LISTENINGS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 131, 26 December 1941, Page 11

LISTENINGS

Pernetrated and illustrated by

KEN

ALEXANDER

| Learning His A.B.C.D.

Japan will be taught, in the only language she recognises. She wiil know her "A.B.C.D." before she is through. She turned on a new form of gangsterism which even Hitler shrank doesn’t pay! That’s what

from using. I don’t say that he wouldn’t have used it or that he didn’t think of it. But he was cunning enough to recognise the strong back-kick of the weapon and its boomerang potentialities. But Japan-she slipped a bomb under Uncle Sam’s end of the conference table while she discussed with him the way to peace. It was the time-bomb of treachery. As an axis weapon it is too old to warrant comment, But it has never been used before with such cynical indecency. Japan’s bomb gave her a big momentary advantage. But wars are long-so are memories. If Japan had wanted deliberately to stiffen the backbone of America and knit her sinews of war into a hardstriking machine, she couldn’t have selected a better method. She took the full-stops out of U.S. and made it Us. She consigned "isolationism" to the American

museum of outworn oddities. She drew a declaration from the Colonel Lindberghs that there is now only one course to pursue and it doesn’t begin with "I." She scuttled decency and took to the boats with death at the ‘oars. This may seem a bold statement to make with Japan’s first blows still smarting. But wars are long, and he lasts best who lasts longest. Japan thought she was clever and had taken Time by the forelock. But Time will eventually have her by the short hair. Nippon’s motto may be "nip on at any cost." But she won’t like the cost when she comes to count it. General Smuts said that Japan’s number will be up in 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "We Shall Win." Taking the long view, it is clear that the Allies will win in the Pacific as they are winning on the other side of the globe. Wishful thinking? Not on your life! Wishful thinking is try-

ing to take a pot shot with the gun you / hope to buy next week. We have the gun to-day. The Rising Sun scowls over the horizon and the shadow of the swastika lies across the Pacific, to-day, but, if the Allies "trust in God and keep their powder dry," as they will, we may find that Japan will have’ hastened Allied vic-

tory to a degree far greater than we can imagine to-day. Crime doesn’t pay, and the criminal mind is never a winning mind. It takes a lot of ju-jutsu to take a fall out of that truth,