The Charlotte News

Wednesday, June 10, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The editorial page tells in one piece of the conditions in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation, that resistance was more the rule than the exception, as the Dutch economy, plundered by the occupier, had degenerated to ruin, that when Jews were ordered to register their ethnic identity, the local Dutch registrars deliberately frustrated the process to the consternation of the Nazis. A Dutch teacher who had fled to England told of the conditions at his school where the students uniformly drew mocking and rueful caricatures of Hitler and Goering. That the only teacher at the school who had been a collaborator attracted so much discredit that he had to retreat to his home where the children continued to hound him until he left town.

So much for the New Order in the House of Orange. Seventy-two leaders of the resistance had just been executed after being found guilty of possession of weapons and explosives, espionage, or aiding the enemy, especially by helping British pilots.

Paul Mallon writes in response to a clergyman who had written to him in complaint of his putative position favoring a post-war world where violent enforcement of peace and American imperialism would be the order. Mr. Mallon responds that the position was overstated, that he favored, not violent enforcement of peace, but an armed peace, contrasting it with that which had enabled the rise of Germany and Japan after World War I. Here, he stresses the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22, which he says he attended as a reporter with high expectations that it would live up to the ideals of peace and disarmament for which its resulting accord stood. Instead, he posits, it merely allowed Japan to break its agreements and begin eventually fortifying the Mandates in the Pacific it received from Germany at the end of World War I while building its navy to superior strength as the United States, Great Britain, and France stood honorably respecting the treaties' terms.

Of course, Mr. Mallon’s view leaves out the critical factor that the League of Nations never had any teeth with which to enforce these post-Armistice treaties, Versailles, the Naval Conference treaties, and the subsequent 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact. And by the refusal of the United States to join it, the League’s impact was further weakened on the world stage for want of any bully stick to shake at the bellicose in preparation.

Thus, was created after World War II the United Nations to try to rectify the lessons bitterly imparted from the prior failed experience. Empowered to impose trade sanctions, provide peace-keeping forces to trouble spots around the globe, ideally to prevent small conflicts from burgeoning into large ones, as well as to afford a forum in which its member nations could iron out differences before the guns start shooting, when the U. N. has been utilized, it has had a definite impact in preserving the peace. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962, its central resolutory role may well have worked to afford sufficient time to avoid global destruction from events threatening to escalate so far as to eviscerate the ability of world leaders to arrest their self-propelling inertia.

Yet, Mr. Mallon’s view at this point in history was one understandable and we do not fault it. Nevertheless, it was one, persisting through time with the hawkish part of the population both in the United States and abroad, which led arguably to the paranoia which caused the friction leading to the Cold War, one mutually begun by the nations as much as being the fault only of the Soviet Union’s post-war demands for territory and the consequent imposition of totalitarian policies within its satellites.

Or, is that too facile? Was Mallon’s position a correct one by the time of the end of the war? Could the Cold War and its consequent smaller wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, as well as the various problems within the Soviet sphere, the erecting of the Berlin wall in 1961, the iron control and oppression of East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rumania, the Baltic States, all been avoided with better post-war behavior on the part of the victorious Allies? If so, how?

Do we rhetoricize to an absurdity?

They had tried mutual disarmament in a time prior to the coming of satellites by which to monitor it; it had failed miserably. How were they to proceed except by the faltering steps which were undertaken in a world as it then perilously existed, amid abounding ignorance and provincial lack of insight to the Other?

Speaking of which, "Mistakes" in the editorial column speaks to the controversy out of Lumberton over the operation of the USO by the Catholic charity organization in regular rotation among the charities sponsoring the USO. The editorial expresses chagrin that North Carolina should appear so provincial to those in uniform at Fort Bragg from places all over the country while suggesting that better judgment might have spared the result by assigning oversight to a Protestant organization within territory historically settled by the Scotch—which is a polite way of saying tara-tory in which Klan mentality, if not the Klan itself, still held sway.

While the politesse, no doubt, exhibited in the matter by the Baptist ministers in Lumberton was not of the Deep South overt variety—no niggers, Catholics, nor Jews gonna come in heya and tell us what to do—the ultimate effect was, politely, the same. Boiling the actuating force behind the matter down to simple provincialism, impliedly advocating catholicity rather than partisanship, if you will, the editorial uses the time-honored approach of appealing to the desire not to be seen as bumpkins before the world to entice wisdom from otherwise stubborn myopia.

And a late story comes from the aftermath of the fall of Shanghai shortly after December 7, in which it was stated that a contingent of some 200 U. S. Marines refused an order of their commanding officer to surrender and instead held out to the death against overwhelming odds imposed by the Japanese conqueror of that city, not unlike the 378 "Devil Dog" stalwarts outnumbered ten to one who had held Wake Island for two weeks until December 23--surrendering that "bewitched" atoll, as described by the Japanese, somehow magically multiplied as a unit from 378 to 1,400--, and the more recent heroics of the Marines the previous week at the Battle of Midway. The report suggests that "Semper Fi" was intact and holding firm.

Paul Mallon remarks on the Sixth Avenue El train in Manhattan having been dismantled during 1939 and then sold for scrap to the Japanese, now being used to produce shot to fire at U.S. planes and ships, as the editorial column recommends conversion of junkers to scrap to make up for the shortage in steel and ameliorate to some degree the shortage of rubber.

The illogic of the mess led poet e. e. cummings in 1944 to indite the lines of "[plato told]", viz.:

plato told

him:he couldn't
believe it(jesus

told him;he wouldn't believe
it)lao
tsze

certainly told
him,and general
(yes

mam)
sherman;
and even

(believe it
or

not)you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn't believe it,no

sir)it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth

avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell

him