7—F r.V
ELLIOTT ELLIOTT
ELLIOTT ELLIOTT
, 0
OPTICIANS PICCADILLYA PIR1N R44E
OPTICIANS
John fllieR may,Ex-lgWW Bros: Sfudeal
Piccadilly Arcade Perth
Tel.
Tel. B7988
B7988
PERTH ,WEDNESDAY ,MARCH 14,
N0, 5,171.
PRICE THREEPENCE.
1948 .
SEVENTY-SECOND
Does Polish Tragedy Mean that One Tyranny May Succeed Another? 115 Millions in Central Europe are Puzzled FT Doubtful Com munists Substituted for Accepted Parties in Smaller Nations '
dh,trong Awn , toand the
saw
;
Folly of "Arms for All" Policy Lord CranUurne said recently: "if, after five years of war, there are - tt up dictatorships all over Europe , whether of the right or left, then we may have beaten flitter, but should in tact have lost the war. "R'o have, in short, to do two things: to defeat and disarm the Germans so that they cannot again threaten Hurope with a particular brand of tyr• :may, and to make sure that no other tyruuty uses the occasion of the Getma il defeat to instal itself in the place at wwhich the Germans had aimed." This admission, by the Government's spokesman in the House of Lords points to the great matter on which the Big Three have decided. Profoundly as everybody must regret that so large and open a rift is being allowed to ap pear between the Soviet and the West, no one should lose sight of the truth that the rift is entirely of the Soviet 's making. The Lublin Committee answers to all the catalogue of evil things against which Me Chamberlain declared in 1939, after every effort to think better of the Germans we were fighting. It is brute force and bad faith and oppression. It exists to liquidate the Polish llome Army, in all the country which the Red Army occupies, and through the N.K.•'.D. ( the Soviet political Pol ce ) . It is one of the horrihle tragedi ies of a war rich in tragedymen that who for five years have risked death at the hands of the Germans are only exchanging the perils of an underground life for the miseries of Sovi et concentration camps. The officers are weeded out as they were weeded out in 19:19, hec:ntsc as men of rduc•ntion, they are jurlgcd to he difficult to discipline and utilise, The common soldiers are forced to serve tinder General Bening or General Rola 7.ymierski, in divisions more than three-quarters of whose officers are, in consequence, Russians. The more distinguished a man has been in the underground movement, the mo re dangerous is he considered by the liberating Power. It is aainst the background of these ceaseless ' arrests and deportations, and the forceful imposition of Soviet citi zenship on genuine Polish patriots who have borne the heat of the day and
For Value and Service
have made understandings before the Germans attacked the Russians. A hundred and fifteen millions of people in Central Europe were, in the vast majority' well-disposed towards Britain
'
Mistakes in Greece & Jugoslavia
Europe, with the majority of whom we
who now report uve" curl over again how the N.1C.\'.11. has succeded to the role of the Gestapo. There has been through nearly all the British press no welcome for the men of Lublin, no congratulations, no ac clamation, but either silence or a clear arraignment of them as the impostors they are. " The Times" itself has printed very little from Lublin sin ce the Committer declared itself the Gov ernment. "Isvestia" writes furiously against the London Poles, and seeks to spread the illusion that the manufactured duplicate parties— the " Peasant Party" and the " Socialist Party" under Lublin — are realities. As with the real Govern meat, so with the real parties: a sham is created by the side of the real thing. "Pravda` takes the same line, blandly accusing the Poles of trying to undermine the unity of the anti•Ilitlerite coalition by intrigues, provocation and other criminal methods." Who is un• dermining the unity of the coalition but the inventors of Lublin? "n Pravda" goes o to sat', quite untruly:
The event is regarded abroad as of great democratic importance, and as a valuable contribution to the common cause of the Allied nations. There is no doubt that this Government has hill rights to expect all democratic rountries to give it their rerngnition" And so on, Pct M. •\ rci.ucwski (the Pol ish Premier in Londonl is well ]cameo as a veteran Polish Socialist a grea t figure in the underground straggle with Germany, one of the Polish equival ents to the men now in honour and P aweerr o in France. The present Polish Government in London is indeed, par• ticular h• representative of the Polish underground, sort has one of its Jlnnis• tern among them. The British and American Govern• meats should therefore make it plain to the Soviet Government that the Lublin screen deceives nobody , and that the consent of the West will never lx forthcoming for the substitution of one dictatorship by another. We have to consider not only whether we can preserve the Anglo-Soviet alliance into the peace, but how we can keep ou r en gagements to the peoples of Central
last year or two. They Britain help the Rusians to be
ensure that the tlZuci•ns aretmoderate. Theylooked u pon Britain as the strongest and most reliable protector of civi• lised standards and personal freedom. They are already puzzled and doubtful. In all their countries it has unhappily become a permanent calculation that if the right words are used and the struggle can be represented as a worker's struggle, political support, Trafalgar Square rallies and speeches in Parliament, can' be relied upon in Britain, and those who recognise that militarily in their own country their bid for power is hopeless, can rally support by pointing to the numbers and influence of their friends in Britain and America, who are, for the most part, men and women acting under amiable but wild illusions, but by those illusions protracting the suffering in other countries.
