"In any case, I did not believe then, as I do not believe now, that you
could punish whole peoples or even solitary individuals into being better
persons. This seemed a renegade, discredited and utterly archaic concept.
It has been tried throughout history. Far from being an instrument of
redemption, which is punishment's only moral justification, it is an
increasingly self-defeating weapon in the hands of dangerously one-sided
men.
I know only that I came out of prison (Japanese POW camp in Java, WWII)
longing passionately - and I am certain my longing was shared by all the
thousands of men who had been with me - that the past would be recognised
instantly as the past and instantly buried before it spread another form
of putrefaction in the spirit of our time. I thought that the only hope
for the future lay in an all-embracing attitude of forgiveness of the
peoples who had been our enemies. Forgiveness, my prison experience had
taught me, was not mere religious sentimentality; it was as fundamental a
law of the human spirit as the law of gravity.
If one broke the law of gravity one broke ones neck; if one broke this law
of forgiveness one inflicted a mortal wound on one's spirit and became
once again a member of the chain-gang of mere cause and effect from which
life has laboured so long and painfully to escape."
Laurens Van Der Post
The Night of the New Moon, pg 123
1970
John Scott
jls@waikato.ac.nz
--"John SCOTT" <jls@mngt.waikato.ac.nz>
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