The Charlotte News

Friday, October 12, 1951

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via John Randolph, that American and French infantrymen had cleared the enemy, in a night-long attack, from the last peak of "Heartbreak Ridge", climaxing the longest and most costly hill battle of the Korean War, lasting 31 days and involving repeated hand-to-hand combat. Fierce fighting continued on the northern slope below the crest, but Eighth Army officers referred to it as "mopping up" operations. On the western front, Communist Chinese troops launched three attacks against the U.N. line and two were repulsed, while the third forced elements of the U.S. First Cavalry Division to withdraw in the Yonchon sector.

In the air war, U.S. F-86 Sabre jets shot down one enemy jet and damaged six, as the U.S. Fifth Air Force said the Sabres were outnumbered 100 to 32, without any American losses in the 20-minute battle. On Thursday, allied warplanes flew 1,045 sorties, the highest number in four months, and were out in force on Friday.

At Panmunjom, allied and Communist liaison officers were reported to be near agreement on terms of the neutrality zone, such that the ceasefire talks could resume for the first time since August 23, when the Communists withdrew based on claims that the neutrality zone around Kaesong had been violated by U.N. forces. The Communists, however, summoned allied liaison officers to Kaesong to investigate a new claim of violations of the neutrality zone, charging that a U.N. plane had attacked the zone about 90 minutes after the truce meeting had ended at Panmunjom. A U.N. spokesman said that the U.S. Air Force was checking to see if any allied plane could have been in the area at the time of the alleged attack.

The New York Times, in a story by James Reston, quoted informed officials in Washington that the U.S., Britain and France soon would make a proposal to Egypt, whereby the 20-year Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936, which Egypt had recently moved to abrogate, would be replaced by a new international agreement for creation of a Near Eastern command, commensurate with the desires of Turkey, and that Egypt would become an equal member of this command, along with the U.S., Britain, France and Turkey, with its headquarters in Egypt, from which the Suez Canal defense would be directed. Under the proposal, the U.S., while associated with the defense of the area, would not replace Britain as the principal guardian of Near East security.

The State Department gave notice that regardless of Russian objections, the West intended to go ahead with plans to revise the Italian peace treaty. The Soviets had sent a diplomatic note attacking the revision plan announced by the Big Three Western foreign ministers. It said that Russia's price for joining the revision was Italian separation from NATO, that such would be tantamount to the status of subjugation of Italy, comparable to the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe. Russia had vetoed four times Italy's admission to the U.N., while favoring the admission of Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania, which the General Assembly had rejected because of those countries' xenophobic attitudes toward other nations and disregard for human rights. Russia charged in the note that Italy was being used by the Western powers to supply considerable manpower for NATO. The State Department said that the charges were so "ridiculous" that Moscow had known they would be turned down.

After the State Department the previous night had released a voluminous record of a 1949 meeting at which had been discussed termination of aid to Nationalist China, ultimately vetoed by the President, Harold Stassen said that it had vindicated his account of the conference, in which he claimed to a Senate Internal Security subcommittee that the prevailing attitude at the conference was in favor of Communist China, including discussion of a ten-point program which entailed early U.S. recognition of Communist China. The subcommittee invited Mr. Stassen to return to point out the parts of the report which confirmed his contentions.

Reported increasing opposition to Senate confirmation of Ambassador-at-Large Philip Jessup as a U.N. delegate had sparked new talk of pigeonholing his nomination to avoid possible rejection and preserve the President's right to provide him a recess appointment to serve at the current U.N. General Assembly meeting in Paris. An Administration official who had asked not to be named said that 8 to 10 of the Senate's 50 Democrats were planning to vote against Mr. Jessup's confirmation. Senators Pat McCarran of Nevada and James Eastland of Mississippi had already announced their intent to vote in opposition. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was leading the drive to block the appointment, based on the claim that Mr. Jessup had followed "all the twists and turns of the Communist line".

The Defense Production Administration declared that use of metal in making household appliances and other consumer hard goods would be cut 11.5 percent starting January 1. The affected items were not stated but were understood to include such things as venetian blinds and other household goods where plastics or other substitute materials could be utilized.

