Simple Simon

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 94, 10 April 1941, Page 4

Simple Simon

HE purpose of the Commission of Inquiry into the alleged leakage of information about New Zealand sailings was to make the seas safer for New Zealand ships. That it will certainly do. But one of the most interesting immediate results was its exposure of the quality of popular rumours. It should therefore be safe to hope that it has made New Zealand offices and New Zealand homes less comfortable places in future for simpletons. One or two rumours were certainly found to have been founded on fact. One or two others may have been so founded. The Commission was careful to point out that inability to disprove a rumour does not make it true ‘nor inability to prove it make it false. But in general its analysis of the evidence on which serious complaints and charges were made was devastating. Rumour after rumour was reduced to absurdity until the Report as a whole became a broadside with all guns on credulity. It might also have been called the Sad Progress of Simple Simon. And yet it is a very grave document published in a very grave hour. It proves not only that most people are very unsafe custodians of the truth, but also that some people of reasonably good education and professional standing are not safe with other people’s lies. There is just no excuse at all for some of the absurdities uncovered by the Commission, and no explanation except the tendency of the foolish to commit follies. We are all foolish some of the time, but it is alarming to have it established that so many of us are never anything else. Have we then learnt our lesson? If we must be simple surely we can be silent, and sensible enough to know that there are more ways of waging this war than with nitroglycerine. The German commander and his officers were the perfect type of stage raiders presented on propagandist films. It is humiliating to think that although their bluff was so obvious it was seventy-five per cent. successful,