It Can't Happen Here?

While we are being told, in a shrill, hysterical voice, that we are menaced by foreign "totalitarianism," the very machinery of totalitarianism is being set up under our noses. Mr. Holmes has his satchel rifled, police envoys attend political meetings, the Press and the Associated Chambers try to bully us 'into military conscription. And now albeit muffled by locked doors, we hear the birth-cries of a secret police.

New Zealand has bud its experience of "security police" before. Back in the phoney war days, there was an individual by the name of Major Foulkes. Besides "snoopers" in bar-rooms and political meetings, "Foulkes's Foxes" searched the homes of pacifists, communists and other "seditious" persons—in many cases plundering books and papers for "evidence."

The tale is told of how two of these people paid an uninvited call on a leading Communist in Wellington, and in searching his, book-cases, passed over in silence the heavy Marxist works, but seizing a copy of "Nicholas Nickleby" with joyful cries of "Ah! a Russian book!"

A Slow Poison?

Over the past few years, it has been fairly evident that the powers that be were thinking along the lines of establishing a new gestapo. Remember the demonstration on indonesia on July 31, 1947, and the role played by the police? In Sydney, the similar demonstration a few days before, had some more sinister implications. There, police basher gangs mingled with the crowd, assaulting and carrying off demonstrators, without provocation or the shadow of authority, to third degree them in neighbouring cellars. One "interrogation" reported went like this:

1st Constable: What's your occupation?

Student: Student.

1st Constable: What's your nationality?

Student: Australian—Jewish extraction.

1st Constable: What are you studying?

Student: Medicine.

2nd Constable: I wouldn't like to have one of you Jewish bastards operating on me.

That Just testifies to the type of brainless thug our little Hitlers are willing to employ in their service.

In the last months of 1947, the police took a hand in the breaking up of a stopwork meeting in the Wellington Government Printing Office. During the Carpenters' dispute in March, 1948, Union officials in Auckland were "interviewed" by detectives—no criminal charge had been laid.

Witch-hunting in the civil service, introduced in the States by the great Harry two years ago, has since spread to New Zealand.

The Public Service Commission - (13/3/48) claims to exclude from "positions involving secrecy" (there are declarations of secrecy for most Jobs in the Public Service) and the "safety of the State" anyone "In active association with organisations the objects or methods of which conflicted with the national interest." This is dangerously vague and Implies a secret police dossier on every member of the Civil Service. Declarations of this kind were made in France in 1940, but proved more successful in persecuting patriots than quislings. The Holmes and Deynzer cases are familiar to us all.

"Our Free Land"

Street meetings have now been banned in Wellington. As Mr. A. C. Barrington said in Court (July, 1948), "The City Council has a duty to . . . facilitate assembly and discussion", but they prefer to ignore it.

While they are sweeping discussion off the streets, the political police are sitting in on meetings of organisations which they consider, apparently, to be "dangerous."

Thus last February the present writer had the unpleasant duty of removing a plain clothes man from a meeting of the local branch of the Peace and Anti-Conscription Federation. Peace, I believe, is in the interest of this as of any other nation. Conscription is to be submitted to a referendum of the people. How, then, can the gestapo claim that this organisation is seditious? And if they don't, what prompts the honour of such visits?

Loudly Mr. Fraser screams about "police States." Yet in his own Prime Minister's Department he has set up the nucleus of an S.S. that would nail down the very coffin lid of our already declining liberties.

Student Congress passed a resolution in January opposing all attacks on civil liberties and intellectual freedom and to police interference with political, religious and industrial liberties. Truly, NZUSA Annual Conference has let the student body down badly by falling to support this resolution. But that must not stop us students from giving it the support of our action now.

Remember Thomas Mann's words. And remember, too, that fascism is just as bitter in its attacks on the universities, as bastions of reason and independent thinking, as it is on the very trade union movement itself. Don't fool yourself. It can happen here.

"God defend our free land." sings our national anthem. But remember. God helps him who helps himself. Wake up, New Zealand!