War in the Air

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 8, 18 August 1939, Page 12

War in the Air

NTIL a few years ago war in the air meant physical war and nothing else. It meant bombs and machine guns and spying and fire-lighting, with barbarous threats, by which few were really alarmed, of showers of poison and disease germs. Today it means spiritual war as well. You destroy your enemy physically if you can. But you also poison his mind as well as his body, and release hate against him day and night. How much of the Palestine story on page 9 is true we do not know. Some of the charges made are probably exaggerated, and all of them, at this remove of time and place, are unverifiable. The narrator is not a historian, or even a trained journalist. But he knew, when he sat down to write, what was happening to him, if he did not so certainly know why; and we know, from a hundred other witnesses, that although radio can do much worse than he says it is doing in Palestine, it can never in war-time do much better. It is necessary to face the fact that broadcasting, though it may one day draw all men together, is far more likely in the immediate future to drive millions to premature death. It is not merely an aid to war but a weapon of war-all the more deadly because everywhere available. The world does to some extent still withhold the ordinary weapons of _war from primitive races. It is not even try‘ing to withhold radio. While this sentence is being written British experts are busy in Uganda testing wireless on native minds. And so it goes on the whole world over. Propaganda in print requires some preparation in the victim. If he can’t read he must at least be brought into contact with pictures. Broadcasting requires nothing but ears,