CO537-6578 — Page 76

important Communism must be attacked as hostile to local

independence and welfare, if anti-Communist propaganda is

not to be prejudiced as being preparatory international

war-propaganda with the odour which hangs over it from two

world wars.

(d) Anti-Soviet themes will be particularly effective

if they are illustrated in the news from China with a

moral which he who runs may read. But Communism as an

idea or institution cannot effectively be attacked

in its Chinese manifestation; partly because it is an

early form of Communism without the later ruthless

developments which are showing themselves in Estern

Europe: partly because of the nature of the KMT regime

it superceded: but mainly because the Chinese here have a

natural and inevitable interest in events in China.

It is impossible to draw a rigid line, but it is clearly

impossible to prevent news, or literature, or pictures of

China from coming in to Singapore. The dividing line

should be to exclude such information material as is

Communist in the sense of:

(1) Being aimed to teach, and win recruits for, the

Stalinist collection of ideas labelled Communism:

(11) Alming to use the Chinese analogy as justifica-

tion for Singapore people, allying with, or following,

the Peking Government to overthrow the local and

native-rooted governments of S.E.Asia; particularly

with an active emergency in being in Malaya.

(111) Stirring up Chinese nationalism as a means of

bringing pressure on the local government and

preventing the building up of a generation of

Chinese with a Singapore (or Malayan) focus of loyalty.

But clearly politics like nature abhors a vacuum and only the

provision of alternative ideas, news, pictures and publications

can prevent the feeling of frustrated appetite which the

Communists know well how to turn to their own use by talking and

acting