The Charlotte News

Wednesday, September 2, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page tells of the shape of things to come after the war, out of the Dies Committee, the charging of hundreds of government officials and citizens with subversive activities for no greater offense than being on the mailing lists of organizations deemed subversive, organizations of which some of them had never even heard.

Whether those organizations included the Ku Klux Klan, so dear to Congressman Dies’s heart that he had previously cancelled all investigation into its members because of its being a "fine old American institution", was not mentioned by the Attorney General in condemning the Congressman’s tell-tale report and denouncing the consequent FBI probe of the named citizens and government officials.

Regardless, it seems Director Hoover had found a friend in Dies or vice versa.

Senator Joseph McCarthy would raise the practice to a practical art form until his politically calculated paranoia, whether real or faux or some of both, finally wore thin with the public and he was censured by his own colleagues.

Another report tells of the execution of one Thomas Williams, an IRA member in Northern Ireland, found guilty along with five others in the murder of a constable during a clash in the spring with police over the outlawing of IRA parades in celebration of the Easter Rising, a 1916 revolt seeking independence for Ireland from Great Britain.

Mr. Williams was only 18 at the time and had been a member of the IRA for about a year. We have no facts before us on the nature of the incident leading to the killing of the constable. Obviously, one may not murder anyone.

So, if Tom Williams was guilty of murder, no one may object too much to his being hung for the offense, beyond the objection generally to the imposition of the death penalty.

But, by the same token, under common law, one has the right of lawful resistance, including the right of self-defense, to unlawful arrest and detention or unlawful use of force in effecting same, which would include the right violently to resist if violence of the same order were being used to effect an illegal detention or arrest. That includes police officers. So, whether young Mr. Williams and his fellow IRA members were engaged in such lawful resistance to unlawful use of force initiated against them, we simply do not have the facts to analyze. If so, he should have been acquitted. If not, he was properly guilty.

His five accomplices, including Joe Cahill, a well-known IRA activist subsequently, who only died five years ago, were also found guilty and sentenced to hang, but their sentences were commuted in light of Mr. Williams’s admission of being the leader of the group and acceptance of responsibilty for its actions.

We have to reflect, for judgment of purpose, lawful or unlawful, with respect to this group, on the American Revolution. It was certainly neither lawful under the law of the Crown for General Washington and his ragtag army to resist and combat the lawful authority within the colonies established for over a hundred and fifty years by England. And, so...

Regardless of the appropriateness of the action, the hanging had stimulated riots in the streets of Belfast making it unsafe for soldiers in training there to walk the streets. So, it was not particularly astute of the British authorities to make an example of young Mr. Williams with his execution, especially in this time of war. It was far more likely to serve the interests of the Nazis than in this manner to put down, no doubt, some of the activities being spawned by Fifth Columnists at work in Ireland, seeking to use the old enmities between the IRA and Great Britain to spawn internal violence to effect the same sort of weakness which was being likewise stimulated by Fifth Columnists at work on the All-India Congress in India. Likewise there, it was rather stupid to jail Gandhi, also stimulating riots resulting in police reprisals and lasting bitterness.

Goebbels, no doubt, was feeling pretty good during these days while smoking his hookah and sending out all manner of false propaganda in the name of whatever organization he could dream up to stimulate internal strife within each of the Allied countries. That, no doubt, included the idiotic likes of Congressman Dies and his ilk of ill-bred, uneducated boobs about as fit to serve in Congress as the pigs they ordinarily slopped.

As with the appointment of Henry Cabot Lodge to be Ambassador to South Vietnam by President Kennedy, another story tells of FDR having sent Wendell Willkie, a former Democrat, his Republican opponent in the 1940 general election, on a fact-finding and good will mission to Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Arabia, Palestine, Russia, and China, to shore up alliances and present a face to the world of national cohesion, to avoid the prospect in America of Goebbels’s machine being able to operate to propagate divisive information in just the fashion characterized by the problems in India and Northern Ireland of the moment, as had characterized much of the United States throughout the early part of the war until the attack on Pearl Harbor, still, however, not completely at rest, notwithstanding recent indictments of the worst of the seditionists.

