Eyewash’

Relations Between

White And Brown

A Plea Against ‘Sentimental Eyewash’

“T ET'S have no. sentimental eye-wash,”

JL A said the man on the Hythe flying boat, pulling out of Indonesia after a lifetime among the native races. ‘‘The natives had their own countries for centuries—and what did they make of them?

“What they’re after to-day—or, rather, what a small minority of westernised natives are after —is not their countries, but the countries we’ve created.

“Did they make the railways or sink the oil wells? Did they know how to make and use rubber? Did they do any thing about building roads or setting up schools and hospitals? No, of course not.

“All that is white man’s work. Now that it’s pretty well done and some of the natives have learnt what the Yanks call the ‘know-how’, they just want to take it away from the people who made it.

“If they want their own countries, let them have them, but first let the white man take away all that’s built —the rail ways and roads and hospitals and oil wells and rubber plantations and all the rest. If they can, let ’em build it all from nothing as we did.

“We’ve slaved and worked in terrible climates yes, for our own profits, I know, but also for the benefit of the natives. We’ve struggled against ignor ance and barbarism and God knows what and we’ve met with resistance at almost every step.”

THE man in the Hythe was an engineer. He had constructed and run a tropical railway for years— had the natives oiling engines, repairing, working.-Then he was moved and natives ran the line. It went to bits. Service maintenance and supervision deteriora ted. Finally a bridge buckled and killed people and the engineer was blamed for it because he first built it.

So giving the islands back to the natives ia a £ sloppy sentiment to the engineer.

George Borodin, Russian-born surgeon, of London’s Harley-st., who persists in writing interesting but wordy books about everywhere he goes, summed up differently from this engineer, who travelled with him part of the way back from Australia to England.

Borodin and other flying passengers were fired on at Batavia, attacked by a mob in Rangoon, taken Under police guard to their Calcutta hotel because of riots and a curfew, lost all possessions in Basra in a raid by self-styled patriots, and were again hotel-bound during dis turbances in Cairo.

So Borodin, who had come lazily down through the Pacific islands and Papua to Australia, then home above the civil strife of southern Asia, saw things dif ferently from the engineer who had lived close to the natives and had been their white man boss.

He found the sudden collapse of the white man during the Japanese invasion in 1942 had “freed” Asia in the native mind. But the white man had with drawn only to gather strength, and he in turn swept the Japanese back.

This action and counter-action was a

fundamental reason for the confusion of thought found among educated natives of the Pacific and Far East.

For a brief period they were free of the white man’s subjection: they saw him exposed as human, With huftnan weaknesses, as themselves. His return showed his power was unlimited.

Underlying native separatist and in dependence movements were the re mains of an inferiority complex compen sating itself by iover-aggressive asser tions of equality, a familiar psychological picture.—From a review of a new book by Dr. G. Borodin,