AUSTRALIA: The Futility of Hatred

The debate waxed angry in Australia's House of Representatives. The government's attempt to ratify the John Foster Dulles blueprint for Pacific peace stirred old hatreds of the Japanese. Cried Alex Downer, 42, who spent 3½ years in a Japanese prison camp: "We are asked to endorse an act of folly for which future generations will have to pay."

To counter Old Soldier Downer, the Liberal coalition put up a speaker whose war record entitled him to talk "in the same fashion. Interior Minister W. S. Kent Hughes, 56, fought in Gallipoli and Palestine in World War I, was a Rhodes scholar and an Olympic hurdler between wars, and in World War II fought in Malaya as a staff officer of the 8th division. Captured at the same time as Downer, he also spent 3½ years in Japanese prison camps. Said Kent Hughes in a dramatic and emotional speech: "Only those who have passed along the purgatorial path of ill-treatment, murder, lashings, and every brutality you can think of ... who have been driven to work in torrential rains and jungles . . . know how often we woke up screaming when we came home, and are still waking with nightmares." Then he abruptly changed his manner. "We also realize," he said, "the futility of trying to build anything on a foundation of continuous revenge or continuous hatred."

Amid Labor protests, the House of Representatives ratified the Japanese Peace Treaty, 54 to 46.