The Charlotte News
Monday, June 24, 1940
FOUR EDITORIALS
Blum's
Aides
He Had Right and Center Company in
His Work
There is an assertion which is rapidly going the rounds which has it that
Leon Blum's Leftist Government is the main explanation of the collapse of
France.
Blum did his part all right, in dealing with the Communists whose only
aim was to disrupt and destroy, and in cutting hours and raising wages in the
arms industry at the time when France needed to turn every ounce of her energy
to arms production.
But Blum was not alone.
Who started the long parade of sellouts to the dictators? Pierre Laval,
the Centrist, with his constant playing up to Mussolini and his smirking
acquiescence in the Ethiopian business.
And who stood quietly by and watched conscription restored in Germany,
the Rhineland re-militarized in 1936? Pierre Etienne Flandin, an extreme
Rightest and one of the great arms manufacturers of France, a holder of large
interests in the German arms cartel.
And who arranged Munich? Daladier, the Centrist, with the backing of
Bonet, the Rightest, and Flandin, the Rightest, who had large holdings in the
Skoda works which he wanted to save.
And who was responsible for all those bad materials, paid for at the
price of the best, which Marshal Petain has openly denounced? Labor or the
manufacturer?
The Left did its full share to betray France, as everyone who knows the
recent history of that country well understands. But if we are to draw the
lesson rightly we had better observe, too, that the Center and the Right also
had their fill in the betrayal.
A Short Account of the History of
a Waterway
Most people think of the Suez Canal, which may figure prominently in the
news in the next few weeks, as having been built by the British, under
Disraeli.
But in point of fact it was built by a private French company, headed by
Ferdinand de Lesseps, who also made the first ill-fated attempt to build a
Canal across Panama. And the British actively opposed it, on the ground it was
an attempt on the part of France to interfere with British interests in the
East and Mediterranean. De Lesseps got his first concession from the Egyptian
Government in 1854. But the British blocked the necessary confirmation by the
Turkish Government for twenty years. Nevertheless, actual construction was
begun in 1859. And ten years later the Canal, a sea level waterway extending a
hundred miles, was formally opened.
Of the 400,000 shares of stock, more than half were subscribed by 21,000
individual French investors. Less than 3,000 were taken by Italian investors,
and none by British investors. But in 1875, Disraeli pulled a fast one, and for
a payment of about 4,000,000 pounds, bought the 177,642 shares owned by the
bankrupt Khedive Ismail of Egypt for the British Government--giving it control
of 44 per cent of the stock.
The Canal was subject to international regulation by a convention signed
at Constantinople in 1888--under which the Canal was always to be kept open to
the ships of all nations in peace or in war. But the British, who had already
closed it briefly in 1882, would close it for three days in the World War.
The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 gave the British the right to protect
the Canal until Egypt should be able to, and to station 10,000 troops and 400
planes there for that purpose.
The Sword May Not Finish All
Hitler's Enemies
Der Angriff, a stooge Nazi newspaper at Berlin, informs the world
that "we are determined to insure peace for hundreds of years to
come." The peace of death, it means. The peace of slavery for the earth
and mastery for the Nerrenvolk of old, the Germans.
And yet it may be that, even if the worst transpires and England falls
and the United States is undone, Der Angriff speaks a little too
certainly. In theory, the Nazi scheme is perfect. We are all to be disarmed.
Armed Nazi slaveholders will be stationed at strategic points, ready to stamp
out incipient revolution at the slightest move. The Gestapo is supposed to
penetrate into our lives to the point that the incipient rebel may be spotted
before he is aware of it himself, ruthlessly extinguished. By much the same
scheme the Romans succeeded in holding the mastery of the Mediterranean world
for 400 years. But the scope of Adolf's dreams is far wider, new ideas have
come into the world since the Romans, the hate that Adolf has loosed is
incalculable, and the mind of man is infinitely cunning.
But it may be that it will not be a matter of long years of waiting for
the "ravanche."
Already medical men are raising their voices to warn.
Behind the horseman whose name is the Sword his fellow aides in the
service of their master, Death, are beginning to gallop into view. Famine. The
wheat crop in Europe this year is the smallest in many years. And famine will
certainly sweep it if the United States does not feed it.
And behind Famine rides his invariable companion, Plague. The European
scene is ripe for great epidemics now. Given hunger, they will certainly come.
And not least to the Germans. For no man can say them nay at a border, and the
bodies of the Germans have been long weakened by half-starvation in preparation
for their great crime.
It is an ironic and a terrible thought that at last the pale riders of
the Apocalypse may be the saviors of civilization. Or if not civilization, at
least something out of which it can rise again. But it is a possibility which Der
Angriff cannot exorcise away.
Marshall Petain's Words Are Denied
by the Facts
Marshall Petain talks largely of "French honor," but it is all
too plain that the term now has little meaning.
France has ignominiously submitted to the most appalling and humiliating
terms ever imposed on a nation in modern times.
She is totally disarmed, two-thirds of her territories occupied by Nazis,
the Mediterranean area is to be occupied by Italy. From now on, France is
utterly at the mercy of the Nazi horde and their jackals from Italy. And there
is no mercy in these words. Already Himmler is in Paris, preparing not only the
territorial destruction of France but its cultural destruction.
What is worse from the standpoint of honor--what is totally incompatible
with the notion of honor--is that France has now become an ally of Adolf Hitler
and his war on her late ally, England--upon England which represents France's
one remaining hope to rise again. Does Marshall Petain take any stock in Adolf
Hitler's "solemn promise" that the French navy won't be used against
Britain? If he does, then age and strain have at last destroyed his reason.
Nor is it to be said that France had no choice. She did have the choice
of continuing to fight by sea and in the colonies, using guerrilla tactics
within her own borders. The worst that could have happened to her is just what
is happening anyhow--that she would be completely overrun. Did Adolf Hitler
propose the wholesale murder of the civilian population if his terms were not
accepted? It is quite possible and even probable. But it is not likely that,
with the United States as close to war as it now is, he would have dared it.
And in any case whatever, the civilian population is in for wholesale
"purges" anyhow. Hitler proposes to murder all liberty-loving
Frenchmen or to reduce them to abject servility.
What we have in this is undoubtedly a new Munich--a return of the
"appeasers" to power in France. As this is written, the names of
Pierre Laval and Pierre Etienne Flandin have not yet appeared in the records,
but we may confidently expect to see them enter the Cabinet before long. These
are men who, to protect their own interests, have all long been willing to sell
France out. And it is to be remembered that Petain and Weygand, like most
high-ranking French Generals, are Royalists. And that to them the elevation of
a Bourbon moron to the French throne again is worth almost any cost to France.
Framed Edition
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.
') } //-->