The Charlotte News

Thursday, April 2, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: March 15, 1968: In the Eastern Regionals, U.N.C. defeated undefeated (or nearly so) St. Bonaventure by 19 points in one of the fastest games of basketball we have ever witnessed.

Bob Lanier. Size 22 shoes.

Fats Waller.

Glad in the sweet and secret aid
Which matter unto matter paid,
The water flowed, the breezes fanned,
The tree confined the roving sand,
The sunbeam gave me to the sight,
The tree adorned the formless light,
And once again
O'er the grave of men
We shall talk to each other again
Of the old age behind,
Of the time out of mind,
Which shall come again.

The front page and "India’s Idea" on the editorial page discuss the rejection by the Indian National Congress, the majority Hindu political party, of the British proposal for dominion after the war in exchange for support in the war while leaving defense to the British. The front page article, however, assures that the Congress was preparing a counter-proposal and so held out hope that some resolution might yet be made amicably. It would not be so.

The editorial and Raymond Clapper’s piece indicate that Nehru appeared on the fenceeven so ambivalent as to effect the Hamlet pose, says Clapper--with regard to whether India should use force to resist an invader. Nehru maintained that the means of resistance, passive or with arms, would depend on practical circumstances, whether the force to be gathered against the invader had a realistic chance of success; that there was nothing to be gained by force exerted in the face of its preordained impotence, indeed that such an attempt had a deleterious effect on morale, such as that which followed the feckless resistance before the fall of France in spring, 1940. Once force is defeated by force, Nehru opines, the result is a psychology of defeatism. Thus, he reasons, it is better, if that is to be the inexorable result, to follow the Gandhi approach of passive resistance when the invader clearly has superior force.

The track of Nehru’s argument was clear: vis à vis Japan’s clearly insuperable military strength, India stood a better chance with passive resistance than by attempting to wage active warfare.

Mr. Clapper also points out that India was of two minds on the question of independence, with many Indian nationalists openly speculating as to whether that which they sought would come back to haunt them, that ridding themselves of British rule would ultimately weaken their ability to resist invasion, thus eventually making room for a worse, less paternalistic overlord in the form of the Axis powers.

"Didactic" comments on the President’s use of the word to coney displeasure with reporters’ questions anent the organization of the new Pacific War Council, as to whether the other five of its member nations, the Dutch, Chinese, Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians, would defer to the British and American general staffs, or whether they would each have a say on policy determination equal to that of the two major powers. The President had demurred by saying that such questions implied didacticism.

The News editorial quibbles with the use of the term and asks instead for specificity of response by the President, criticizes his general tendency to defer details to staff, to relegate the inevitable vicissitudes attendant with daily human endeavor to determination by the vagaries of existential concourse as they transpire in occurrence.

Well, for éclaircissement, didactic, in the sense the President used it, we glean, impliedly had freighted with it its more precise connotation, moral instruction or peremptory orders, than that ascribed by The News editorial’s bare synonymic definition, "instruction". In the President’s opinion thusly conveyed, the import of the reporters' questions was too little pregnant with the flexibility afforded by a more Ionian conception of organizational structures, leaving them not overly encumbered by the aburdened absurdity of stricture suppositing particular conditions precedent to a mutually agreed contractual arrangement yet to reach fructification. For, as Heraclitus said, "No man may cross the same river twice."

Thus, we conclude that the President demonstrated wisdom in his approach to this multi-national conference aiming at rapprochement among societies, as well the varied moieties within each, possessed of disparate incidents of reality and perceptions of time, those based on geographical and historical indices of differentiation between cultures, each, however, also coalesced in moment toward realization of a common goal, when boiled to its essence, of beating the everlasting Hell out of their common enemies.

The reference, incidentally, in the piece by Amy Bassett to Justice Holmes’s injunction regarding freedom of speech is presumably that to which we have sometimes referred herein, the well-promulgated limit that the freedom does not extend to falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater. More precisely, the full exception is expressed: "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force." (The latter exception to protection embraced specifically words which carried with them a pre-defined signal meaning to labor union members as published by labor leaders. Even though the particular words did not convey ordinary meaning subject to prohibition, their pre-defined usage behaved as signals to engage members in particular activity banned by court order and thus the words, thusly used to actuate behavior, could be considered contemnacious of the order.)

The statement is from Schenck v. U.S., 249 US 47 (1919), wherein the issue was the circulation of anti-draft pamphlets in alleged violation of Congressional legislation making it a crime to interfere with the draft or cause insubordination within the military. The pamphlets had equated the draft to involuntary servitude, suggesting thereby that the Thirteenth Amendment banned the draft, and therefore that it was the duty of each citizen to resist same. Justice Holmes, writing for an unanimous Court, found this speech unprotected against government regulation in time of war emergency, as it tended to create a "clear and present danger" of interference with the powers of Congress, in this case the declaration of war on Germany in World War I and the "necessary and proper" laws enacted to carry the declaration into effect.

The key to understanding this principle of exception, therefore, is the restriction of its use to time of plain national emergency, such as that where national conscription had to be instituted to obtain a fighting force to comprise the AEF of World War I.

The opinion states the limit of freedom of speech more generally thusly: "The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."

Ms. Bassett’s point, therefore, might be well taken by analogy, provided the statements to which she is referring were limited to those conveying either an expressed or signally pre-defined implied meaning such that the plain intent of the words was to obstruct or interfere with an act of government in conducting the war.

Plainly, the exception does not extend merely to criticism of the war effort or the prosecution of the war or even to expression of opinion or argument on whether the United States should fight in the war.

And before reaching the question of whether the statements interfere with necesssary and proper laws to carry into effect the powers in question, one first has to determine what properly is a true national emergency. For the opinion expressly declines to extend the exception to peacetime or non-emergent circumstances.

Was Vietnam, for example, such an emergent circumstance that freedom of speech could be limited accordingly? As we lived through that one, we make bold to say that it was not, even if many politicians of the time, for the sake of winning votes and shining shoes (that which many politicians do on Maundy Thursday--see how they run), tried mightily to make it so.

The Congress never even thought enough of it to issue a formal declaration of war, after all. Thus, it was often euphemistically yclept "conflict".

Iraq? Clearly not, if Vietnam was not. Moreover, the Congress has never seen fit to institute a draft in the Iraq War. There plainly, therefore, is no national emergency at stake in this one suggestive of the necessity of curtailment of First Amendment rights, the efforts of the previous Administration and its Justice Department, especially between 2001 and 2005, to the contrary notwithstanding.

It is why the country is so dispirited still, even if those absurd strictures have now been lifted from us. The psychological scars remain and are not easily forgotten in a country which prides itself on freedom of thought and expression, indeed that which is its most sacred founding principle. We are not a "Christian nation" but rather united only in the one single concept: that we are a free nation.

We hope and trust that the country will not in the near or distant future make the same mistake as that preceding in response to one day’s anomalous act of nineteen madmen. Even in 1942, the country did not go quite so nuts as this country did in the wake of a single act in 2001. We are spoiled by too much daily insularity from even mild discomfort, unlike the generation of 1941 which were better suited to cope with disaster all around them without panic and belief that the sky was falling and that thus they had to fight everyone in sight, as we did in 2001--until all whom we fought were in fact, primarily, only ourselves. They won the war. We didn’t.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links-Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i>--</i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.