The Charlotte News

Monday, April 15, 1940

FOUR EDITORIALS

Incidentally, we deplore the North Carolina State Bar’s decision this date and think it a sham to justice and whatever "morality" and "character" is left in our olde home state, which candidly we perceive as being scant at best, these days in which Nazism is apparently running rampant, disguised as some hokum, pagan form of "christianity", of which we know all too well from our own past growing of age there, a bunch of drunken louts at best thinking themselves partaking of "the blood of christ" from their red vino, and as we perceive ourselves to this day.

We pass no judgment on either the young men accused originally or the fine prosecutor who we believe thought he was doing the right thing, amid a public outcry of the time, in accusing them, which we believed then and still do believe was a crowd too quick to judge, too overwrought with tedious tears to glean any sense of understanding; yet we judge not the crowd either for something welling up which perhaps spoke only a cry of pain from the past, full of injustice to those who were heard not—not dissimilar to that when we ourselves were in school once upon a day and a young black woman was accused of murder for slaying her white jailer in what she claimed was in the course of an attempted rape, now over thirty years in the past.

But, not all cases are the same, and we must greet the law without mobs, on either side of the street, which is still tragically divided there, in our olde home state. The case was properly dismissed. But the case against the prosecutor in our estimation is nothing more than meat being fed to hungry Wolves in the name of some insane sense of Righteousness, framed only as Nazis did and do, on preconceived, prejudiced notions.

Shame on you, State of North Carolina and its Bar, for your judgmental statements and your presupposition of godlike awareness, of which you have none, in our estimation. It is you, we perceive, who are besmirched and disgraced, finally, and most justly, before the eyes of the entire World this date—and, we reiterate, most justly for your manifold, unholy sins of the past, continuing into the present, your unholy sins of judgment of men and women, as men and women, as if you propose to be the Holy Ones.

If so, if your slate is so clean and pure of sin, of any mistakes of perceiving what is True and that which is not, then step forth to the World now, Holy Ones, and provide for us your Solution.

Concentration camps? We would expect so, Holy Ones, from such as yourselves. Shame on you.

We are entitled to judge you, State Bar of North Carolina, and we shall. We have seen it before. Now, this day, June 16, 2007, Hate us for our free statement of values and Truth if you so wish, and thus Hate the Constitution, as you do, for your demonstrated utter and complete ignorance of its most basic precepts; but you shall not take from us our Truth or our Soules or our Minds, your Nazism notwithstanding.

Shame on you and the Horse you Rode in on…

Go Hawkshaw yourselves now, before we Hawkshaw you. As we shall… As you shall See. The whole World saw today.

Threreat?

Nawsuh.

Promise.

Why, if everyone were judged on the curiously mercurial standards, applicable to some, the "nigger lovers", which you employ regularly, and have for time immemorial, State Bar of North Carolina, Abra'm Lincoln, no doubt, would have been disbarred for moral character issues. Oh, not for freeing the slaves, of course. You would never be so obvious. Rather, for suspending habeas corpus in the face of a public insurrection which was grossly exaggerated, having simply to do, after all, with those states' rightists asserting their god-given principle of self-determination as rugged individualists, so as, if they so desired, to "elect" the incarnation of Caesar. Yes?

Unchecked Negro Killings May Lead To A Branching Out

The people of this city, and their courts and police forces, well know its record as one of the most murderous communities in the entire United States--if not the most murderous of all. But they tolerate the distinction, and seem thereby almost to condone it, because they realize that 99 out of 100 of our murders (a three-year supply) are simply Negro killings.

The passion and the easy morality and the thin veneer of civilization which characterize the lower orders of this race--these are supposed to make murder among the blacks less reprehensible than the murder of white people, however trashy. The courts, by handing down light sentences, and the police departments, especially their detective divisions, by indifferent investigation, seem to encourage this view.

Which strikes us as short-sighted, particularly on the part of police forces. For if any white men should be determined to break up the rash use and the carrying of weapons by Negroes, they should be the police officers, who have to handle them. Simple self-preservation would suggest as much.

Occasionally something happens to suggest the advisability to the white race as a whole of putting down, in simple self-preservation again, free and easy murder among Negroes. Such as the case of the Negro man now held in the South Carolina Penitentiary.

He was arrested a few days ago, after a furious hunt, on a charge of having killed a Horry County white farmer and having bludgeoned and robbed a Dorchester County white woman. In jail, he confessed to the prior killing of three men, all Negroes, and is suspected of the murder of one other.

