The Charlotte News

Thursday, November 17, 1938

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Completing the Indictment" presents a problem which was so often repeated in decades to come during the profligacy of Communism in Eastern Europe. That is that those who focused on the sins of communist regimes, especially as they gained ground in Latin America, appeared oblivious to fascism, often encouraging by official acts and surreptitious intelligence operations the deliberate installation of a fascist regime in the stead of a communist.

What is overlooked too often in this assessment of history is that after the War, in the haste of sharing technology, in the haste of sharing post-war intelligence, in the haste of trying to ward off the potential bogey of Soviet-styled Communism and to establish a stable Europe in the wake of the war, one which would not fall prey, by dent of the same sort of poverty-traps and emasculation of military wherewithal, to the attractiveness of another dictatorship of the type Hitler and Mussolini sold their constituencies, our intelligence services, established for all intents and purposes by the War, in combination with that of Great Britain, invited in among their ranks, both as operatives and confidantes, "ex-Nazis", "ex-Fascists". But whether such people really changed their stripes or whether they merely adopted, chameleonesque, to their surroundings, is troublingly uncertain and remains so as to the resultant effect on our society and freedom since the War. Has World War II, despite the end of the Cold War, ever ended, perpetuated by the need to recapitulate that constant state of fear brought to the fore in this preceding month of 1938 as lying just below the surface of Americans, so close to the surface as to engender mass hysteria, or, in a more modern context, mass shock, still in a mass state, unable to detect the difference between reality and fiction? Hence, we posit, the dupes who still say, after three years of being told there was no connection between September 11, 2001 and Iraq as a state that somehow this insane war in that country will help to ease state-sponsored terrorism--while meanwhile it has spawned a yet greater, stronger network of terrorism in the Middle East and Europe than that which preceded even September 11. The shock is reminiscent exactly of that same shock which pervaded society in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, the need to strike out at Communism somewhere--and so the willingness to go to Southeast Asia and fight to resist the toppling of that first crucial domino, the one which eventually fell anyway in 1975, but fell flat, without as much as a single rippling tap to any other dominion in the region, those thought in the fifties and sixties surely to topple, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, the Phillipines.

The mixed results of our intelligence services over time through the mid-1970's when, in the wake of the revelations, post-Watergate, of abuses in domestic spying operations for which they were sometimes utilized, Congress overhauled their legislative fiat to limit spy operations to foreign intelligence gathering, to take us out of the business of active de-stabilization of undesirable regimes and assassination, provides testimony to this post-War era of fear-engendered rip currents, employment of persons as mercenaries for the purpose of "preserving democracy" who were either expressly and unabashedly inimical to democracy or who were without the nurturing experience necessary to appreciate and practice its indispensable tenets while carrying forth their assigned tasks.

In 1938, there was no official intelligence gathering agency, devoted solely to that purpose, within the United States. The Office of Coordinator of Information, initially headed by William "Wild Bill" Donovan, was established by Roosevelt on July 12, 1941. This fledgling group of data analysts and information gatherers became O.S.S. in spring, 1942. After the war, Truman opposed formation of a C.I.A., but was eventually convinced it was necessary to thwart Communist advances in Europe and Asia in the post-war division among the Allies of those regions as far as oversight, support, and rebuilding was concerned.

To avoid more Versailles Treaties, leading inevitably to more Munich compromises, compromises to the dictatorial will by populations and their leaders made timid by fatigue of too recent memory of previous warfare, the U.S. loaned its military resources to N.A.T.O. nations for the purpose of a long-term commitment to maintaining the borders arranged at Yalta and Potsdam, and the sustenance of freedom of the European nations left independent of the Soviet sphere after the War. That some, such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, the Balkans and Poland fell to the Soviet sphere, was obviously a tragedy. But it was a tragedy scarcely avoidable. For the U.S. and Great Britain to have waged war against the Soviet Union immediately after the latter had joined forces with the allies for three years in defeating Hitler, would have been unseemly and exceedingly dangerous in terms of the appearances in world opinion. Thus, the Cold War, as it was, out of mutual fear of two peoples separated by language and culture and a place in time. The Cold War ended; who won is of little consequence; that humanity survived it is.

As a society, however, we posit that a good portion of our pols and some of their constituents have yet to understand that it is over, as the news comes slowly to some, apparently, and that we need not start it over again to get our kicks. Follow the weather instead; much scarier stuff going on there with much greater dark portent in the near future for mankind, from Route 66 to Highway 61 and all along the weather tower.

By grace of chance and an efficient fire department, the city of Charlotte ought to get by with an exceedingly small fire loss this year. In the first ten months, according to headquarters, fire has caused losses of $111,756, as against $238,222 for the corresponding period of 1937. The low since 1930 was $152,705 in 1935; the high, $353,026 in that bad year 1932.

As the months are running this year, 1938 per capita fire loss in Charlotte will come to only $1.59. This compares favorably with the average of cities reporting over the country. In view of the many frame dwellings jammed next to one another, some of them within a stone's throw of the town's business district, we suppose we are both fortunate and beholden to the Fire Department.

Pushed for declarations of the question of Hitler's demand for colonies, both England's and France's governments rose up on their hind legs yesterday and said that they had no intention of giving in to Germany.

"No cession," Daladier told the Chamber of Deputies Colonies Committee, "has ever been envisaged, nor could one be."

