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GUIDE TO GOOD READING

Prof. Toynbee: ‘learned idiot’
who reduces history fo astrology

PROFESSOR Arnold Toynbee
is the pet historian of those “in-
tellectuals” who have lost faith
in the human race.

He is an extremely learned but
foolish man — one might say “a
learned idiot,’ as Lenin once
called ‘the eminent Australian
Socialist Otto Bauer.

He has used his vast learning
to reduce history to a branch of
astrology.

Recently Toynbee appeared to
be taking a very critical position
with regard to the West — by
which he means, in the main,
capitalist Western Europe and
America. :

He asks the capitalist nations
to take an exceedingly close look
at themselves.

For the last 500 years, he
argues, these have been the ag-
gressor nations. It is they who
have in Russia, Asia, Africa/and
the Americas invaded, subjugat-
ed and enslaved other peoples.
They were enabled to do so by
their superior technique.

This, he says, has compelled
other nations, notably Russia, to
adopt Western technology in
order to defend themselves
against aggression from the
West.

Russia, first under Peter the
Great and later under the Com-
munists, has, he thinks, engag-
ed in technological revolutions
in order to catch up with the
aggressive West.

She had, he says, achieved
Significant progress in this direc-
tion by the time of the last war,
‘as the defeat of Nazi Germany
proved.

By the end of the war, how-
ever, the capitalist West had re-
leased nuclear’ energy, adds the
professor, and shot ahead of the
Soviet Union, which has still a
long way to catch up.

The Soviet Union has, how-
ever, acquired a very powerful
weapon, he thinks, a spiritual
weapon derived from the West
namely Communism.

With this weapon the Soviet
Union hopes, says the professor,
to set one section of the West
against another and so compen-
sate for her own technological
deficiencies.

» Such is the content of Profes-
sor. Toynbee’s discourses.

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NOW IT IS salutary for the
peoples in the capitalist world to
see their states as others see
them.

Their countries are seen, not
as nurseries of freedom and de-

»mocracy (how recent parliament-

ary government is in most of
them, anyhow, and how little de-
mocracy there is in it), but also
as the breeding ground of wars,
the slave trade and vast colonial
exploitation.

The history of the so-called
“free world” seen from this
angle is the history of various
attempts, successful and unsuc-
cessful, to reduce the rest of
the world to colonial slavery.

It would be wrong to conclude

from Professor Toynbee’s, critical

remarks that he has any funda-
mental quarrel with the picture
of the world presented by the
crude capitalist propaganda. e

However justified Russia’s com-
plaints against the West have
been in the past, Toynbee holds
that the tables have been: turned.
The West he thinks, is now
menaced by Russia in a struggle
for world power and “he wants
the West to win.

+. * *

BUT WHAT is this West?

Toynbee talks of it as if it
were a civilisation whose peoples
are animated by common ideals.

In fact, Western capitalist
states have not only oppressed
the non-European world, but they
have torn the world apart in
gigantic wars among themselves
— wars into which they have
drawn other sections of mankind.

Further, the same ruling class
which has sought to enslave
other people has in the first
place enslaved and robbed its
own people — its own workers
and peasants. These also it has
treated as its enemies.

In fact, the British ruling class
for a period between the wars
succeeded in reducing its miners
and textile workers to a coolie
level.’

The civilised values of which
Professor Toynbee and _ others
boast — the freedom of meeting
and association, collective bar-
gaining between employers and
émployed, minimum wages, and
the rest — have been forced on

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the rulers in the West by the
fierce mass struggles of the com-
mon people.

The fruits of these struggles
are continually menaced by re-
curring economic crises and,
wars. The workers are realising
that until the capitalist system,
which generates these things, is
destroyed, there can be no fun-
damental social advance.

From that realisation
world-wide Communist
ment springs.

Communism is a weapon of
the exploited and oppressed
everywhere.

It is a weapon of the workers

the
move-

of the West against the decay-

ing capitalist system which is
dragging them from economic
crisis to war, and from war to
economic crisis.

The holy West which Commun-
ism threatens is the robber West
—the West of the great trusts,
the West of the colonial exploit-
ers, the West which rigs elec-
tions, organises witch-hunts, and
sells the national independence
of its people.

To the common people of the
West — the workers and the
middle stratum — Communism,
arising from the workers’ strug-
gle, is not a threat but a release
from exploitation and the threat
of war.

That is why the cunning capi-
talist propagandists try to make
us believe that the West is a
unity — that all who live in the
geographical. area of the West

_are threatened.

But the Communist movement,
arising out of the struggle of
the people in the various coun-
tries in the West, threatens only
the capitalist exploiters, whose
continued rule is a menace to the
overwhelming -majority of the
population of this area.

Professor Toynbee .seeks to
blur the class lines in the West
and to convince us that we must
all hang together, since the non-
Western world is turning the
tables and is out for revenge on
us all.

He tries to fool us into be
lieving that the capitalist West is
no longer aggressive.

The American atom bomb
bases circling the earth, the Dul-
les policy of “liberation”—that

‘is, the restoration of capitalism

in Eastern Europe—prove only
too clearly that monopoly cap-
italism is more aggressive than
ever.

The peoples of the West must
not allow people like Professor
Toynbee to fool them into be-
lieving that cooperation with a
ruling class that is preparing new
aggressions is the defense of
their interests or of Western
civilisation.

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What is this West bat Toynbee talks about and seeks to fool? UE

that if is ne ionger Seataseive?

AMONG THE NEW FILMS

Recorded facts overlaid —

ENGLISH history in terms of
“Bess Loves Tom” is M.G.M.’s
Coronation offering now showing
in Vancouver.’

Young Bess has a_ spirited
Elizabeth (Jean Simmons), not

yet queen, in love with dashing

' Admiral Tom Seymour (Stewart

Granger). during the reign of the
boy king Edward VI. :

Seymour is married to the
widow of Henry VIII, Katherine
Parr (Deborah Kerr). Soon after
she dies Seymour is beheaded by
his jealous rival, brother Ned,
leaving young Bess brokenheart-
ed to reign as the Virgin Queen,
bringing glory to England
through the love of the sea she
has been taught by Admiral Tom.

Such able British actors as
Granger, Miss Simmons, Miss

with unrecorded fancies.

Kerr and Charles Laughton (®
peating his greatest role *
Henry) are surprisingly success
ful in distilling real poweY

distinction from banal’ dialogu®

But the picture is stolen by
young Rex Thompson. In spite
of a tendency to confuse ~
part at times with Christo
Robin he makes the young ™
king, uncomprehending ¢&?
of powerful intrigues, a ai e
ly pathetic figure. ;

No desperate violence — ms
been done to recorded -
though plenty of nec
fancies have overlaid them.”
I didn’t much believe in a
Simmons as young Elizabeth
less in, Archbishop Cran i
played as a  doddering
‘fool.—T.S.

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