Moral Poison

Must we hate the enemy to win the war? That debate was going on, hotly and heavily, in the New York Times. The affirmative had been opened by Rex Stout, bewhiskered detective story writer, chairman of the Writers' War Board, with an article called We Shall Hate, or We Shall Fail.

Stout wanted to rouse hatred against those Germans "who accept, either actively or passively, the doctrine of the German master race . . . [or] who, reluctant to join the Nazis, nevertheless failed, through lack of courage or conviction, to prevent the Nazis from . . . plunging the world into this filthy swamp of destruction." In other words, hate most of Germany.

Stout urged this bitterness primarily as a safeguard against chickenhearted United Nations action at the peace table. Said he: "If we do not . . . [hate] those who do or tolerate the evil, the temptation will be irresistible at one point or another, to compromise with it instead of destroying it."

And the Christian doctrine of love for one's enemies? Stout called it "worse than double-talk . . . plain nonsense."

Prompt and profuse was the rebuttal, made in many letters to the Times and in an article, Hate Is Moral Poison, by Dr. WT. Russell Bowie, longtime pacifist of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary. Wrote he:

". . . Wars are not won by dosing people up with a lot of synthetic hatred. They can be effectively lost that way, as Hitler will find out. This nation had better take its chance of winning, not by glandular virus, but by clear thinking, positive purpose and intelligently disciplined will. . . . Hatred is not something that discharges itself upon one object and then conveniently disappears. It is a poison in the blood, an emotional debauch. . . . People who should get the habit of hating all German Nazis . . . would get so that they would just have to hate somebody."

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