3. Interview with a New Zealander

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 144, 27 March 1942, Page 7

3. Interview with a New Zealander

NEW ZEALANDER who has returned to’ the Dominion after spending several years in Rangoon, confessed last week in an interview with The Listener that he had no hope of any happy future for Burma _ until Whitehall gave up the attempt to rule the country democratically. Asiatic politicians, he said, have their own ideas on democracy. They know what graft and corruption and squeeze and

plunder mean, but "Burma for the Burmese," like any other nationalist slogan if it is ever really applied, will be just a wider opportunity for certain families to enrich themselves and all their relatives at the expense of those who are not powerful enough to do the same thing themselves. That excellent book Oliver Wiswell, by Kenneth Roberts, shows the process in 18th century America. They would begin first on the "foreigners"? — Europeans, Indians, and Chinese -but everybody would suffer, as everybody does now suffer to some extent, who could not turn the tables and begin squeezing them. It did not surprise him in the least, he said, that the British were getting little assistance from the local inhabitants in their efforts to stop the Japanese. The Burmans had no love for the British, and laughed at British protestations of faith in them. They had, in fact, no faith in any foreign power, but they disliked most -those with whom they had been most closely associated, and the British Government had been foolish enough for years to allow the Japanese to corrupt them by radio. They disliked the Indians because the Indians lived among them as competitors and came among them as soldiers, They hated the Chinese because China had poured armies into Burma in the past and might at any time do so again. They preferred the Japanese to the British because the British were among them and the Japanese, so far, were not, Until these facts were recognised, he insisted; it would be impossible to see events in Burma in anything like a true perspective. Most of the news cabled from Rarigoon had as much resemblance to the truth as a Maori in a top hat has to the truth about New Zealand. The significant things were just not reported, partly because they were unpleasant things like rioting and murder, and partly because politicians were as determined in London as in Rangoon not to call a spade whatever it resembled to those who had to use it.