of plucing his own evaluation upon the facts. . So this is the answer to your question as to what would happen if news from East and West were universally available. In the first place it is available. In the second it is being printed in at least one part of the world. Now significantly this happens to be just exactly that part which is not committed to either side in the wearisome and quite overplayed cold war between East and West. India and Burma, having won their independence the hard way. treasure it more than we who inherited it from our ancestors. Their leaders realise what ours do not: that there can

be only two outcomes to a continuance of the cold war, namely, (a) it gets hot and we are atomised, or (b) it stays cold and we quake and ‘tremble in our respective funk-holes until, fed permanently on intellectual pap like we are getting now, we and our unfortunate offspring revert to the mental and moral status of ants. The moral, then, is that the cold war must end. One way it can end is by the adherence of more and more ‘governments to that block of non-committed countries, led by India and Burma, which stand for a positive approach to the problems of living together in one world. Our own politicians and journalists, unfortunately, are busy rushing us off in the opposite direction, But this, on all contemporary evidence, is a blind alley, and we shall have to come round to a more rational way of thinking and behaving. When at last we do so, for want of any other sensible alternative, we shall find that the Indian and Burmese people, led by statesmen of some vision and instructed by a press with some sense of responsibility, have arrived there already.

H. W.

YOUREN

(Napier).