WESTERN WEAPONS IN EASTERN HANDS.

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 80, 28 December 1937, Page 6

WESTERN WEAPONS IN EASTERN HANDS.

Military machines do not stop when Christmas comes along. Tlie message of Peace on Earth'goes nnlieeded by both Christian and infidel if the instruments of war demand attention. Thus we find the Spaniards marking the Christian festival by a sanguinary batttle for the city of Teruel and the Japanese continning their vast manoeuvres among the teeming millions of China. We can assume no superiority 'becanse our peoples, and those racially close to us, are not to-day engaged in the complicated art of scientific killing, for Spaniard and Oriental has but to look back twenty years to view the arena of mutual slaughter from the spectator's viewpoint. There is a diff erence in the quality of the act of killing in warfare as practised by the Christian and the Oriental respectively. Not that the effect is noticeably different; all men at war have the one purpose, the destruction of the enemy by making him unfit for resistance. It is noteWorthy that the Occident has developed the means for military destruction with an efficiency that far outstrips that of the Orient. Yet if the Occident has invented and developed the weapons and technique of warfare deadly beyond anything the Orient has ever knoAvn, it has developed also, paradoxically, a hum.anitarianism equally unknown in the Orient. This attitude is not to be found in the Orient. Society there has not concerned itself with the defective, who if not actually killed is certainly allowed to die, for society does not concern itself with the individual, whatever his case. Single lives mean nothing. For centuries Chinese officials made no effort to relieve famines hecause they considered them a proper means of population control. i Nor has he any tradition whatever toward especial care and protection for women and children. His history has included ' no age of chivalry.

Some interesting distinctions between Oriental and Occidental attitudes to war are given by Pearl Buck, the wellknown author, in an article in the magazine Asia. She points out that the Oriental has no interest in human welfare and also no technique in what is called humane warfare. It is to him folly to talk about zones of safety or the protection of noncomhatants. It is true such technique has broken down ofteu enough in the best of Occidental wars, also ; nevertheless, there still remains in the Occidental mind — perhaps by rationalizatio11^ by moralizing, even by hypocrisy, but still it is there— a, sentiment, tradition, sense of fair play, sportsmanship, inherited or cnltivated instinct, or whatever one may choose to call it, which operates enough so that Agreements, if they are not too long in duration, may be fairly well carried out, and treacliery is still despicable in theory. "In the Oriental mind," continues Pearl Buck, "there is not and never has been such a thing as fair play in war or distress. There are no rules of sportsmanship, treachery between enemies is a matter of course, and the lives of non-combatants are of no more value than any other, which is to say they have no value at all. The war in China, therefore, is a peculiar war. It is war at its simplest worst— death, with no attempt to save anybody, with no pity for anybody, because pity is not there to work. The guns and the cannon and the bombs are unchecked and triumphant.

And what will happen with victory? So far as Japan and China go, from this partieular point of view, it can inake 110 difference to the world which will win. China, having been less aggressive in the past, may, if she is victorious, be less aggressive in the future. But victory will not leave her unchanged. She will have learned that in the crisis what served her from the West was the mechanical means of death. If Japan wins, she will be re-enforced in the same knowledge. Either winner will look at the rest of the world with new, triumphant eyes. Neither will be the same Japan or China we have known, but one flushed with a fresh and horrible confidence in.the ruthlessness of his heart and in the gun in his hand. "We Occidentals may very well have made in our invention of the modern methods of war a boomerang which one day will end us," concludes 'Miss Buck. "For we cannot develop any more quickly than the Oriental a spirit which is not our own. The obliviousness to the individual which is native to him is not native to us. He will outdo us, therefore, in the use of the very weapons we have made, for the simple reason that a gun in the hands of a man who does not mind killing is infinitely more dangerous and effective than it is in the hands of a Inan who on the whole prefers not to kill another man." This war in China, then, is more than a war between two Oriental nations. Christians can take comfort in the tliought that tlie attributes of pity, cliarity and love, which are the essenee of our Christmas celebrations must eventually triumph, but if, as Christians, we fall short of the Christian ethie the pitiless efficiency of the Orient will remain as a standing menace to our civilisation.