The Charlotte News
THURSDAY, June 20, 1940
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: Cash continues his outrage at the fall of France to the
Nazis while the United States, in the political strangle-grip of isolationists,
stood outside the fight and watched.
Note that in "We Are In", he asserts, quite accurately, that
"Mexico swarms with Nazis" and that Hitler would seek to control
Latin America before he would seek to invade Russia. Just three months later
Cash would seek his Guggenheim Foundation grant to spend a year in Mexico City
to write a novel. Of course, the Russian invasion, Operation Barbarosa, would
begin June 22, 1941, just two weeks after Cash arrived in Mexico. The steadfastness
of the British in the fall of 1940 prevented the further domino disaster which
would have inevitably followed otherwise in South America and quite possibly in
Mexico. And while Russia plainly did not have the machinery of war to withstand
the sophisticated armor of the Nazis, the people, including old and young
alike, carried the day to man the barricades with archaic weaponry but with a
force of will seldom seen in the world since; this heroic defense stalled the
assault and caught the German invasion force in an early and brutal winter
which gave time for a military build-up by the following spring by which time
America had joined the fight, thus helping to split the German army on two
fronts and finally halting Hitler's aggression in Europe and eventually turning
the tide of the war for the first time.
Trial
by M. D.
The Coroner Ignores Main Points in
Our Complaint
Dr. Fred Austin, the coroner, felt that his office had been unjustly
criticized by editorials in The News, and so yesterday he asked The News to put
before the public his side of the case. It was done, as always. There is
nothing any self-respecting paper will do more quickly than to give space to
views and opinions in rebuttal of its own.
But when Dr. Austin's statement was made, he left a good deal to be said.
The matters of cost, hand-picked regular juries, autopsies and the like are of
some concern but beside the principal points made by The News. These were:
1) That of 29 manslayers arrested in Charlotte during the period
July-April, ten were turned loose by the coroner;
2) That no State's attorney or prosecutor was on hand at these hearings
to offset counsel for the defense and to let murder come out;
3) That whether or not the office of coroner carried the authority to
conduct trials rather than inquests, the lawyers would have to say; but that
for our part we thought it absurd for one trained in anatomy rather than in the
law to conduct murder trials.
Which Is Much Too Weak To Convince
Anybody
The Nazi hog is trying to pump up a case to justify the brutal itch which
he is unable to resist--the itch to destroy France now that he is in a position
to do it. Tuesday the Volkischer Beobachter, Hitler's own organ, bawled:
"We remember with the greatest clarity the
gray hours of the morning of Nov. 11, 1918, when the same Weygand who today is
the French Generalissimo dictated to an heroic foe which lost honorably
conditions of an Armistice more brutal than anything since the destruction of
Carthage."
It is, of course, a falsehood. The Armistice actually did nothing to
insure the disarming of the German nation to the point that he could not afford
to renew the fight. All the rest was left to be settled at Versailles. And the
"heroic foe who had lost honorably" was in fact the same infamous
horde which holds France in its power today. Then, as now, it had come charging
into the French land to burn and destroy it, to kill millions of Frenchmen, to
send their wives and children to death or ruin as refugees.
And even so, the hog might do well to remember that the war is not over
yet.
If Republicans Do This, They
Deserve Oblivion
If the Republican Party attempts, as rumors say it will, to wage the
coming campaign on the ground of "Keep Us Out of War!" and by
painting the President as a war monger bent on getting us into the struggle
which is none of our business, it will deserve to be blasted into oblivion once
and for all. And we think it will be. For it will have demonstrated that there
is no energy and no courage and no honesty left in it, that its greatest value
is pure partisanship, and that to gain their ends its ruling leaders are
perfectly willing to gamble with the destiny of America.
The people of this country now know that the claim that the struggle in
Europe is "none of our d---- business" (Isolationist Hugh Johnson's
phrase, not ours) is the most dangerous delusion ever fobbed off on us. And
anybody who thinks he can resurrect it, to the end of getting into office, is
mistaken. Anybody who tries it deserves nothing but to be blasted out of public
life at the ballot box.
