The Charlotte News

Thursday, December 3, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Signal of the tension still in the country a year after Pearl Harbor, no doubt heightened by both the approach of the first anniversary and the warning published two days earlier from Maj.-General Walter Wilson, speaking in San Francisco, that the Japanese might yet attack the West Coast, a ship’s report of a ghost fleet came into the Twelfth Naval District, claiming a sighting on radar of a large armada of ships 450 miles from the West Coast. A thorough search of the area, however, turned up no ships and the report was invalidated.

It is too bad that such thoroughness could not have been accorded the safety of the nation a year earlier with regard to an armada 450 miles northwest of Hawaii, when it mattered. But such is life and no one, save the Japanese planners of the attack, really was to blame, as we have suggested, in that one.

Elsewhere on the front page, it was reported that the Allies continued to move toward Tunis and Bizerte, cutting communication and transportation lines between them, while the Navy intercepted and sunk several supply ships and their escorts in the Mediterranean. The British Eighth Army remained stationary before El Agheila where Rommel, for the time being, was making a stand.

Once again, as in the previous winter, the Russians were employing ski troops amid blizzard conditions to push back the Nazis in the Rzhev region, west of Moscow.

On the editorial page, Henry the Horse, that is, Henry Luce, receives the focus of Paul Mallon’s commentary of the day. Mr. Luce was, at the time, seen as a potential Republican nominee for the presidency in 1944. Mr. Mallon, however, warns of the Luce Keynesian view of government deficit spending which he believes would lead only to an impoverished society. Mr. Luce, having written the foreword in 1940 to John F. Kennedy’s published senior honors thesis, Why England Slept, by 1964, was a prominent supporter of Barry Goldwater. Mr. Luce was the waltz king.

Raymond Clapper, as if in answer to some of Mallon’s fiscal conservatism enunciated in recent columns, reminds that FDR did not start either government social spending or government enforcement of improved labor conditions, that it was being done by Theodore Roosevelt in the first decade of the century, by Wilson in the second decade, even by Harding in the third decade, long before FDR came into office in the fourth decade.

Anyone today who professes to suggest that the currently proposed reform of health care will somehow radicalize society and lead to socialism, should read carefully this piece for further education. Mr. Clapper points out that the same argument was made in regard to having the government run the post office or even govern meat inspection, the latter having been implemented by Theodore Roosevelt over the same old irrational screams and hollers of "socialism" and hence "communism" in the offing.

Anyone who utters these old familiar phrases instantly ought appear to you as they are, either terribly uninformed, as it is in the bulk of the cases, or, in the case of well-pocketed tv commentators, the instruments of Fascist Corporate Dictators who pay these creeps well to say whatever their string-pullers tell them to say to earn a buck on the tv and continue to do so, to sell cheap products made with cheap labor to keep the Corporate Fascists in furs and big houses in the country.

The editorial column, paying no heed to Harry Golden’s criticism in a letter to the editor published Saturday, renews its cautionary reservations regarding the wisdom of FDR’s curtailment of salaries to $25,000, finding it merely a ploy to implement a goal FDR always had, utilizing the excuse of curbing inflation in wartime to press it into existence, an existence which, the piece suggests, would not easily be undone or the power generally vested in the executive in consequence of the war easily wrested away once the war ended.

The piece, we suggest, was off the beam in this instance, too much inclined toward the traditional distrust of large government and high taxes which characterized J. E. Dowd’s philosophy, and should have paid greater attention to the view enunciated by Mr. Golden, or, for that matter, the column this date of Raymond Clapper.

It is a fine ideal, this notion of unrestrained free market, but “free” becomes a relative term, and ultimately a cruel joke, as the editorial itself appeared readily to recognize, when the freedom to be wielded is always governed by the size of the pocketbook able to wield it. Most of the improvements in society generally today are the result of an activist government taking care of the welfare of the people against the large economic interests in the country. Left to the trickle-downers, there would be no Social Security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no minimum wage or hours regulation, no Civil Rights at all, in fact, only rampant homelessness for all those who were not the object of the trickle-downers’ brand of charity. That is, you do and say and act the way we tell you, or you get no bread today. No rights under the First, Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments except those available to the trickle-downers and filtered through to their minions below, just as their economic charity. Oh, but your precious Second Amendment, that, of course, will not be touched, until you use a gun on your neighbor, of course.

It is sinister; it is evil; it is the hallmark of Fascism. It is childish unrealism. It is stupidity. It is the hatred practiced in Italy for 21 years by Mussolini and his millions of minions among the Italian people, who were by no means innocent in the affair. Give up all freedom and individualism to the corporation. That is the Fascist ideal; it is the definition of Fascism.

Leave the matter to the trickle-downers and “free marketplace” idealists and you will have no freedom at all, save that generously donated to you as a second-hand trickle-down.

The moment you let one of these fascists rule you, determine your political opinion, your right to voice it freely, your right to say anything you damn well please, anytime and any place you damn well please, is the moment you give up on democracy and yourself, and your inherent individual right to freedom, freedom especially from the rule of some dumb Fascist corporatista, or some public official who has taken a bribe from some dumb corporatista.

The column had it exactly right, however, when it came to the subject of Benito Mussolini, in "Vague Hero". But was it not merely an Afghanistanism? Were there not plenty of little Benitos running around the countryside of America, trying to tell everyone what to think and when to think it, what to say and how and when to say it? And are there not still?

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