FAGGOT AND SWORD

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21462, 8 April 1933, Page 1 (Supplement)

FAGGOT AND SWORD

BY MATANGA

STONES THAT REBOUND

Will Hitlerism fall, unwittingly, on its own sword? If history is to be trusted, this may speedily happen. Ihe Nazi marching orders brook no challenge. They threaten death to e\ciy foe, lire intolerant of every user of other shibboleths, seek to crush wherever protest is thought to offer opposition. A few brief weeks have seen a sweeping movement to rid Germany of elements deemed alien. Political power has given a chance to carry to terrible lengths the old quarrel with Marxian disciples, and the opportunity has been seized with a ruthlessness of which the Mussolini model knows nothing. Now the anti-Semitic purpose is acknowledged with a frank brutality that has no bounds. Communist and Jew may not go down " in one red burial blent," but they are equally to be disfranchised, despoiled, driven out. According to the Nazi creed, both are pests to be uprooted. It matters nothing that their outlooks differ, that many of the hated Jews have been of service to the country, have been as thoughtful of its financial recovery as the Marxians are wantonly reckless. They seem to stand in the way of national, Aryan advance. That is enough. Nazi Germany must be rid of them, and woe to any lifting a voice on their behalf. So crude and cruel an outburst of intolerance breaks strangely on this age of much charity of mind, yet it is by 110 means solitary. A world reputedly devoted. to law outgrows with criminal slowness recourse to faggot and sword. It is not long since Smyrna was diabolically burnt, its Greek Christians slaughtered mercilessly in tho streets or hounded into the sea to be shot or as they tried to swim to safety. No feat of memory is needed to recall tho torture and massacre of over a million Armenians by fanatical Turks and the indescribable barbarities inflicted on two millions hunted out of Anatolia. Fiendish hatred in the name of religion can still be mad with bloodlust; and the insane Bolshevik, in spite of all that is said by smooth apologists for Soviet Russia, has shown that pagan fear of religion can yet delight in murdering devout priests and people by the thousand. These things, you say, are not typical of the West—Turkey has reformed and Russian commissars have slackened in their orgies of persecution; but this is to say no more than that the West is not typical of the world —and now Germany adopts the pogrom. The spectacle is no less humbling than amazing. That the persecutor, pious or impious, is still abroad makes sad and shamefaced thinking. It brings, too, a revived conviction that those taking the sword shall perish by the sword. Repression and Reaction Revolt is fed by repression. Be persecution never so relentless, it invites reaction. Its murders lead to its own suicide. At times, to be sure, it has the appearance of complete triumph. Cathari and Albigenses were persecuted out of existence by the Dominican onslaught and the Inquisition. Reforming zeal in Spain, Italy and Bohemia was stamped to death. But Tertullian's word about the blood of martyrs and the seed of the Church is accredited by centuries of witness; the spirit of Wickliffe and Huss and Tyndalo is unsilcmced; no breath of hate has been able to put out Latimer's " candle, and the Smithfield fires hare lit many a path for faith. Souls thrive on hard fare. Never reached the-Jewish people such heights of splendid vision as in the days of oppression and exile. Constantine did Christianity a doubtful good by establishing it in official eminence. Perhaps Nero and Diocletian were its better friends. Tho truth that lurks in these things is, nevertheless, not the whole truth, nor does it justify the intolerance that quaintly serves the hated cause _ and ruins itself. A by-product of its bitterness may emerge in tho narrow, unseeing antagonism it sometimes engenders. An apostolic sword was savagely whipped from its scabbard when unfaith and bigotry laid hands on Selfless Love in Gethsemane. Not all the martyrs have gone to the stake with the joyous sublimity of Rowland Taylor. The oppressed have often striven to turn the weapons of evil against their users, manifesting an equal enmity. No persecutors have outmatched in hideous zeal some recreant to the creed downtrodden. Such facts are chastening and admonitory. When all is said, the horrible truth remains—persecution is at heart a more damnable sin than the heresy it would overwhelm.. And it damages its cause. Stones flung at Stephen bruised deeply the soul of Paul consenting to his death. Voltaire's Service Well it is, also, to remember that tolerance has at times been nobl> taught by those aloof from religion. There was the,case of Jean Calas, which became, through Voltaire s vigorous denunciation, the beginning of a new. chapter in toleration. Jean was a, reputable tradesman of Toulouse. Late one evening his elder son was found hanged in a warehouse. Good reason existed —in his gambling habits and proneness to fits of melancholy—for believing that the young man died by his own hand. Popular talk, however, accused the father or some other member of the family, suspected of taking this terrible means of preventing the son's " contemplated conversion to Catholicism." This accusation was supported in high places, and the family, one of its domestics and a guest were brought to trial. It is now known that some witnesses against them were deluded, others are thought to have been bribed. A cogent defence was presented, but the father was sentenced, by a local parliamentary vote of eight to five, to torture and death on the wheel. He was thus put to death, and his property was confiscated. Tho surviving son was banished for life but was captured by unscrupulous monks. Tho daughters were immured in a convent. The guest was acquitted. Jean's widow fled to Switzerland, and there won the sympathy of Voltaire, whose book Sur la Tolerance " brought the case before public notice. He proved that it was the outcome of religious fanaticism. A new trial followed, and tho national parliament at Paris three years later (1765) declared Calas jjnd his family innocent. Louis XV. gave the stricken family .'IO,OOO livres, but tho perpetrators of tho injustice were never brought to book. However, tho case became the subject of frequent literary comment in the course of the next century, and Voltaire's exposure bore wholesome fruit. Persistence of Persecution

Persecution on religious grounds has nevertheless persisted, and scandalous events in our own time demonstrate that the spirit of it has by no means been exorcised. Bolshevik and Nazi, for all their fundamental 'difference', turn easily to deeds of violent oppression, using legal or quasi-legal process. Hitler, no less than Stalin and Litvinoff, would doubtless build without difficulty an argument based on political need, and all of their kind, whatever their various ranking, may explain as service to truth each measure of persecution. It is cruelly wrong, .and therefore ultimately futile. ' Magna est Veritas et praevalebit " is more than an adapted tag from Esdras: it is an unshakable pillar of the universe.