The Charlotte News

Saturday, March 14, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Elsewhere on the front page, Hitler lays forth his four-point plan for success, as intercepted by listening posts in London: 1) Japan would attack India and eastern and southern Africa; 2) Japan would attack Russia from Manchukuo at the right time; 3) Vichy would be "forced" to comply with Hitler's demand to aid Rommel's forces in North Africa and supply two battleships for occupying the British and U.S. navies in the Atlantic; 4) Italy would be required to commit its navy to the effort of securing the Mediterranean and thus aiding Rommel in his move to capture Egypt and the Suez Canal. Thus, the ultimate goal would be achieved of joining Japan through the Suez in the Indian Ocean, thereby cutting off all Western aid to China, in short controlling the entire Eastern hemisphere. In effect, it was let's all of you fight for the Reich, (and then be vanquished by it as the end-game). It was a bold plan on paper, fit for a lunatic of Hitler's stripe. It had many flaws, however, first of which, for its dependence on inherently independent peoples, themselves led by lunatics and charlatans, being that it could never be achieved in reality. Lunatics are seldom good at organization, in the final analysis.

The sentiment at a time such as the one in which they found themselves is understandable. But it was nevertheless wrong. We cannot be governed by our sentiments, lest we lose democracy very quickly. It was sentiment which led to the disgraceful internment in 1942 of Japanese-Americans and confiscation of their real and personal property in the process; it was sentiment which led to lynching; it is sentiment which often leads to ordinary murder. The First Amendment does not say that the Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech except when emergencies so require and our feelings, collective or otherwise, dictate that we should suspend the Constitution by Gallup poll or popular referendum. The only exception to any individual right in the Constitution during emergency is the ability to suspend habeas corpus in cases of rebellion or invasion. Otherwise, we live by it through clear and stormy weather alike.

One could counter that had less freedom of speech been allowed during the thirties, then perhaps the set of circumstances, explained by Paul Mallon in his elucidative piece, which led to the absence of proper defenses and adequate airfields in the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and Malaya to counter the attack of the Japanese, would not have occurred. But, of course, that set of circumstances was not the result of freedom of speech, rather simple short-sightedness, as Mr. Mallon explains.

The myopia was brought on by the results of World War I and the overly simplistic thinking that the build-up of armament for defense necessarily eventually produces war, as nations begin to compete out of paranoia to better the other's defense capability, finally leading to a mentality within the military which often spills back into the civilian command structure and trickles then into the popular mind to create inertia toward offensive action. But such a model of course was precisely the contrary to that which gave rise to Nazi Germany, a country stripped of military capability after World War I by Versailles.

The fault lay in not stopping both Japan and Germany in the beginning, Japan when it invaded Manchuria in 1931, Germany when it began to re-arm itself in 1933 and then began its small aggressive moves in 1936, and, likewise, Italy when it invaded Ethiopia in 1935-36. That the Dutch, the British, the American governments and people did not foresee the danger in the Pacific and arm accordingly may be laid to many sources, the Cliveden Set in Britain, the isolationists in America; but ultimately it is not to be laid at the feet of freedom of speech. For without that, the democracies would not be fit to call themselves such, indeed, would have lost the war for their lack of moral ground over Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo. And it is ultimately that moral supremacy inhering in democratic peoples, left out perforce in totalitarian states, which breeds the spirit which enables the fight which finally wins the war--any war, even if a few battles may be lost along the way, even if all the battles may be lost along the way.

A totalitarian is a dummy who has relegated all his thinking capacity, all his spirit, all his conscience, all his human sensibility, to the dictator. Once he chooses that course or submits to it, he loses all rational direction and consequently all ability to think for himself. He is bound by that method to lose, for he no longer has the impetus to create and without the impetus to create, the human being slowly dies.

Totalitarianism is a meritless proposition from the beginning, one always bound to lose. We may carp at democracy in action, we may dislike what we see sometimes as its results, but ultimately it is the only fit system of government for human beings. Totalitarian regimes are fine for animals. So leave them to govern the animal farm.

And, "Plenty of Ice Cream" tells us that ice cream was not to be found wanting for sugar, despite the scarcity of the sweet stuff with the fall of the Philippines imminent and the Caribbean supply being needed for defense purposes. The government was too dependent on the revenue for defense, that the dependably insatiable desire of the American public for ice cream would substitute for revenue normally generated by other markets, cars and tires and gasoline and refrigerators, now necessarily depleted.

Dorothy Thompson takes a trenchant look at the history of Britain in India, that it had not been the type of enslavement promised by the Axis. The question remained, she presciently suggested, as to how the nearly one quarter Muslim population of the country would ever coalesce with the three-quarter Hindu population to form a cohesive government. The answer of course was that it wouldn't, that the country would have to be partitioned in 1947 with Pakistan ceded as haven for the Muslim population.

The Mallon piece and the Thompson piece nicely dovetail with the little New Yorker piece opining that Gary Cooper as Sergeant York and Rudyard Kipling's various novels on India had deluded the Western powers into the facile belief system that the Japanese could never muster sufficient technical skill and industrial might to conquer the lands of the Far East and Near East as long as there were a single brave individualist from the Western powers left standing to mow them down, or alternatively that the fiercely loyal native populations, trained and armed for the fight by the British, would be adequate to the line of defense.

After all, it was Kipling who had said:

But that was poetry and the novels were fiction, just as the characterization of Sergeant York's derring-do in World War I was acting. More hyperbole than reality, therefore, lay in the particular laying of blame on these two gents, we suggest. Yet the idea conveyed is nevertheless probably true at its base, that the ascription of less than normally human traits, including intelligence, by the supercilious among the Caucasian leadership and within the consciousness of the population generally of both Britain and the United States through the decades had undoubtedly contributed to some of this notion. But moreover, a belief was engendered that the people of the Far East, including Japan, would not turn on the Western powers. The Japanese had invaded Russia in 1906, but that was based on natural geographical and historical enmity. They had invaded China in 1931 and waged full-scale war from 1937, but that also was the manifestation of an historical antagonism combined with a weakened Chinese military from its own internal strife. The concept that Japan would seek Empire in the Pacific, would wage war at once on Britain, the Dutch, and the United States, while taken increasingly as a reality beginning in 1937, and accepted as a practical fait accompli by summer 1941, was not one which had been regarded gravely prior to the 1930's. Indeed, Japan had sided with the allies in World War I.

Meanwhile, on the front page, the President asked for cooperation among the states' governors to institute a 40 mph speed limit. Forty miles per hour. Could you abide it?

The President urged the speed limit and the checking periodically of tires in order to conserve rubber, much of which, he stated, was to be found on the 30 million vehicles in operation on the roads and highways of the nation.

It is the only time in history that a President ever addressed all the governors on the subject of rubber and curtailment of usage of same. Today, were a similar emergency to occur, requiring a similar proposition be put forth by the President, we suggest that the ensuing late night tv jokes would likely engulf the seriousness of the rubber shortage at issue. But, we shall resist the temptation to follow suit in hindsight.

Incidentally, this year, unlike two years ago, we are glad to see that the Trojans of Southern California are not in the same region as our team, as they gave our team fits two years ago. The Spartans, however, are, both teams happening to be number ten seeds, along with the Gophers and the Terrapins. The Sooners are also in our team's region, as are the Orangemen. The Longhorns and the Badgers are, however, in a different region. Well, we good go on. Consult your own brackets.

Oh--congratulations to the Blue Devils. Enjoy it while you can.