There is only one way in which anybody can undertake at present to promise
at present to keep us out of war. And that is quite simply by undertaking to
make a deal with Hitler, under which Latin-America would be handed over to his
influence, the bases surrounding us given up, the American economy tied to his,
and the American Government and way of life Nazified. And the good sense of the
people is well aware of it.
The Republican convention will be well advised to ignore the counsel of
the die-hard professional politicians who are attempting to stampede it into
this thing to heed its enlightened leaders, such as Col. Frank Knox.
Hanging to Words Won't Change
These Facts
All this talk about staying out of the war is largely beside the point.
In real effect, we are already at war. Indeed, we have been at war ever since
Adolf Hitler began to appear on the horizon with his dream of world domination.
Merely, we did not know it.
And now, for that matter, we are at war in a quite technical sense. For
any non-belligerent government to sell arms to a belligerent government was
explicitly made an act of war by the Hague Convention of 1907. We get around
that by the patent subterfuge of "selling" them to private American
firms in order that these might "re-sell" them to the Allied
Governments. It is the kind of subterfuge that Hitler continually indulged in.
But that, of course, does not change the fact that in reality they have legal
ground to attack us when they are ready.
No one, however, need spend any time bemoaning that. The decision was
taken at the behest of the President, with the full support of the Army and
Navy chieftains, and such experts and leaders as Black Jack Pershing and Col.
Frank Knox, and on the insistence of the American people. It did no more than
recognize what all but the die-hards now recognize--that our frontier was in
Europe after all. Moreover, whether Adolf Hitler has legal ground or no legal
ground will make slight difference in his plans. He had none against Austria,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium, but he invented them and went
right ahead.
Ultimately, we are involved in this war because of the Monroe Doctrine.
To that Doctrine more than any other one thing, we owe the fact that we have
been able to grow great while enjoying relative peace. And it is a remarkable
commentary on the usurpation by Congress of the executive function in foreign
affairs that only now has anybody thought it necessary first to get the okay of
Congress before again reiterating this basic premise of our existence.
Behind the Monroe Doctrine we have flourished. And we have had the Monroe
Doctrine ultimately because of the sea power of Great Britain. Until after
1906, there never was a time when we had any chance of successfully enforcing
the Doctrine without the support of the British navy.
And if the support of the British navy vanishes tomorrow we shall have to
face the nearly impossible task of defending the Doctrine alone.
Nobody in his senses will take stock of Hitler's "assurances"
that he has no designs on this hemisphere. They are identical with the
"assurances" he has given every appointed victim to date. And South
America is really the greatest prize at which the Axis aims. It is the only
great unexploited storehouse left on earth. There, precisely, and not in
Europe, is to be found the "lebensraum" about which we have heard so
much. Both Mussolini and his mouthpiece, Gayda, as well as many Hitlerian mouth
pieces, have tacitly or explicitly recognized the United States as the ultimate
great enemy, because, as they say, it plays the dog in a manger with
Latin-America. Their agents have been busy down there for years. Colonies have
been planted there with the explicit idea of revolution in mind.
Brazil, if you have forgotten, has already had a Nazi putsch.
Vargas put it down. Today Vargas is openly pro-Nazi himself. Uruguay is right
now uncovering a gigantic Nazi plot to seize the Government. The Chilean army
is honeycombed with Nazis. So is that of Guatemala, in throwing distance of the
Panama Canal. And Mexico swarms with Nazis.
Nor can we delude ourselves with the hope that Hitler will decide first
to take on Russia. Russia is a victim he can eat at leisure. Given years she
still cannot get ready to repel him, for the reason that she lacks the
necessary industrial establishment. But Hitler well knows the industrial power
of the United States, knows that if he does not strike quickly to seize and
hold, the United States will become too great a military power for him ever to
realize his Latin-American dream.
Framed Edition
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