The Evening Post WELLINGTON, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 26, 1945.

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 152, 26 December 1945, Page 4

The Evening Post WELLINGTON, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 26, 1945.

A SEARCHLIGHT ON IDEOLOGIES

From the few glimpses that have been offered, to the world at large, of that extraordinary man Pastor Niemoller, it would seem that he has the very inconvenient habit of looking below the surface of things. This habit is embarrassing to friends in almost all circumstances; to political partyism it is fatal. There was a time when Niemoller seemed built to be a patterned German, even a patterned Nazi. First of all, he was an excellent U-boat commander in World War I, and he seemed to be built to go on in that way; yet he drifted from submarines to the Church. In the beginning, also, he was, it is said, a "staunch" member of the Nazi Party; but he judged the Nazi Party not only by its creed but by its conduct—"what audacity!"—and as time went on his defiance of the Nazis brought him "solitary confinement at Sachsenhausen arid at Dachau." In most countries — and in Hitlerite Germany most of all — to criticise your own party is one of the things that are "not done." ~ You may or may not have an eye for strict righteousness in some departments of life, but certainly you must not import this attitude into the affairs of your own party. The party member who dares to stand to his guns, and who presumes to criticise his party for disloyalty to its, professions, is generally heading, at the very least, for expulsion. In Hitler's Germany he soon arrived in a far worse place. The exsubmariner Churchman who refused to take the Nazi .Party at its face value, and who was rash enough to look under the tablecloth, was rewarded not with an Iron Cross but with a sojourn at Dachau. The Iron Cross is not for men who are iron or steel in the wrong place.

This quality of offering an iron front to the wrongdoer, even though the wrongdoer be your party-political or administrative leader, has often been associated with party-breaking, Cabinet-breaking, and even Churchbreaking. A man like Niemoller is always a terror to the many who take the line of least resistance and who eschew those things that are "not done." This is true when such a man is in the right as .well as when he is in the wrong. For being unlike most other men Niemoller paid to the extent of eight years of detention in varying degrees; and though he did his best to break Nazi despotism when he realised what it was like beneath its label, he did not break with Nazism merely in order to vault into the camp of democracy or some other political principle. On the contrary, after his liberation this year, he expressed the opinion that Germans were not .fit for democracy in the sense of "government of the people, by the people, for the people"; that they preferred government by a leader to government by the people, their prime interest being not in governing but in being well governed. So far as Germany and Germans are concerned, he did not in any way kneel at the democratic altar; and his whole career as a Churchman seems to imply that the political tree must be judged not by its promise but by its fruits —a principle which chimes very imperfectly with the practice of governing peoples by party-political propaganda without regard to real facts. From the few glimpses that have been offered of Niemoller in his post-war expression, one might picture him as following the instruction of Christ to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's. Does not the whole history of the world down to this moment prove the limitations of all political systems, of whatever kind, and the incapacity of man to find any real uplift except through the channels of the spirit?

The text from which Niemoller actually did preach—a few hours after his liberation by the U.S. Fifth Army —was an all-sufficient elevation of the spiritual over the temporal. It is said that the following text had been long chosen by "him for the moment of his liberation: "Behold? the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave Me alone; and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me. ... In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world —St. John 16:32-33 (King James version)." For Germans this is a special message, yet by no means for Germans alone. Niemoller, it is reported, "is certain that the Church holds Germany's only hope for the future" —and (the Security Council notwithstanding) the future of victors as well as vanquished. After all, how many political systems can bear the uncompromising searchlight of a man like Niemoller, blessed (Or cursed) with that inconvenient habit of looking below the surface instead of merely taking things as read? "Our people," says the German pastor, "now know that all false idealisms are worthless." All political ideologies, whatever their degree of honesty or dishonesty, rest, in the last analysis, on the spiritual life of the people; and the post-war era presents, says Niemoller, "both to Catholicism and Protestantism a tremendous challenge."