The Charlotte News

Friday, October 23, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page announced Eleanor Roosevelt’s arrival by secret passage in London. On hand to meet her train were King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, Admiral Stark, and General Eisenhower.

The First Lady’s "My Day" of this date referenced a new book by Herbert Agar, the scheduled speaker the previous December 5 in Raleigh at the posthumous presentation of the Mayflower Literary Society Cup to W. J. Cash, forced by inclement weather to cancel in favor of Josephus Daniels. Mrs. Roosevelt underscored in her piece Mr. Agar’s suggestions that a free press was paramount in a society to restrain government power, even if in the abstract ideal, no government should be necessary at all in "a society of saints"—though not mentioned, the ultimate ideal to which communism strives. She agreed with Agar’s notion, while adding that the government must also watch "with equal care" the people, a reciprocal ideal of mutual deterrence.

Was she correct? Does this ideal not devolve to a mutual staring contest in stalemate, not dissimilar to that which finally prevailed in high relief in society during the Nixon years? Were the domestic surveillance operations of the CIA after the war not the Ultima Thule in application of this ideal, based on the constitutional police power of the government to mind the health, safety, morals, and welfare of the people? But where is the limit on the government, a more powerful entity obviously than either the individual or even the organized group of individuals over whom it is charged with the legitimate interest to "watch carefully", the people it also has the responsibility to serve and protect?

Where does the line between service and protection become crossed to push recognized police powers into the hazy outskirts of totalitarian control, systemically accomplished? That place where freedom of speech and movement and association, the hallmarks of liberty, are lost to the point where the people are so "socialized" into this controlled pattern of behavioral acquiescence to the implied and expressed restraints spoon fed them daily that, by and large, they no longer are even aware of their individual and collective roles as operands of their government? In other words, the people as a whole becoming so afraid to say what they actually believe, afraid to express themselves in vivid language, for fear of social disapproval, for fear even of winding up on the news for so-called "abusive" or "threatening" use of language for merely saying what they truly believe, that they are without any actualized individual freedom, the Constitution qua the proverbial carrot--a mere carrot guarded inevitably by the threat of the stick being pulled to trap in the box the partakers should they dare try to feast, the Constitution under glass as an historical relic at the Archives, meaning, in practical terms, little or nothing.

Is that resultant state of society not despotism, gone so far beyond totalitarianism as to be in a state no longer in recognition of the despotic rule for what it is, being instead so submissive to the totalitarian’s efforts to effect subservience and slavery, economic and psychological, as to be oblivious to the actual state in which the citizen exists in the society, liberty being only an illusory ideal never fully realized for fear of reprisal?

Had the Axis mentality so infected the world in reaction to its totalitarian complex, with its disease of hatred and manipulation of the will, that the Allies, too, ultimately, succumbed and became, essentially, especially post-war, a less overtly obvious version of that which they fought?

It is unclear whether Mrs. Roosevelt, in referencing an article by Hans Habe at the end of her piece, meant that from the American Mercury which appeared April 11 in The News, anent Monsieur Van de Castel, the aristocrat who went along to get along with the Nazi occupiers of his native Belgium, only finally to have his ten-year old son murdered by them with impunity on April 10, 1941, for coming to the aid of a five-year old girl kicked by a German soldier guarding the railroad tracks running near their homes. As we pointed out in the note associated with April 13, Mr. Habe eventually went to work for the O.S.S., founded June 13, 1942.

In any event, Santa Claus is coming to town and he may be watching you. Consult NORAD for sightings of him, come Christmas Eve. This year, he may be arriving in a flying saucer rather than a sleigh. For there isn’t much ice left in the north, so they say. Better not drive the gas-guzzling S.U.V., we’re telling you why; for by next summer, you may be going to cry.

A series of firsthand accounts by reporter Leland Stowe begins on the front page from the Russian front, significant for being the first American reportage of its kind, journalism having been highly restricted and largely confined to official Soviet and German government press releases in that theater.

