SECRET
P.C. Paper No. 3.

PAPER APPROVED BY CABINET ON 30TH JANUARY 1940.

in any conditions which can at present be foreseen, would be negligible. Our aim must be to foster in Latin American countries the existing attitude of friendly neutrality and to encourage the disposition to assist us with supplies and to stretch a point in our favour on disputed issues. In this part of the world, our propaganda may also perhaps look beyond the end of the war and keep in view the secondary objective of maintaining and restoring the vast British financial and commercial interests in this region.

In most Latin American countries, we can usefully stress the community of culture and ideals between them and the Allied countries, and depict Britain and France as the upholders of a Western civilisation in which the Americas play an essential part. The most effective counts in our indictment of Nazi Germany will be (a) her hostility to Catholicism and to any form of organised Christianity, which forms an essential part of Western civilisation (b) her pact with the materialistic and revolutionary power of Soviet Russia, (c) her exclusive racial doctrines (anti-Semitism, superiority of Nordic man) which are directly contrary not only to the teachings of Christianity, but to the whole doctrine of the ius soli (as opposed to the ius sanguinis) on which Latin American civilisation is based, (d) her attempt to organise citizens of German birth or German descent into units actively serving the needs of German policy. (This indictment proved effective in the last war, since when German activities of this kind have been considerably intensified.)