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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 12, No. 10. September 20th, 1949

Prophetic?

Prophetic?

His personal contacts, his outspoken honesty, and his fearless assaults on what he knew was wrong, even if held sacred by the orthodox, make the book as powerful reading now as it must have been 30 years ago. Is there not something half-prophetic about a reference in 1919 to General Mannerheim as "the White Butcher"? And Wilson as "not a Democrat: not even a believer in the things he said, but the supreme political strategist of American Money Power"? At a time when these men were the heroes of democracy, Anstey saw through the mask, and his Judgment has been upheld by history.

With a keen eye, he saw the unsavoury machinations of the Chur-chills and Ironsides, the Kolchaks and Mannerheims, in their attempts to strangle the Soviet Republic at birth, and shook his head. He saw it all as a puppet show acting Canute with too tide of history. And he seems to have been right. For all the nations of the Entente's "Cordons Sanitaire"—the Baltic States, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and even China, seem to have become infected with the Red rash.

It was destined, claimed Anstey, to engulf even his native Australia. The system which gave 1 per cent. of adult Australians the ownership of their country's total wealth contained the seeds of its own destruction. No wonder the powers that be were panicky. Anstey's book was instantly banned.

The Auckland pacifist, Mr. H. R. Urquhart, records an interesting incident in his 1946 pamphlet, "Searchlight on Big Business". At the time "Red Europe" came out, local newspapers recorded that Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd. was fined "for importing prohibited goods, namely, a book entitled 'Red Europe'. The books were ordered to be seized and forfeited."

Urquhart's comment is: "I feel that in the final day of judgment this attempt of Messrs. Whitcombe & Tombs to broadcast the contents of 'Red Europe' will be accounted to the firm for righteousness ... .