In London, before the House of Commons Colonial Secretary Malcolm McDonald, the late Ramsay's son, was equally positive. The Government, meaning old Bumble, had authorized the statement that they "did not contemplate the transfer of any territory under British administration."

Those are pretty flat statements and we shall have to take them at their face value. At the same time, with what is known of the policy of Britain under Chamberlain, it need not necessarily be assumed that Germany will get no colonies. Chamberlain's method of appeasing the dictatorship has been to hand over somebody else's property. In the case of Italy, he handed over Spain; and in the case of Germany, he handed over Czechoslovakia.

And the suspicion that perfidious Albion is up to its old tricks is warranted by a story that appeared in The London Daily Mail at about the same time that Sir Malcolm was announcing the Government's firm position to Commons. The story said that Oswald Pirow, representing the Union of South Africa, a British Dominion, was on his way to Berlin with the "Pirow Plan." The Pirow Plan, the story went on to say, was not, to be sure, to give back to Germany her former colonies which Britain now possesses, but to give her portions of the French Cameroons, Portuguese Angola and the Belgian Congo.

General Motors' plan of taking care of workers in slack times, not to mention Westinghouse's 3 per cent monthly bonus, is another sign that industry is assuming new responsibilities. General Motors' plan is for the corporation to put up enough over and above unemployment compensation to assure workers 60 per cent of their regular weekly earnings during slack times or lay-offs. It will be an advance, repayable out of half of their wages over 60 per cent when business picks up, but death or change of employment will discharge the obligation.

Industry is beginning to take seriously the question. What happens to workers when they are laid off? An unworrying assumption is that they have put by enough to carry them for awhile, and of course they have their unemployment insurance. But as a matter of fact, they don't put by, not many of them, anyhow. They live up to the hilt of their wages--a trait which industry does its best to encourage by high-pressure salesmanship and installment-payment methods. And unemployment insurance, which in this state pays a maximum of $15 a week for 16 weeks, simply won't maintain a worker and his family in anything like the status their wages have accustomed them to.

The annual wage is the solution, but it is not so easy as all that. Relief is inconsistent with the old-time American scheme of banks, and besides it costs money and to a man needing food at once it is maddeningly full of red tape. General Motors' advances may be a better way, or may not, but at least we're getting somewhere when industry begins to give serious and practical consideration to the problem.

A civil service commission works no miracles per se, full automatic, on the police department. That was established beyond doubt several years ago when a shake-up in this city's police department was traced directly to high improprieties on the part of a civil service commissioner himself. The desirability of a civil service administration depends entirely on the character of the men who compose it. Chairman George W. Patterson, who has handed in his resignation, was the ideal commissioner.

Mr. Patterson is an intelligent man. He is keenly interested in the success of the department. He is a man of unimpeachable integrity and character. Best of all, he has not a single political axe to grind, nor did he receive his appointment in return for any political favors rendered.

We know something of the circumstances leading up to his resignation. They were merely vexatious, the sort of thing that a man serving on the commission solely for the good he could do would be inclined to shrug off at first but finally to dispose of by resigning when he found the commission working at cross purposes. If Mr. Patterson's resignation is accepted and the commission left to work at a purpose counter to that which governed him, it will be a sad day for the police department and the entire City Administration.

Under the surface of his resignation, there is something else which the people of the city should know. Not only the Civil Service Commission and the police department are involved. The basic issue is domination over the City Government and all its agencies, of which the police department is one. To achieve it, the group that would very much like to have this domination has set up to depose, in particular, City Manager Marshall and Chief of Detectives Littlejohn. Mr. Patterson stood shoulder to shoulder with those two officials, and it seems to us tremendously important that they, who we believe are wholly trustworthy and incorruptible beyond question, should not lose this ally so strategically placed. In fact, the people of the city should not allow Mr. Patterson's resignation to be accepted.

We have just been looking at an article called La Trahison des Clercs-- i.e., "The Treason of the Intellectuals,"--written by one Mr. Arnold Lunn. The title is not his own but that of a Frenchman of the Brunetiere school whose name escapes us at the moment. As to who Mr. Lunn may be we don't know. Nor does "Who's Who" for 1938-39 seem to have any ideas on the subject. But what he says is this:

That many intellectuals in Europe and America are guilty of treason to intellectual honesty and a decent humanity by continually apologizing for minimizing the crimes of Communism.

It is perfectly true, of course. And such people deserve all the abuse Mr. Lunn heaps upon them. But all the time, there are a couple of things about Mr. Lunn, who seems to set up for an intellectual on his own account, that somewhat disturb us. One of them is that Mr. Lunn says not a word about the crimes of Fascism--not a word about the murder of half a million innocents in Spain by Franco's Italian and German hosts. And the second thing is that Mr. Lunn's article comes to us in an elaborate piece of propaganda called "Spain," which arrives on our desk each month and which is solely devoted to trying to persuade us that our American news services are liars, and that Franco isn't the butcher we know him as being, but a great and decent man out to save religion and "true humanity" in Spain.

If the kind of intellectual who blinks the crimes of Communism on the assumption that the movement is a "humane" one, is a traitor to intellectual honesty and decent humanity, what, we should like to know, is the kind of intellectual who blinks the crimes of Fascism on the ground that it will save religion and "true humanity" in Spain?