LOOKING BACK

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 65, Issue 5493, 3 July 1942, Page 5

LOOKING BACK

WHERE WE FAILED “There is something profoundly irritating- in a new school of thought, particularly virulent since America went to war, which preaches that the trouble with the American people is that they have spent the last twenty years in wilful blindness, crass materialism, or selfish hedonism, thus neglecting the true values of life, which are the constant fight for freedom, sacrifice, heroism, and so on. To condemn the America of the last twenty years is just as futile and unfair as to condemn France for the same period. That both the Americans and the French, along with most other people, were slow to grasp the danger that confronted them is not to be disputed. But it is not they that sinned. Their trouble—our trouble—is that w’e have tried to live like civilised human beings in spite of the fact that in our midst was a people, the Germans, intent on bringing us all down to their level of barbarism. It may have been foolish. It certainly was inprovident and dangerous. It was not wicked nor sinful.”—From “The Making of Tomorrow,” by Raoul de Sales.