LISTENINGS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 166, 28 August 1942, Page 7

LISTENINGS

(Perpetrated and illustrated

by

KEN

ALEXANDER

OU remember the big, bull-faced boy at school who liked to twist wrists and push little fellows in the face. Then someone pushed him in the face good and hard, and he couldn’t take it. Germany bombed England and liked it. Now England is bombing Germany and Germany hates it. Goebbels refers to it as " spiteful," Goebbels is funny like that. It seers that you can blow up English homes and hospitals and erphanages and cathedrals in the best of good spirits, and it’s only harmless fun-just a good-natured boyish prank. A few thousand mangled victims is the result of sheer good nature and friendly rivalry. But the razing of German murder-plants is a sign of a mean, nasty, spiteful spirit. "It ain’d gricket . nein!’ Der boor innocent Germans to blow oop — woof! -like dat! Fair blay it iss nod." Poor Goebbels is so hurt at such a flagrant breach of good taste that he puts himself on the spot, as he always does when stung on the swastika. After calling the British bombing spiteful he promises that, as soon as Germany has completed its beneficent rape of Russia, it will turn its kindly eye to England and give her particular hell. Such action, of course, would not be taken in any spiteful spirit. On the conbis every bomb dropped on an Enghome would epitomise the wellcaaed Nazi policy of good clean funthe same kind of merry-making practised

in ‘concentration camps to promote strength through joy. It is this spirit which urges Nazis to shoot hostages and women for the purpose of making everybody merry and bright. Everybody knows that there’s not a spot of spite in the Nazi character. So, when the Allied nations drop more thousands of tons of bombs over more and more Nazi. murder-plants the world will know to what depths of unmanly spite they have fallen. "Bah! Blay der game, you gads!"