In Stalingrad, German troops prepared for winter, demanding that Russian residents of nearby occupied towns relinquish their winter coats for the Nazi invaders. As the penalty for non-compliance with the directive was death, no doubt most of the local townspeople followed suit—after, likely, salting the garments with plentiful lice larvae, carefully maintained and cultivated from the previous winter. But that is just our speculation.

Presaging the coming stress on the Mediterranean theater, RAF bombers out of Britain let loose with their largest raid of the war thus far on Italian targets, hitting Genoa and Turin the previous night.

A British battle armada reportedly deployed in the Indian Ocean, thought to be the signs of an incipient invasion of Burma, was instead apparently a feint to draw Japanese attention away from the Solomons and, perhaps, to draw Axis attention generally from the invasion in preparation for North Africa 18 days away.

This date, not yet reported, the Second Battle of El Alamein began, preparations for which had appeared in the reports preceding it for the previous couple of weeks, indicating repeated RAF bombing raids on the Nazi supply depot at Tobruk.

Operation Lightfoot, as the British plan of attack was dubbed, began at 9:30 p.m. on this date with heavy artillery fire into the German panzer lines. The way was laid for the advance of infantry through the heavily mined sands of the desert, the mines being set to trip by tanks, not the light feet of the infantry. As the infantry moved through to protect a corridor, mine-sweepers followed, clearing an adequate path for a single line of tanks to advance. By 4:00 a.m., the Allied tanks had entered the minefields.

In the Solomons, also not yet reported, the Japanese began a new major offensive to try to re-capture Henderson Field, deploying forces from the south, 7,000 strong under General Masao Maruyama, and from the west, 3,000 strong under General Tadashi Sumiyoshi. The two forces were supposed to coordinate and strike at the same time. Instead, their communications became confused and the force from the west attacked prematurely on October 23 at 6:00 p.m. at the mouth of the Matanikau River, while the southern forces remained mired in the jungle, not yet reaching their designated point for launching the attack on the airbase until the following evening at 7:00.

The new American reinforcements recently landed on Guadalacanal, as pictured on the front page of this date, had bloated the numbers of men at Henderson Field to 23,000 during the previous month, while the Japanese believed the contingent of defenders numbered only 10,000. The resisting Allied forces were under the command of Lt. Col. "Chesty" Puller and Lt. Col. Robert Hall. The fighting would last until October 26. The battle was a miserable defeat for the Japanese, losing between 2,200 and 3,000 men while the Allies suffered approximately 80 killed.

Former isloationist Senator Gerald Nye, Republican of North Dakota, was reported to have taken public issue with Wendell Willkie for his statements demanding for Russia the opening of a second front. Senator Nye suggested that the statements were harmful to America’s continued role in the war in support of Great Britain.

He also criticized the role of Hollywood publicity agents’ successful manipulation of the draft to protect the hides of stars by establishing the greater importance of their roles as entertainers of the troops than as active combat soldiers. The Senator cited North Carolina’s own danceband leader and sometime mediocre actor, Kay Kyser, as Exhibit A.

But, the isolationist, of course, had little room to make any case with moral probity on his side, having, along with his fellow Republican and Democrat Anglophobe-Russophobe isolationists, opposed entry to the war and aid to Great Britain right up until the attack on Pearl Harbor, having seen the Nazi as a counter-balancing factor against Communist aggression in the world.

In any event, the Kollege of Musical Knowledge remained free of combat duty for the duration. But, since Mr. Kyser was 37 years old at the time, his was not necessarily an exceptional case vis á vis that of the general population or indicative of undue avoidance of combat duty.

On the editorial page, "Fair Exchange" reports on the Nazi threat to blind and deafen Allied prisoners of war should the British follow the demands of the Soviets immediately to try as a war criminal Rudolf Hess. Hess was being held incommunicado by the British since his "escape" from Germany to Scotland in April, 1941, thought either to be insane or seeking to establish false bona fides as a defector when actually intending espionage.

Hess, of course, would be tried at Nuremberg after the war, found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison. Spending the last half of his life confined, he died at age 93 in Spandau Prison in West Berlin in August 1987, the apparent victim of his own hanging—though the case remains controversial as to whether his guards hastened his end.