Murderous tendencies unchecked in this man after crimes against his own race, finally saw him branch out and extend his attention to members of the white race.

Concerning The Equipment Of A Foreign Expert

Last Monday, that distinguished authority on foreign affairs, the Hon. Robert Rice Reynolds of North Carolina, spoke in the Senate to the tune of seven solid pages in the Congressional Record--at a cost to taxpayers of $84 a page--in the course of which he prophesied confidently that Norway, Denmark and Sweden would not be involved in the European war.

Then toward the end of his speech, he announced that he was in possession of a letter from a high official in Haiti, and went on:

The letter, as reproduced in the original by the Congressional Record appears below.

Somehow, we suspect that the Senator doesn't read French either.

We Look At The Evidence That He Was A German

The German Shakespeare Society plans to go right ahead with its annual meeting on April 22, war or no war. Which might be set down for good tolerant sense if it did not appear that it is in fact a new offensive against Britain.

Shakespeare, says the society, is really a German. A hundred years of the performance and study of his works in Germany have made it so--which is an interesting doctrine. Under it, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Bishop Berkley, Hobbes, Omar Khayyam, Gautama Buddha, Edgar Allen Poe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as Aeschylus and Sophocles and Cicero, seem to have been Germans also.

Moreover, says the society, the man Shakespeare always showed an unmistakable German cast of mind, which had nothing to do with the miserable race of shopkeepers among whom he lived. That also seems a novel doctrine. We have somewhere heard the man called Gentle Will.

Still, maybe so. There's certainly a low rumor that a shotgun figured at his wedding with the Hathaway girl. And there does not seem to be much doubt that he stole a deer from Squire Lucy.

It Is Most Likely Bluff To Frighten Neutrals

It is interesting that it is Count Ciano's Il Messagero which takes the lead in announcing that Italy considers her entry into the war on the side of Nazi Germany inevitable, is only waiting for the best moment to strike, and in warning the neutrals to follow the example of Denmark and yield quietly, Ciano, long the greatest admirer of the Nazis in Italy, is supposed to have soured on them after being subjected to a tirade by Hitler, and lately has been little inclined to praise them. It suggests that Mussolini himself has turned on the heat and is directly responsible for these utterances.

It is quite possible, however, that they are not yet to be taken too seriously. That the statements constitute a candid setting forth of the real Italian policy there is little doubt. All along Mussolini has almost certainly planned to jump into the war on the side of Germany when he was reasonably sure that the Axis would win. Nevertheless, it is also true that he has wanted more time to get ready, and above all has wanted to wait until the French army and the British-French navies were heavily engaged elsewhere. Underneath all his megalomania there is pretty clearly a streak of realism in this fellow. And in the calm of his closet he must often gloomily remember what has invariably happened to Italian armies whenever they have stood in front of the French, must have nightmares when he thinks of the Italian navy actually having to fight the British-French fleet.

Italy is not at all enthusiastic about fighting on the side of the Nazis, and the reigning king has flatly said that Italy will not fight the Allies so long as he is on the throne. Nevertheless, she will of course fight when Mussolini orders it.

But that he thinks the time for that has come is not proved by the newspaper roars. On the contrary they may prove exactly the opposite. Coupled with them is talk about the crushing defeat which Britain has suffered in Norway. But you may be certain that Mussolini is not deluding himself with such stories. He knows all too well that the outcome of the Norwegian fight is yet in doubt, and that so far the Allies seem to have the best of it. The English have certainly had the overwhelming best of it at sea so far, and if it is true that a British expeditionary force has landed in Norway, then the Nazis are faced with a crisis of the first order. In the nature of the case they are going to have now to bring their whole navy to sea in an effort to stop the English transports and to get their own through. And when they bring their whole navy to sea, the odds are very heavily that that navy is going to be destroyed. With the Nazi navy gone, the rope would already be around Adolf Hitler's neck.

Under the circumstances, it is not probable that Mussolini really considers this an opportune time to strike, for the British-French naval forces in the Mediterranean still outweigh his own, and the French army, it may be confidently guessed, is poised on the Italian border. Meantime, however, the Italian dictator does of course view the Nazi case with alarm, and especially the fact that Rumania's conduct shows clearly that the neutrals are growing more confident of Allied power.

Hence it is quite possible and even probable that his sword-rattling now looks not to his actual entry into the war but to frightening the neutrals and especially the Balkans, with the belief that he is about to enter--and so making them more amenable to Hitler's demands.