THE PROPAGANDA OF HATE

New Zealand Tablet, 18 March 1920, Page 15

THE PROPAGANDA OF HATE

In letters to the Bishops of various countries the Holy Father Benedict XV. has been continuing his mission of peace by urging that men should strive for real harmony among the nations and lay aside the passions and hatreds of the days of the great war (says a writer in the London Catholic Times). There is need of this good counsel from the Father of the Faithful, for, sad to say, there are still, even amongst Catholics, men who use the old formulas of hate, and amongst politicians and journalists there are not a few "ho make it their policy to continue the evil propaganda of war time. They seem to want to make the peace a ‘‘peace of hatred and ill-will,” a war in disguise. It is worth noting that this frame of mind is to lie found mostly among comfortable folk, who made their profit in war time out of playing up to the passion of the moment, civilians who were never seriously troubled by shortness of food or fuel for their homes, " and never in danger except perhaps during an air raid. One does not find the soldiers preaching hatred in peace time. One of them has lately been speaking wise words of good counsel on the subject. “Tear that long Italian word propaganda off the back of the hate agency,” says General Sir lan Hamilton, “and you will find underneath it a very ugly little Anglo-Saxon word. Lying is bad enough when it is carried on by amateurs, but when it is organised by professionals, then, believe me, we shall have "to say good-bye for ever to peace on earth. I say to you, if you wish for peace, then away with hate propaganda. But you will not be able at once to stop this evil propaganda, for hate and envy have found fit instruments to their hands.” Sir lan Hamilton is right" in saying that the warpropaganda was largely based on lying. Evil deeds done by the enemy were exaggerated; kindly deeds were not even mentioned. And horrors that never happened were described with the deft touches of detail that make a lie look like truth. - "Wild stories from the war front, told by hysterical women or shell-shocked men, were treated as unassailable evidence. There seemed to be an idea that our men at the Front would not fight well, and the people at home would not support them properly, unless they could be persuaded that they were fighting against incarnate devils. ” In the early days of the war Lord Roberts, in the last message he addressed to the British people before going to his death in France, protested against atrocitymongering. Even if evil deeds were done by the enemy, he said, one should not harp upon them, for the result be to produce irregular reprisals and make the war a horror. But he was not listened to by the sensationalists of the press and the platform, and the result was what lie predicted. Mr. Stephen Graham tells us what happened, in his book A Private in the Guards a record of his own experiences : “It seems that in former wars one granted to the enemy a great deal of human dignity. Though he was a foe, he was a fellow-creature, and was saved by his Re-

deemer as much as we were. But the opinion cultivated in. the army regarding the Germans was that they were a sort of vermin like plague rats that had to be exterminated. ... ‘Killing Huns’ was our cheerful task, as one of our leaders told us. The idea of taking prisoners was very unpopular among the men. A good soldier was one who would not take a prisoner. If called upon to escort prisoners to the cage, it could always be justifiable to kill them on the way and say they tried to escape. ‘Thank God, this battalion’s always been blessed with a C.O. who didn’t believe in taking prisoners,’ says a sergeant.” Mr. Graham describes the capture of a German post. The little garrison surrenders. “Leave to shoot prisoners, sir?” a sergeant asks of his officer (described as a “poet” who had published some pretty lyrics). Leave is given, and the prisoners are killed. He tells how a bombinginstructor taught his men;—“The second-bayonet man kills the wounded. You cannot afford to be encumbered by wounded enemies lying about your feet. Don’t be squeamish.” So the hate propaganda at home produced a code of murder at the Front. Exaggeration and Fiction. There were, of course, some very ugly truths for the propagandists to work upon. But they added lies. The Allied armies advanced over every yard of ground the Germans had ever occupied. Strange to say, they found no trace of that horrible factory for boiling down the dead and extracting fats and chemicals for supply pur—the Kadaververwcrtkunfjsanstalt of which the Daily Mail and other papers told sickening stories day after day. It was all based on a German allusion to the utilisation, not of corpses, but of the carcases of horses killed in action or dying in the lines. It was based, too, on ignorance of German, for Kadaver means a “carcase,” and a “corpse” is Leieh-nam. This ignorance of German, by the way, was responsible for other fictions. Thus wo were told that German atrocities were not the acts of lawless and cruel men here and there in the enemy’s ranks, but part of a system, and the proof was that Clausewitz, whose book is the German text-book of war, had said that “war must be waged- with ruthlessness.” He never said anything of the kind. What he does lay down is that war must be waged with Bur hsichtlosiy he it , and the long word does not mean “ruthlessness,” but merely “determination,” or, literally, the habit of not looking backwards. Then there was the story, since commemorated by a group of sculpture, of the Canadian officer crucified by the “Huns.” The Canadian Record Office knew nothing of it. A man was found ready to swear an affidavit about it, and then it was discovered that he had never been out of England. An American journalist pointed out that it was the same story told during the Civil War of Confederates crucifying a Federal officer of negro troops, and remarked; “The story was believed at the time, and served its purpose, but who believes it now?” These stories served their purpose. They are still used to keep up hate in the days of peace.