Dorothy Thompson suggests that the Axis reasoning behind their threats of atrocities against Allied prisoners, both those of the Nazis and Japanese, was twofold: to bring to the table terrorism as a coercive political weapon to achieve a negotiated peace on their own terms, while also, in the German case, lending authority to Hitler’s nationalistic cry that the war was one for the preservation of the German people. Part of the latter appeal was the ultimate admonition of Ragnarok, that losing the war would mean the end of German culture, thus creating a psychological atmosphere in which reprisals against German prisoners of war for acts committed against Allied prisoners would substantiate to the average German Hitler’s warnings and thereby retain potency through time as a propaganda instrument. Ms. Thompson's anodyne: segregate, among the prisoners of war, the Nazis from the Germans merely coerced to fight, and reserve the treatment in kind for the former.

Problem, however, being that, after nearly ten years of enforced indoctrination to the Party regimen, it was difficult to tell the mere sheep from the original Schwein.

And, we maintain, Schopenhauer’s studied caveat on the dangers of too much contemporary reading of that which is kitsch was entirely correct.

He concluded his essay thus:

It is [in painting and sculpture of the eighteenth century] the same with the progress of the human mind in the history of literature, which is for the most part like the catalogue of a cabinet of deformities; the spirit in which they keep the longest is pigskin. We do not need to look there for the few who have been born shapely; they are still alive, and we come across them in every part of the world, like immortals whose youth is ever fresh. They alone form what I have distinguished as real literature, the history of which, although poor in persons, we learn from our youth up out of the mouths of educated people, and not first of all from compilations. As a specific against the present prevailing monomania for reading literary histories, so that one may be able to chatter about everything without really knowing anything, let me refer you to a passage from Lichtenberg which is well worth reading (vol. ii. p. 302 of the old edition).

But I wish some one would attempt a tragical history of literature, showing how the greatest writers and artists have been treated during their lives by the various nations which have produced them and whose proudest possessions they are. It would show us the endless fight which the good and genuine works of all periods and countries have had to carry on against the perverse and bad. It would depict the martyrdom of almost all those who truly enlightened humanity, of almost all the great masters in every kind of art; it would show us how they, with few exceptions, were tormented without recognition, without any to share their misery, without followers; how they existed in poverty and misery whilst fame, honour, and riches fell to the lot of the worthless; it would reveal that what happened to them happened to Esau, who, while hunting the deer for his father, was robbed of the blessing by Jacob disguised in his brother's coat; and how through it all the love of their subject kept them up, until at last the trying fight of such a teacher of the human race is ended, the immortal laurel offered to him, and the time come when it can be said of him

"Der schwere Panzer wird zum Fluegelkleide
Kurz ist der Schmerz, unendlich ist die Freude."

Earlier in the essay, he suggested that reading even the thoughts of the average person is an experience engendering thought worthy of contemplation far beyond that produced by conversation, indeed, even the thoughts of the average person whose conversation would ordinarily be displeasing, that, we assume, by the types of conversation and literature which Schopenhauer openly considers stupid, alternating between the production of ennui and anxious annoyance. But if so, then does that not undermine his entire premise that reading the average contemporary novel, that which we like to call in present parlance "supermarket checkout drivel", (even if we haven't hereinbefore called it that precisely), is the ingestion merely of fast-food filler bloat which he, in his own time's idiom, fashions it to be?

Nevertheless, we find his argument cogent and compelling, binding in truth across the years since he first published it in 1841.

It remained so in 1936 when Cash asked on the book-page of The News the question, perhaps second only in importance to the ultimate questions anent existence, "What Is a Reader?", and then proceeded to answer it.

If one accepts the Cartesian notion, "Cogito ergo sum," then, indeed, it is part and parcel of the ultimate question, that is, provided one, in reading, follows the Cash ideal and the Schopenhauer ideal in pursuing the occupation, and thus performs it only irregularly--as we certainly make a refined habit of doing from much practice at the art whenever we may, with impunity, so practice it.

The premise is why, for instance, we opted not to pursue an originally designated major of political science, instead, after eclectically dabbling in several courses of study, choosing sociology and philosophy--less reading requisite, leaving more time for inspired thought, especially important in the springtime and early fall.