The following is from the speech of Dr. John Haynes Holmes, of the Community Church, who testified for American Public Opinion at “The Case of Civilization Against Hitlerism” last night:
It is not the violence, the suppression of political minorities, nor even the denial of basic civil rights which have caused the world-wide revulsion of public opinion against Hitler and his regime in Germany. A long succession of wars and revolutions since 1914 have blunted the sensibilities of men on these points. We are unhappily accustomed to the repressive measures of dictatorship.
What has outraged world opinion in the case of Hitler is the undeniable evidence of the reversion of a great people under Nazi rule to conditions and standards of barbarism from which we thought mankind had long since been delivered.
What are we to think of a government which drives its greatest scholars and artists into exile, raids libraries and burns books in the public squares, reduces world-famous universities to the status of military academies, wrecks the most enlightened labor legislation of modern ##mes, reduces workers to a new serfdom, subjects women to ancient levels of sex inferiority, persecutes Jews with fierce ferocity, and revives a race myth which is the religion of “the horde!”
Public opinion would be recreant to its trust if it did not revolt against these potent signs of savagery. Civilization has no security, mankind no hope, so long as the Nazis hold their power.
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