Poisonous Anti-British Journalism

in the Wake of the Pacific War

SOME nasty specimens of the genus Journalist Americanus have been wandering through the Pacific Islands lately, and releasing some of their ac customed poison against the British Empire. White people in the South Seas generally look upon the United States as their friend and protector; but it is well to remember that, within USA, there are important elements which hate all things British —and especially, it seems, these isolated sections of the great British Empire.

Hereunder is an article which was published, late in 1948, in an American newspaper of pronounced anti-British bias. It is re-printed in order to show South Pacific readers the distortions and lies which are circulated deliber ately in North America as propaganda against Britain. Our own comments are added, where comment seemed called for.

IT was five years ago that the Americans landed at Tarawa, occupied early in the war by Japan without resistance from Britain, the owner of the Gilbert Island group. It was six years ago that Ameri cans began working their way back up the coast of New Guinea, where the Japs had lodged themselves without opposition from the British Empire. It is also six years ago since Americans landed on Guadalcanal, another imperial holding, and began the slow work of running out the Japs.

Actually, some British Empire troops— Australians in New Guinea, New Zealanders and Fijians in the Solomons—co-operated with the Americans, and were supposed to have done a reasonably good job in places like Bougainville, and the Kokoda Trail. However, let that pass. . . . The Americans did not come into the South Pacific to save the British Empire. They came because the Japs, in the beginning, had given the Americans in Hawaii and the Philippines the same kind of hiding that they gave the British in Singapore and the Australians in New Guinea; and the Americans, accordingly, could not advance directly upon Japan from the east. Instead, the Americans had to attack Japan south about—that is, they had to work around the Jap eastern flank and establish attack bases in the South and South-west Pacific Islands.

t CORRESPONDENTS who have been J filtering back into these remote places of the world for a memorial look find the British colonial administration installed in its old position, but sorely troubled and with its authority shaken.

True, the British were playing cricket on Tarawa, but C. F. R. Williams, the dis trict officer in charge, confessed that times had changed. The natives, he said, had loved the Americans who came and brought with them at once deliverance and abundant wealth. They resented the return of the British and the restoration of imperial rule. There were disturbances and some prosecutions were necessary.

Which is plain lying. There has been acute restlessness in some of the more primitive Melanesian islands, but not among the Gilbertese.

THE District officer thought the ex planation lay in the fact that for

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thousands of years the natives had sur vived on the products of the coconut, pandanus, and breadfruit trees, and that their view of what was possible expanded too rapidly when Americans began giving them food, bedding, cigarettes, clothing, priceless utensils, and bicycles, which per mit them to ride between islands at low tide along the reefs.

True enough. The aftermath of American wartime luxuriousness is seen in innumerable administration headaches, in all the groups touched at by the lavishly-equipped troops.

The “PIM” would dearly like to see some atoll natives riding their bicycles along the reefs at low tides! McCormick journalism at its best!

IN Guadalcanal it was much the same story, but conditions were even more aggravated. A few Americans are still stationed near what was Henderson field, engaged in graves registration and com munications. One day they were ap proached by a delegation of natives who laid down 3,000 dollars in worn American currency and asked their help and leader ship in driving out the British. British colonial administrators report that the natives have erected warehouses and wait in the confident belief that one day a great American convoy will return, bear ing automobiles, refrigerators, cases of Biscuits, and all of the things of the modern world to go into their palm huts.

In New Guinea there is a similar “cargo cult.”

There is also a new political develop ment in the Solomon Islands, known as the “Marching Rule.” This is an organ isation of head chiefs, area chiefs, village chiefs, and sub-chiefs, with the chain of command marching from the central authority through the jungles and into the most remote village. It taxes, con

ducts trials, maintains jails, and requires

communal service quite apart from the British rule.

The matter came to a head when the nine head chiefs of Malaita appeared be fore the British district commissioner with 7,000 followers at their backs and demanded 16 dollars a week for all natives working on the coconut plantations. This impudence was dealt with by jailing 19 of the leaders for periods up to six years hard labour. ft surely takes an American anti-British reporter’s imagination to decorate the drab tale of the “Marching Rule” in the Solomons.

The Malaita-men are very primitive folk; and they, in particular, and Solomons natives generally, were greatly disturbed in their ways by their treatment at the hands of the richly endowed, over-generous and wasteful American Servicemen. When the Americans passed on, and normal conditions returned, the natives did not return cheerfully to their village life.

As the months passed, and Father Christmas did not come back, they grew sulky and non co-operative; certain political ideas planted

cunningly among them by certain Americans began to sprout; and so we got a queer kind of movement called “Marching Rule” —which apparently is the Melanesian attempt to pro nounce “Marxian Law.” The British officials for over a year were very patient and for bearing with these children of the jungle; but when “Marching Rule” began to set up its own Courts and deal out punishment to so called malefactors, the British acted firmly, and put a score of leaders into gaol. “March ing Rule” thereupon faded out—and is still out.

BUT these delusions, as the colonial ad ministrators regard them, persist and have the colonial powers badly worried.

Some members of the administration think it may take generations for the effect of the American occupation to wear off, and that the growing pains of the natives who have awakened to the charms of a life that must exist somewhere in the outside world can only be ended by long range education, if at all.

It has been deucedly annoying, indeed,

that the Americans ever had to intrude into the sylvan if malarial paradise of the south seas and stir up a folk who used to give their labour freely or at the most

for a few pence, and who were satisfied with a little cotton cloth and trade goods, That stuff about the four freedoms took hold when anybody in his right mind

should have known that it was simply a parcel of chitchat.

Is it any wonder that we are having endless trouble witln black and brown and yellow People. aU round the north-western edges of the Pacific, when American millionaire news paper owners send long-haired scribes across the world to dish up that kind of stuff? Races and nations do not gain freedom and high standards of living by the mere fact of being born—they achieve these things, and usually through many generations of sociological struggle. The idea of a world in which white and black and yellow can sit down amicably together to an equal share of life’s good things is pure and impractical idealism—and will re main so for many generations yet to conic.

It is so easy for the uninstructed mobs to be lieve the American reporter’s jeering rubbish —they want to believe it.