The Charlotte News

Saturday, July 4, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Upon this first July Fourth after America's entry to the war, the editorial page is filled, as one might expect, with war news and patriotic memorialization.

Paul Mallon tells of the industries which benefit the most from the war, trains, buses, streetcars, labor unions, and defense industries. Those hurting the most or completely driven from business included automobile dealers, small appliance dealers, lawyers. Undertakers, he cracks, had broken about even.

Raymond Clapper, about to begin a month-long vacation, his first in two years, (to be replaced by Ernie Pyle for the time being on the pages of The News), writes of the enduring light and spirit of freedom which gave birth to the country, that which, he opines, while suspended during the emergent events of the war, would return afterward. It would, but it would take until the 1960's for the majority of society to begin to reawaken to the rights it had lost in the war and to begin to demand that its full complement be returned. When unheard in the state houses, in Washington, the demands would take to the streets.

Whether the rights have ever been fully restored once having been ceded for nearly four full years to the colossus which is government, whether Federal, state, or local, transposing open government as the Founders intended with one cloaked in secrecy, providing information on a hush-hush, need-to-know basis, is quite debatable. Certainly the previous Administration took a step rearward in that regard, advancing us back to the time of the Cold War, when secrecy became such a compulsive obsession as to cause the government at times, especially during the Nixon years, to resemble that of Nazi Germany in fact, replete with its secret police and Storm Troopers.

If you place value on law and order, on security in your home and workplace, above freedom of thought and speech and assembly, then you might as well start wearing a swastika to befit your mentality, because a Nazi is what you have become, and it is a corrosive ideal which wil infect your entire view of the world in short order.

The biography from Time on Mr. Clapper states, among many interesting tidbits about him, that his wife was traveling the country as a speaker for the National Democratic Committee, had traveled recently from Boston to California.

The fact, together with the tenor of Mr. Clapper's piece, catalyzes our message this Fourth of July, 2009: Get back to where you once belonged--and leave fascism, with which the country has been dangerously toying off and on these last six and a half decades, alone. Let it drift back from whence it came to the likes of Mackinder and Haushofer, the authors of geopolitics from whom Hitler and Mussolini culled their strategies, to the likes of Thomas Dixon and D. W. Griffith, the adapters of modern media to the application of propagating poisonous tales to the dupes of the modern age, from whom Goebbels and Riefenstahl obtained many of their tricks of the mind, to the likes of Davis, Jackson, and Lee. Let it drift back to the Hell from whence it originated, in someone's fastastically misshapen grotesquerie culled from story books, mistaking self-fulfilling prophecy for religion in the guilty dank dark of childish night.

One can no more experiment in society with the ideas in small portions which pervaded the thinkling of Nazis and Fascists than one may try to make beneficial use of a little bit of strychnine for medicinal purposes. Yet, we persist, unwittingly or not, to adopt a part of their views, a part of their technological advance, and attempt then to apply it in limited doses for supposed beneficial purposes--just a little bit of strychnine, to improve your sensation. It will be our undoing, if it already isn't, lest it stop. Get back to where you once belonged--to democracy, freedom of speech and thought, unregulated by any tv program possessed of those shaky, free-hand cameras for the A.D.D. crowd and the otherwise young and the restless, radio, newspaper, magazine, or corporate straitjacket telling us what to think and say and when and where to say and think it.