Michael Joseph Savage speech on 5 September 1939

by Michael Joseph Savage

Good evening everybody. In this critical hour of our own and the world's history, I feel that I should abuse my privilege of addressing you if I were to speak of matters affecting myself personally. For that reason, and that reason only, I say no more of a certain recent experience that I have had than this, that it has taught me as nothing else could have done how quick to kindness the people of this country can be, and how easily political and other differences are extinguished by sympathy and goodwill.

Tonight I feel that I can say to all of you with a sense of certainty that I have never quite felt before, thank you friends for your kindness that you have so generously shown to me. To my colleagues who have so loyally in these anxious times carried on the work of government in my absence, performing without complaint my tasks as well as theirs, I express my sincere gratitude and I concur wholeheartedly in every decision they have made for the safety and well-being of the state. It is not my purpose tonight to state at length the issues involved in the conflict that has now begun, but I should like to tell you in a few sentences just how I see them.

The war on which we are entering may be a demanding from us heavy and continuous sacrifice. It is essential that we realize from the beginning that our cause is worth the sacrifice. I believe in all sincerity that it is.

None of us has any hatred of the German people. For the old culture of the Germans, their songs, their poetry and their music, we have nothing but admiration and affection. We believe that there are many millions of German people who want to live in peace and quietness as we do, threatening no one and seeking to dominate no one.

But we know, alas, that such a way of life is despised and rejected by the men who have seized and hold power in Germany. We know that those who have done and are doing incalculable harm to the true interests of their country, and that they are wasting and destroying the intellectual, artistic, moral and spiritual resources that their people have built up throughout the centuries. In doing this, they have, for the time being, cowed the spirit of a vast number of their best people.

This work of destruction they have already carried into other countries and, despite denial, now intend to carry into Poland. If they succeed there, they will next attempt the overthrow of France and Britain. Let us make no mistake about that.

Of course they repudiate any such intention, but fortunately for the world we know now what it has taken us a long time to learn, that their promises are worthless, are made only to gain an advantage for the time being, and are broken as soon as that advantage has been secured. Not a moment too soon have Britain and France taken up arms against so faceless and unscrupulous an adversary. The fight on which we are now engaged is one whose issue concerns all nations of the world, whether as yet they realize it or not.

We are fighting a doctrine that springs from a contempt of human nature, a doctrine that government is the affair only of a self-selected elite who, without consulting the people, may irrevocably determine what the people shall do and shall not do. The masses are to be used as instruments of power in the hands of their masters. They are to be given slogans and directed towards this or that objective approved by their masters, but never are they to be treated as free men, as individual and responsible souls.

The individual man is submerged and forgotten, the intrinsic worthiness of his personality contemptuously ignored. Freedom of action and expression is denied to him. Dissent or criticism is brutally repressed.

These are a few of the incidents of the Nazi philosophy that is seeking to thrust itself everywhere over Europe today and the rest of the world tomorrow. Nazism is militant and insatiable paganism. In short but terrible history, it has caused incalculable suffering.

If permitted to continue, it will spread misery and desolation throughout the world. It cannot be appeased or conciliated. Either it or civilization must disappear. To destroy it, but not the great nation which it has so cruelly cheated, is the task of those who have taken up arms against Nazism. May God prosper those arms. I am satisfied that nowhere will the issue be more clearly understood than in New Zealand, where for almost a century, behind the sure shield of Britain, we have enjoyed and cherished freedom and self-government.

Both with gratitude for the past and with confidence in the future, we arrange ourselves without fear beside Britain. Where she goes, we go. Where she stands, we stand.

We are only a small and young nation, but we are one and all a band of brothers, and we march forward with a union of hearts and wills to a common destiny.