The Charlotte News

Thursday, January 2, 1941

TWO EDITORIALS

 

Site Ed. Note: There are examples in January's editorials of these "well-heeled cats" of whom Cash obliquely writes in "His Equipment". You will know them when you see them and so we need not point them out here.

Query whether isolationist dogma--that is waging an imperialist war when it suits, such as the Spanish-American war, one well-heeled by William Randolph Hearst and others of the time--to plunder small, relatively weak countries while insisting on staying out of foreign wars between other nations which are strong militarily, hoping the while to collect on the spoils in the aftermath, is afoot again among us in 2003. Is there, as in 1941, a major wave of propaganda being steadily purveyed across the land and throughout the world, all put forth by some well-financed heel-cats--ones unworried of dripping paw-prints, the paw-prints in their trail being so numerous as to cause the vermilion-drenched forest floor to obscure the fresher?

It seems to us that a new generation should learn from both the wisdom and the weakness of the former and gently aid the thing toward a better understanding of one another, in substitution of violence as a solution; not simply follow the bloody patterns of the past in fear that otherwise the source of the wounds might be revealed.

Bear in mind that it is quite probable, though not readily susceptible of evidentiary proof for its secrecy, that forerunner groups whose memberships later comprised the old White Citizens' Councils of the South, (which formally came into being after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision), usually of names such as Cooperative Citizens Council or Citizens Coordinating Committee or what have you, (not to be confused with the Civilian Conservation Corps set up by the Roosevelt Administration for proper purposes), as well as in other Cloud-Cuckoo places in the land, where oil and cotton money in particular flowed freely in their support, floated much of the propaganda campaign in 1941 and earlier of which Cash speaks below. There was an excess of cotton on the market being bought up to the extent possible by the government and stored, and much to be made off of expropriated Mexican oil which had no market except in Germany and Italy; likewise, American oil could be shipped to Japan at higher than normal profits available in a still unstable economy.

No doubt, the agents of propaganda infiltrated this volatile economic mix through low level patronage jobs, such as, for example, local and state school boards, school textbook commissions, and the like, to give a patina of legitimacy to their purpose of vanquishing from within. Secret eugenics committees, for instance, immersed in a rising tide, and wearing hosiery, set up in many states, especially prevalent in the South, lay underneath this outer core to give teeth and the threat of teeth to it--for those too stubborn to go along with the plan. Of course, many of the people so inspired were dupes who thought but casually and rationalized that they were simply recognizing Hitler's new world order in Europe and could live in Cooperation with it. Thus, it became an easy task to set up these trimmed-hedge, jockey-statue collecting cats by over-lavish praise from within and without to make them feel and appear as they were not--with themselves far too shallow and lacking of reflection to recognize what they were and were not.

That, just as Hitler himself, and all dictators do, forming the masses gradually in their own demi-god image in Cloud-Cuckoo worlds of self-anointed Royal and Racial and Religious superiority. "I don't need to read; I read all of that as a kid. I'm superior, naturally. I don't even need to listen or to look. I have experienced it all. What else could be knew? Oh, you have a medal for me, Mein Fuehrer?"

And so...

His Equipment

A Savior Explains How He Qualifies for Job

Mr. Verne Marshall tells a reporter for A. P. that he "never bothers" to read Adolf Hitler's speeches.

What is interesting, Mr. Marshall is a newspaper editor out in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and a newspaper editor who doesn't read the important news from the day is like a grocer who never looks at a price quotation.

It is more interesting because of something else. Mr. Marshall is the self-anointed savior who got up the No Foreign War Committee. At least ostensibly he is the savior who did it.

Actually, it has the backing of well-heeled cats pouring out money for a vast propaganda campaign designed to persuade the American people to abandon Britain to Hitler's mercies.

Anyhow, Mr. Marshall knows that Adolf Hitler has absolutely no designs on us, that the notion that he has such designs is only wicked British propaganda intended to bring about the useless slaughter of Americans in foreign fields, and that a "just peace" may be had at once if we abandon Britain.

Mr. Marshall doesn't read the Fuehrer's speeches. It is a fair assumption, therefore, that he hasn't read Mein Kampf. And it is a fair assumption also that he doesn't read the other important news and so doesn't know about Adolf's activities in Latin America, and in this country for that matter. All the same Mr. Marshall, by his own confession, knows all about the workings of Hitler's mind, and that he is really the nicest fellow.

We get it. The great man is clairvoyant--an intuitive genius who perceives the truth without bothering with facts. Or is it that he believes that the very best leader when one is skirting a precipice is he who is stone-blind?

 

French Crisis

It Is a Hard Decision Marshal Petain Must Make

Wish-thinking has been too often disappointed in this war for the reported rupture or imminent rupture between Hitler and the Petain Government to be accepted until it is certain and final.

Any decision on the part of Petain to defy the brutal conquerors of France would necessarily be a terrible one. The Nazis would occupy the whole of France, and that would be only the beginning.

France would at once be subjected to what the Poles have already been subjected to. The families of members of the Government, of men in the North African armies and in the French navy, would be executed en masse. The French would be systematically uprooted from France, their property given to Germans, themselves carried off to Germany to work, literally, in slave labor.

More, the country would be completely denuded of food, the people left to starve. And wholesale sterilization would be introduced with the purpose of exterminating the French people for good.

But if Petain can make up his mind to face that torture in the hope of ultimately liberating France and forever destroying the most criminal nation of history, then the prospect will be pretty good. The entry into the war of Weygand's North African and Syrian armies and the remaining French navy would spell sudden and final doom for Italy.

Moreover, it might well nerve Turkey to enter the conflict. And if so, these armies could be hurled into Europe to attack Hitler from the rear. Still more, it very probably would make up Franco's mind to keep Spain out of the Axis. What he wants is a hunk of North Africa, but he knows well that his country is in no position to undertake an interminable war, with the French in order to get in.

Finally, as a result of Italy's removal the British navy would be released to use its full strength against Hitler in the Atlantic.

All this, however, is at the moment still on the lap of the gods. We can only cross our fingers and hope.

 


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