The Waikato Times FRIDAY, AUGUST 6, 1937. RETALIATION.

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20265, 6 August 1937, Page 6

The Waikato Times FRIDAY, AUGUST 6, 1937. RETALIATION.

The policy of armed retaliation seems to be without a tittle of justification. There was a striking illustration off the coast of Spain a few months ago. A bomb dropped on a German cruiser had caused the death of a number of sailors. There may have no justification for the attack, but the Nazis did not stop to inquire. They at once retaliated. They ordered some of their warships to bombard a Spanish coastal town, with the result that a large number of civilians were killed—people who had had nothing to do with the bombing incident— and much damage was done to property. Having thus shed more blood and extended the work of devastation by way of retaliation the Nazis expressed their contentment.’ The incident, they said, was ended. Examined carefully it will be found that the Nazis had proved nothing, had righted no wrong, had made no contribution to the establishing of a better order of things either in Spain or elsewhere. All that had been demonstrated was that German warships could bombard a town on a coast with little in the way of fortifications, but the Nazi leaders claimed to have guarded the prestige of their nation. The same sort of thing is now going on in China. The Japanese recently reported that the Chinese had brutally massacred a large number of Japanese and Korean people. The retaliation apparently takes the form of bombing villages, and again proves nothing except that the bombs were deadly. This idea that if blood is shed then more must be shed before anything else is done is a reversion to a barbarous age. If those who, in the first place. Were guilty of atrocities were punished nothing could be said. Such awful things should be punished. But that the punishment should take the form of inflicting pain on innocent people, whose only offence apparently was that they were of the same race as the culprits, is unpardonable. If this is the standard of nations claiming to be in the van of civilisation, then the road to peace is going to be very long and very difficult. The idea that one awful crime is in some way cancelled out by a retaliatory crime is purely pagan. There is a marked difference between the restoration of national prestige by these dubious means and retaliation in the form of counter-defence measures, and if either nation which in recent months has resorted to retaliation should claim that these things weaken the morale of the nation attacked, it is a sufficient reply to state that in neither case had war been declared, that in both instances the innocent suffered and that in the last resort the prestige of a nation does not depend upon actions such as these.