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The Spike or Victoria University College Review 1931

Open to Correction

page 46

Open to Correction

Instinct usually guides the individual to those actions most healthy for him. Mass prejudice is merely mass instinct, and it is astonishing to note how accurate it has been in the past in matters of fundamental policy. Based on prejudice, mass ignorance has a peculiar faculty of being right for wrong reasons, especially so in the case of the healthy anti-Soviet prejudice in New Zealand, shared by all except a numerically small body of economic Communists and a class of intellectuals attracted by the self-evident ideals and achievements of the Soviet.

The reasons underlying silly prejudice are usually sound. In Chicago, a city of three million people, the successful municipal platform for many years was "to Hell with King George." There was a sufficient reason why this Anti-England bravado was supported by votes. In Chicago, a new city of a new territory, political balance of power is in the second generation Europeans, immigration and absorption into the nation. These people needed a banner under which they could parade their Americanism. The Great War merely created a conflict of patriotisms. Mayor Thompson created a national enemy, a King George who bribed school-text publishers and carried on insidious propaganda to make Chicago an English Crown Colony. The intelligent voter laughed or was disgusted. But those emotionally insecure in their nationalism snatched to a "100% Americanism." Mayor Thompson, unwittingly perhaps, created nationals out of polyglots.

It is my purpose to suggest a reason for the prejudice in New Zealand against the Soviet. Certainly its defects are not exposed in the arguments of those whose political mission it is to oppose Communism.

Certain benefits to the Russian people are obvious, both under the original scheme and under the later Five-year Plan. A measure of political freedom has been achieved. Education at last is coming into Russian everyday life. The nation is being organised on a scale that must inevitably work for the ultimate national welfare. Starvation, poverty, degradation are not non-existent; but at least they, are less prevalent than under the Tsar; and the so-called "prison-camp" atrocities, bad as they are, compare favourably with the saltmines and the Siberia of the old regime.

Just as the Soviet cannot be condemned for its internal achievements, neither can its attitude to the rest of the world be blamed. A great deal of unfair comment has been heard about the Five-year Plan and "dumping."

It is manifestly fair and just for a Government to demand a temporarily-lowered standard of living to ensure that the national machine be put on a working basis. This is done by the Soviet by selling abroad more than the true surplus of basic commodities. The same thing is done in New Zealand by stringent (but temporary) Finance Ac's. The Five-year Plan is simply a Communist "10% cut."

It is true that this "dumping" has affected world prices; but it is nonsense to imply this to be the deliberate aim of the Soviet. Russia needs manufactured goods in huge quantities, and, to import rinse, needs cash, credit rightly being denied to a defaulter nation. The only possible source of cash revenue is the sale of basic products on the world market. Far from desiring to upset world prices, Russia would be delighted to find her offerings bought and sold with no effect on the stability of prices.

This justification of the Five-year Plan and "dumping" cannot be denied, any more than we can deny the real advance made in art and pure science under Soviet encouragement. Mass prejudice seeks more vital things than the economic record of fourteen years. Mass prejudice is unreasoning because it is founded on something deeper than reason. It is the instinct for Government that is the heritage of all political masses and the special genius of the English. It is an expression of the same quality that elected a buffoon to the Chicago Mayoralty, that called a king back to England after an eleven-year interregnum, that made a chaos of warring interests welcome an Italian Dictator, that brought Augustus to the Republic, that destroyed the Commune.

It is possible that New Zealand's dislike of Sovietism is based merely on a preference for our own quasi-democracy. Soviet success does not: page 47 necessarily mean Soviet superiority. A strong and virile people with immense national resources will advance economically under any governmental system. It may be quite possible that Russia's development is unreliant on the Government of the day. Russia advanced under the Tsars. Russia advances to-day under the Soviet. Russia will advance to-morrow under any control.

But it is also possible that Russia would advance more happily under a capitalist democracy, where safeguards exist to protect the people and depend for exercise upon the political honesty of the people. Voters usually deserve their Governments. The voter can always check vested interests if they over-reach, as in the Interstate Commerce Commission of the United States of America. Vested interests are equally ready to fight extremes, as in New South Wales. The great insurance companies are huge vested interests, whose life-blood is the health and well-being of the masses. Capitalism, with all its faults, has at least achieved a working balance that is safeguarded. The Soviet has no safeguard, once abuse of its ideals finds power in its Councils.

There lies Soviet weakness. For the first time in democratic history, political and economic control have merged. The Soviet Councillor is stronger than the most powerful combination of politician and capitalist. He is above the law, because he and his colleagues are the makers, administrators and abrogators of the law. L'etat, c'est tnoi is as true of a Lenin as of a Louis.

So long as the first fine flush of idealism re-mains with Russia's leaders and the breed remains that lives and works for all mankind, just so long will Russia's progress be triumphant. But the mass mind knows instinctively that human greed cannot be banished by the exile of money. It realises that money is not an end; it is a commodity. An unworthy member of a Soviet State who wants all that money can buy—comfort, prestige and power—will achieve his end by politics. The generation of Soviet leaders who know not Lenin, who had no part in the white-hot flaming zeal of the creation of United Soviet Socialist Republics, will furnish the proofs of the vitality of the Soviet to prosper without developing, like the rest of nations, into an arena for the conflict of strong men.

Already there are daily press reports of executions of Soviet officials by the political machine. In just the same way did the self-seekers of the French Commune eliminate unruly subordinates and rivals to power. Prosper the United Soviet Socialist Republics must. The question is not whether the U.S.S.R. will succeed, but whether it will succeed unchanged.

The mass mind instinctively believes that when Soviet Russia finally emerges as a prosperous nation, it will not be as a State organised on an ideal system and managed by idealists, but it will be just another form of Government for historians to note, where the able, ruthless man rises to power, and sooner or later perpetuates the power of his colleagues and class.

S.E.B.

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