Should We Tell?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 82, 17 January 1941, Page 4

Should We Tell?

Forster said that if the painful decision had to be made, he would sooner betray his country than betray his friend. It would be interesting to know what he thinks now. "Betray" is, of course, a big word, but as things are at present, betraying one’s country is betraying one’s friends, the closest as well as the most casual, and may easily mean murdering them. Nor is the question any longer academic. It is an issue with which anybody may be faced at any moment, with which perhaps some recently have been faced, and which it is extremely probable someone is facing as we write this sentence. For every day and every night, New Zealand ships are on the water. Every day and every night, raiders are lying in wait for them. Every day and every night, enemies are seeking for news of their movements; and it is impossible to believe that no single scrap of information has ever been passed on from our own shores. If news has gone from New Zealand, there is a New Zealander who knows where it started. There is some one who knows whether it was passed on by a fanatic or by a fool, by an enterprising neutral, or by a treacherous national, by a money-maker, a sensation-hunter, or merely by a_loosemouthed idiot. It is true, as the Prime Minister warns us, that one of the Nazi methods of making war is "to foment and disseminate suspicion." It would not help us, but greatly help Germany, if we became "unwitting instruments of this Nazi technique." But it would help Germany more if we were too proud to be suspicious and flatly refused to believe that treachery could begin at home. It can begin at home, and it does, or it is not treachery. The enemy who collects and passes on information against us may be a spy, and if we catch him, we may shoot him, but he is not a traitor. The national who does it is a murderer, and the national who knows and does not tell, is a potential murderer. Let us call things by their proper names. Loyalty to a friend in one set of circumstances may be cowardly disloyalty in circumstances of another kind. Pity for one man in danger may be brutality to a shipload of men if that man, by action or inaction, threatens their lives. We must have the courage to abandon a virtue before it is perverted into a vice. | N an essay written before the war, E. M.