Forgiving and Forgetting

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 330, 19 October 1945, Page 5

Forgiving and Forgetting

dangerous just now, or more horrible, than a worldwide campaign of vengeance (as distinct from justice and retribution); an eye for an eye, murder for murder, torture for torture. Nothing would more quickly, or more effectively, make victory a mockery and another war certain. But it is only a little less dangerous to forgive and forget; to refuse to believe in atrocities or to hate those responsible for them; and in the end to sneer at all propagandists in case we fall victims to abominable truths. Last week some of us saw the first shipload of rescued prisoners from Singapore and Formosa-several weeks after IN could be more

their rescue. Reporters accustomed to painful sights — accidents, inquests, and the occasional horrors of the Police: Courts, who have seen hospital ships full of wounded and the sad homecomings of the permanently maimed, were more depressed by what they saw on the Maunganui than by any duty the war had previously brought them. Two facts that particularly impressed our own representative were, first, the number of men who had been shocked into insensibility, so that they had lost both the power and the inclination to talk, and the burning hatred of the others when they were asked about their Japanese guards. The whole truth about atrocities is of course never told. Something like the truth may get into medical journals -as it did in the case of the Lancet and Belsen-but many of the facts are too horrible for lay consumption and are either not published or are hinted at and not understood, But there is a danger in all that, over and above the ordinary consequences of feeding people on half-truths. What we don’t know we can’t worry about, but if we try not’to know we are already half-way to a cowardly complacency, and morally at least compounding felonies.