Content note: Repeats First World War atrocity stories, including invented ones, and their wording. This object is shown as it was published. Why
There are two things which cannot be permitted during war. Firstly, favourable comment on the enemy—instances of this have been given in the Introduction. Secondly, criticism of the country to which you belong cannot be publicly expressed. Suppression of opinion of this kind is all very well, but the deliberate distortion of it is a peculiarly malicious form of falsehood.
The late Dr. Weston, Bishop of Zanzibar, a great champion of the African natives, wrote an open letter to General Smuts, in which he said:
It is political madness at this time of day to try and subject a weaker people to serfdom, or to slavery. ... It is moral madness. . . . Thirdly, it is so definitely an anti-Christian policy that no one who adopts it can any longer justify the Gospel of Christ to the African peoples. . . .
In a pamphlet quoted in the Church Times, October 8, 1920, the Bishop of Zanzibar wrote :
When I wrote my open letter to General Smuts I called it “ Great Britain’s Scrap of Paper : Will She Honour It ? ” I was alluding to her promise of justice to the weaker peoples. The Imperial Government took my letter, cut but some inconvenient passages, and published it under the title, “ The Black Slaves of Prussia.” I suggest that East Africans have now become the “ Black Serfs of Great Britain.”
In the Life of the Bishop of Zanofbar, published in 1926, the letter appears in its garbled form as the Bishop’s opinion of the German treatment of their “ black slaves.”
This is a good instance of a quite deliberate perversion by the Government and also an instance of how difficult it is for the truth, even when published, to overtake a lie and to reach the people most concerned.
Falsehood in War-Time, Arthur Ponsonby. Published in the United Kingdom in 1928, more than 95 years ago, so in the public domain in the United States. Ponsonby died in 1946, so the text is also in the public domain in countries that count the author's life plus 70 years. Provenance and rights.