Pride in Reverse

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 242, 11 February 1944, Page 3

Pride in Reverse

T would be wrong to suggest that the purpose 'of most, or any, of the correspondents who have been discussing the New Zealand Division on this page has been to smear the Division or prick the bubble of its glory. Their purpose has been to bring other Divisions-English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish-into an equally brilliant flood of light. But the correspondent who writes to us to-day protesting against the tone of some of those letters is a healthy human being as well as a good New Zealander. It is a fact that we often seem ashamed in New Zealand of the things of which we should be most proud. Nor is the explanation simple modesty. If it were, that would be a good thing. But it is meekness, timidity, conditioned inferiority. We are a century old, with social and political standards for which we need apologise to no one; and if we have not yet developed our own cultural standards, we are at least beginning to recognise the things we do not wish to reproduce. Why then shduld we hesitate to accept one glorious fact which the rest of the world has conceded without any reservations at all-the skill, gallantry, and toughness of our fighting troops? Fighting after all is the only national activity in which we start level with the rest of the world. We really are in many respects "country lads"; distance, time, and environment compel it. But a country lad can give a good account of himself if his home is attacked; and if our country lads, brown as well as white, have fought so well in this war that even their enemies pay tribute to them, it is not merely timid, as our correspondent suggests, to shrink from praising them, but morbid and discreditable. It is pride in reverse, which, if we do not pull ourselves up, will make a "please sir" nation of us like too many of the smaller groups of history. In the meantime some of us are coming very near to betraying the men whose reputation it should be our proud duty to uphold.