Mr Shand and the Rain of Fire (an open letter)

Dear Mr Shand,

Many of us were surprised and enlightened to read the report of your impassioned outburst in a recent session of Parliament, when the possible admission of Miss Rice-Davies for a tour of entertainment in New Zealand was being discussed. Your language left us in no doubt concerning your personal views on this matter. You referred to this young Englishwoman as a ‘gangster’s moll’ and implied that some unstated moral harm would result from her admission to this country as a travelling entertainer. Some people might consider your statement an exhibition of gross prejudice. After all, the Profumo case is now dead and buried. The gutter press has turned its attention to new topics. It would have been possible for you to let the dead bury their dead, and allow this young person to visit our shores. The private lives of entertainers are rarely free from some taint of scandal – but this need not prevent us from accepting their contribution to popular culture – and our country has a grave lack of local talent in the field.

But you chose the sterner, higher road – and we must congratulate you, for we think we know the secret source of your decision. It is your sensitive awareness of the enormous value of moral purity which has led you to this hard decision. Your sensitivity to this virtue is so great that even the whiff of an old scandal makes you recoil as a housewife might at the sight of a weta in her linen cupboard. Do not be ashamed of it, Mr Shand! We do not wholly share your sensitivity, being perhaps a little coarser in grain – or rather, in us it operates in a slightly different area. The rain of unquenchable phosphorus which our New Zealand artillery is at present unloading on Vietnamese villagers horrifies us much more than any breach of the sexual code. Yet we can understand that people differ – one may follow St Francis, another St Jerome. In some respects your crystalline purity fills us with awe. Another man might have felt there was a danger of making a fool of himself in public, of playing the Puritan in a worldly modern age – but if such a thought occurred to you, it did not deter you. For you, the virtue of purity had to triumph at all costs. You said what you had to say; you did what you had to do – and while we marvel, we also admire you for it.

There are facts we must bring to your notice – facts which have wholly escaped your attention. We refer to the social disorder which has developed in South Vietnam now that more than one hundred thousand American troops are quartered in that country. The bar girls of Saigon have not been sufficient in number to cope with the brunt of the sexual demands of this new army of crusaders. A number of ugly incidents involving sexual assaults made by soldiers against Vietnamese womenfolk have steadily worsened the relationship between the people of that nation and their saviours from overseas. We quote a leading Vietnamese Catholic priest, militant againstpage 736 Communism, when we say that the Saigon Government will very soon be obliged to establish ‘sanitary conveniences’ for the use of allied troops. The daughters of the rich are unlikely to volunteer for service in Army brothels – no, it is much more probable that young women already destitute and parentless after the rain of fire has fallen on their villages will choose this way of life as a way of staying alive. It is even possible, Mr Shand, that your young heroic New Zealanders serving in Vietnam may be tempted from the path of virtue. A man less sensitive to this issue might shrug it off as one of the unfortunate by-products of total war. But we have observed you, Mr Shand. We know that you are a deeply committed man. The man who decided to exclude an English entertainer from New Zealand, because her past was not what it should have been, cannot condone the establishing of Army brothels or allow our young men to run the danger of disease and moral ruin. We know that if it came to the bitter test you would rather take a gun and fight on the side of the Viet Cong – whose old-fashioned philosophy includes the intention to eliminate all prostitution – than to permit a danger you consider more terrible than gas, napalm, phosphorus or the poisoning of crops. We wait eagerly, Mr Shand, for a public statement from you that our troops must be withdrawn from Vietnam. What else can you do? After all, you are not a hypocrite?