Our Own Words

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 165, 21 August 1942, Page 3

Our Own Words

general than remembering past follies; especially follies of the tongue and of the pen. But there may be a case at the end of three years of war for taking stock of our own mental development. It was clear enough at the beginning of the struggle that our progress would depend on the courage and reality of our thinking. We got into the war because we’had forgotten what facts looked like. We can get successfully out of it only by coming to ourselves again and to terms with some ugly realities. These things we are doing, slowly and of course painfully. But it is a shock to recall how consistently in the early days of the war we all ran away from simple realities. As an indication-just a faint indication, since we have not dared to disinter the most egregious of our follies-we reprint in this issue a thin trickle of the absurdities that have run through English newspapers during the last three years; and American newspapers too. It is not pleasant to read these, since they indicate a weakness from which nobody yet has fully recovered; but we are far gone still if it is not profitable. And it cannot be necessary to add that for this pillory everybody has qualified, some more often than others, but even the wisest now and again. It would not, for example, give anybody better digestion if we printed again what Mr. Churchill said about the Russian attack on Finland; but it would be easier to justify what he said then than to see sense in G: B. Shaw’s remark last June that all the Allies had to do now was to sit down and watch Uncle Joe Stalin making mince-meat of the German Army. In this sad glass-house no one dare throw stones. But we are not forbidden to look about us, and to risk an occasional glance over our shoulder. TN eens, is more futile in