Discrimination The Other Way

Australia's Prime Minister, John Curtin, says that he has received official reports that the Japanese are "Discriminating" against white war prisoners in Hong Kong. The non-whites, he points out, are said to be getting more food and better accommodations from the conquering Nipponese. His report further charges that the Japanese are forcing white Europeans to pull rickshaws for Indians and Chinese.

This is awful to contemplate! Such indignities! Such leveling of pride! Already "discrimination" is coming to the fore in the Pacific phase of the war, and we can discern why. Picture white Europeans and Eutralians hitched up to flimsy Chinese rickshaws, trotting through the winding gutted streets of war-torn Hong Kong, with swarthy, turbaned Indians and slant-eyed Orientals as the passengers. And think of all this service and no pay!

The inclination of colored people, both in America and elsewhere, to laugh at the plight of the white war prisoners of the Japanese and to say "they had it coming to them for keeping their feet and on our backs so long," should be curbed. The Japanese are crafty and play politics from 'way back like the British. They know human psychology. They reason that if colored people arrayed on the side of the Allies against them can be brought to believe that the Japs are really fighting a war to make things easier for them, then the Allies will have trouble at home, and consequently will be unable to put up a united front so necessary in this total war. Make no mistake about it. The colored American is Christian, as are his white fellow Americans, the Japanese worship idols. The fundamental difference in religions and culture and customs overshadow any side issue of color, and Negro peonage and oppression under Japanese rule would be no less than it is under American and British.

The discrimination shown white war prisoners in the Philippines, Burma, French Indo-China and elsewhere in the Pacific is aimed to eventually take in every believer in democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of thought, and freedom of body and soul.

--Sepia Socialite