In Detroit, the opening performance of the touring Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo appeared as a class of beginning ice-skaters, as "The Elfs" took embarrassing falls, followed by a similar performance of the other members of the troupe, the result of the auditorium having just installed a new linoleum floor on the stage. The ballet directors then sprinkled resin onto the surface and the dancers continued to perform, but with due caution for the slippery surface, prompting a slow-motion performance. Prima Ballerina Alexandra Danilova and Leonide Massine both fell, the former, twice. Following the performance, the auditorium management assured the angry troupe that the stage would be sanded before the next performance this night.

In Los Angeles, a couple were driving along in their car, when the woman suddenly got an urge to kiss her male companion, wrapping her arms around his neck in the process, and causing him to steer the car into a utility pole. The investigating police officer accepted the story after the driver passed a sobriety test. No one was injured.

Honi soit qui mal y pense...

The "Our Weather" box states that while most climatologists believed that the earth's climate was growing warmer, pointing to the fact of the rise in temperature throughout most of the world, the northward migration of animals, birds and fish, and the retreat of the glaciers, one climatologist, Dr. Raymond H. Wheeler, believed the climate would become colder in the ensuing 50 years, claiming that weather ran in 100-year and 1,000-year cycles and that the earth was presently starting the cold half of a 100-year cycle. He believed that there was no chance of a warmer climate in the coming half-century.

So much for him. Next…

Deny. Deny. Deny. Meanwhile, the most ferocious hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. in the past half-century just took place this week on the Gulf Coast of Florida as a category-4 hurricane, packing 155 mph sustained winds.

Would it not be a lot cheaper in the long-run to participate in climate accords internationally and to curtail, in a bipartisan manner, the unrestrained notion among some people, both here and abroad, that there is no fear for the future of mankind on the planet by corruption of his environment over the course of the past 170-odd years of the Industrial Revolution, that it is therefore quite all right to barrel down the highway at full steam ahead, damning the consequences to the environment, and continuing down the foolhardy path of reliance on fossil fuels as the primary method of running industry, power grids, and motorized vehicles across the globe, than to continue, increasingly, to expend billions of dollars each year on relief to storm victims who have lost their homes, the entirety of their worldly possessions, and sometimes their lives, to the stupid blindness of petty politicians who exploit for the sake of votes, telling people of limited education what they wish to hear, that which confirms their most destructive impulses toward the world around them, all rationalized on the basis of maintaining a sound economy with plenty of jobs for everyone, including Tiny Tim? How is that sound economy going to provide solace to those former land dwellers who experience the steady lap-lap of the oceans' encroaching waters at their thresholds, further and further inland, as time advances into the future? What will the children of today, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of tomorrow consider us to have been, in their forever-ruined world of the future, with, among other systemic effects, food production so disrupted worldwide as to create mass starvation in parts of the globe formerly abounding in plenty? Will we not seem to them only as a bunch of money-hungry pirates bound only to the extent of vision to the tip of the nose, similar to the robber-barons of the latter 19th Century, ignoring the handwriting on Mother Nature's increasingly tumultuous, angry Eye-Wall, in favor of continued expansion of already ridiculous corporate profits at the expense of the world, itself?

We no longer have the excuse of past generations, such as those in adulthood in 1951, who could only view the problem through the lens of an occasional mention in the "Our Weather" box on the front page of the afternoon daily. Yet, the head Moron in his "MAGA" cap, shortened presumably to a cute acronym because internal White House studies found that his average follower is too dumb to recite the full phrase in anything more complicated than baby-talk, continues apace down the course to the ever-encroaching sea.

But someday, in the not too distant future, those people, perhaps with their tattered and dirty red caps being the last of their worldly treasure, may instead be saying, "O Ma Ga," meaning, in the superannuated baby-talk, tweet-speak of that not too distant future: "Obama made America great again. We should have listened. Now, it's too late, as Ma Na has taken over."

On the editorial page, "Prompt Action on Suez Problem" finds that the State Department had responded to the British-Egyptian crisis, in which the Egyptian Government had determined to ban access to Britain from the Suez Canal and the British-Egyptian Sudan, with a swiftness lacking in the Iranian oil nationalization dispute with Britain. The U.S. had a significant stake in the Egyptian crisis as control of the Suez by Egypt, without the interests of NATO at heart, could endanger Western security. The U.S., therefore, along with other Western powers, were proposing that the Canal be placed under the control of NATO and guarded by an international contingent.