A small but significant report appears on the page regarding the arrival of American troops in the Belgian Congo amid greetings from the Belgians. They were there not only to protect the northern supply route in Africa but no doubt, moreover, to secure the uranium deposits from Nazi acquisition and for the purpose of establishing a supply of the unstable element for the research begun on the Manhattan Project.

Robert Oppenheimer of the University of California had assembled numerous prominent physicists of the day, including Edward Teller, for a meeting in Berkeley in June to determine the feasibility of a fission bomb. Determining its theoretical feasibility, the project officially began and during this September, sites for the research work, including the princiapl site at Los Alamos in New Mexico, were being chosen for the purpose. The other principal sites were Hanford, Washington and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, plus a site in Ontario.

The Congo had been identified by Einstein to FDR in his August 2, 1939 letter as the world’s principal source of uranium necessary for the production of atomic weaponry, as Einstein informed FDR was being developed in Germany at the time.

On the editorial page, a piece appears which provides a prime example of the type of internal strife still besetting the country among labor leaders, a regional UMW CIO leader exhorting coal miners to strike to paralyze the country’s supply of coke for steel production—with the explicit purpose of pleasing the Reich.

Or, did the editorial misinterpret the purpose of Mr. McTigue? Was he using irony to prevent a strike? Certainly, his overt bluster was so starkly treasonous as to make it appear so.

If he was without guile in his exhortations, then here was a man openly committing treason, one who probably should have been prosecuted for attempting, with real authority over his audience, the power to affect their very living wage and hours, to obstruct the war effort.

Dorothy Thompson writes of a principal part of the wrong in the country at the time: that while most of the country was behind fighting an ideological war, one which must be fought to have any hope of achieving victory, some very powerful men, Robert Rice Reynolds, Robert McCormick, and others, were still advocating with any force waging a war only against Japan while remaining largely neutral with respect to Nazi Germany, that for their sympathies being anti-British and anti-Russian.

What she does not say is the obvious inference to be derived from these facts: that these men were racists, found themselves at home in the company of Nazi racists, parted company only to the extent that their Fuehrer was sympathetic with the Japanese to further his own ends, of course realizing that the Fuehrer would dispose of that small anomaly in due course once he won the war, that by eliminating his Oriental ally, just as he was now seeking to dispose of the Russians, his former ally.

The front page and "Final Shift" find significance in the forced resignation of Foreign Minister Togo from the Japanese cabinet, as it was he who had been a prime mover in orchestrating the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact. Coupled with this ostensible harbinger of bad things to come against the Russians, appeared the displacement of 100,000 Japanese troops from the main fighting in China to positions along the Soviet border, plus movements of Japanese ships into northern Japanese waters toward Vladivostok.

Probably, the appearance finally that Hitler was about to conquer Russia, with the fall of Stalingrad and control of the Caucasus appearing imminent, meant that the contingency for attack by Japan on Russia from the East, indications of imminent success by Hitler from the West, as determined in the Imperial Conference held July 2, 1941, was now being resurrected by Tojo, to be ready to do obeisant and loyal service to his fellow barbarian, Hitler, in the hope that Hitler would not have him executed after Hitler won the war in Europe.

That it did not occur is the result of the incipient siege of Stalingrad by the stalwart Russians who again withstood the onslaught in their homeland for the second straight summer and early fall until the merciful relief of snow and bitter climes to which they were accustomed served their facility to push the unacclimated Nazi back from whence he came, the fiery depths of Hell itself.

Meanwhile, Hitler, according to Herblock—as with idiotic Nazis in 1963 and continuing to this day in the United States and elsewhere--studied his favorite Book of Divination.

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