smaller allies mith us in all our dealings, and have maintained a solid front. Not only did we not do that, but we made the second mistake of ourselves undermining the authority of the Allied Governments in Greece and Yugoslavia, by equipping organisations which really wanted our weapons in order to make themselves the Governments of their countries. It is a far cry from the rueful admissions being made today to the reckless and 'short-sighted way in which we set out four years ago on the policy of arms for all. It must be understood that the French armistice had a great deal to do with the one-time popularity of this decision. * We felt betrayed by the propertied classes in France, and we at once swung over to the idea that our only allies, and the only people likely to help us in a battle against great odds, were the most violent proletarian parties. So the " Daily Express" ncrote in July, 1940: "Since we are fighting Fascists, we .must work for left-wing revolution in Europe. That is only commonsense."
And it went on to explain that the tuore moderate parties " are the wrong people for carrying on underground inIn every country, even in the most trigues, organising strikes, arranging contentious Balkan countries, the fansabotage and fomenting general disconatical politicians are in a very small tent in Europe;" minority. The mass of the people are There could not have been a more rdent nationalists, highly patriotic, but wretched diagnosis, made 'at a time their private lives and not public afwhen neither Greece nor Yugoslavia fairs are their deep and life-long conwas in the war. Of the countries that . , ern. They have seen their private were in the war, all soon showed that lives increasingly requisitioned and harthere was no sort of left-wing mono• ne•scd to fulfil the ambitious propoly of underground patriotism. In grammes of political masters. That Norway and Denmark Holland, Belis the great threat which overhangs the gium and France, the • resistance was common man in Central Europe to. national, not to be grouped politically or horizontally. The French resistday. ance began when the Communists were We have made ttwu great mistakes still taking an equivocal attitude be. since 1941. Firstly, we have not ap• cause the Soviet had not been attackproached Soviet Russia as the leaders ed. It contained far more men who of a united alliance of Governments were alive to the dangers of proletarand peoples, inseparably linked, and ian dictatorship than who joined it hop• offering to extend membership of that ing the issue would he just such a dicalliance on the same terms to the Rustatorship. The Polish underground sians when they in their turn were atrested on a broad patriotic basis, worktacked by the ' Germans. The more ed through the main political parties, help we determined to extend to the and has looked always to the restoraRussian armies, the more resolved we tion of parliamentary politics in the were to equip them so that they should Polish State. not only avoid defeat, but should be Trt Maly and in Germany the main able in their turn to take the offenopposition to the Fascist and Nazi parsive, the mare clearly we ought to Ica Ce ties did not come from the Left at all, facer) the risk that as their power grew but from groups and strata of society «n there would grow also an ambition which had always received singularly to suttvert the existing Governments little enronragernent from our propaof their smaller neighbours and to inganda. The hfussolinian Rump in stal subservient administrations of northern Italy never reuses to attribute their own. To forestall that danger. his downfall to the Fascists' folly in so far as it could be forestalled, and not being totalitarian and proletarian to multiply the difficulties in the way enough , and in permitting in Italy a of a Russi:.n policy of the suhst:"` monarchy, an upper class and a strong of disciplined Communists, for the acmiddle class,all centres of political incepted anti-C- - ists prilitic:,t par• ties, we should4) have associated our (Continued on Page
Guilfoyle's Hotel Australia