Christmas 1939: the spread of barbarism - archive

Editorial: the spread of barbarism

13 December 1939

If anybody wants to measure the effects of the rise and influence of the totalitarian philosophies of the State on the brutalisation of life, he has only to study the newspaper for a single day and then ask himself how the events there recorded would have struck a reader in the days before the Communist, Nazi, and Fascist systems had swept over Europe. A great surface of the Continent was then under the rule of authoritarian Governments, and liberals all looked forward to the day when those Governments would be changed into something better. He could never have imagined the plight into which Europe has fallen. Take only the events recorded in the last few days.

In Finland the Government that has succeeded the Tsar’s Government is engaged in a wanton invasion, and it refuses the services of the International Red Cross on the cynical pretext that its violence is not war. In Poland the scientific laboratory of one university has said that the treatment the Jews are receiving there would be condemned in any civilised country if it were applied not to human beings but to dogs or cattle. Children are taken as hostages for the docility of their parents. Populations are moved here and there at the pleasure of a single man; famine is wantonly created and spread.