The Charlotte News

Monday, June 16, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

The one most distinguishing ingredient of Nazism, he tells us, is the reverence for the lie and the liar.

And, so it was; and so it is still.

Show us a liar who thinks nothing of his or her lies, who lies for the sake of it, is proud of the lie, is equally disdainful of someone honest and with integrity and ethics, and we shall show you also one who is full of prejudices for this or that group, this or that ethnic or religious minority, who regards themselves as somehow saintly, above the mere pretention of moral values which accompanies the concept of honesty and integrity, who sees this precept as nothing more than a rule of fools for fools, by which the super-moral need not be governed, being of superior blood and breeding, not needful of such human acumen accompanying such foolhardy notions of truth for the preservation of systems bound to be destroyed by the wave the self-anointed god will not only ride but direct and course to his or her exclusive benefit--because, at the end of the day, such people are Nazis.

The professor, we hope, tomorrow might mention another definite and distinguishing characteristic of Nazis and the Wave riders--stupidity. It was, finally, the reason they lost the war. For along with the lie, always comes greed for power over others. For if someone points out that they are essentially liars, that person must be branded inferior, threatening, hostile, possessing animus against the good Nazis, a dangerous radical interloper to the cause, an heretic, and, eventually, therefore, must die. It was that, along with the lie, which destroyed them.

It was; and still is.

"Trick Play?" compares the world situation to college football, including analogy between England and Duke coach Wallace Wade before a Duke-UNC game--gloomy. "Fullback" Semion Timoshenko of the Russian army, as mentioned in the piece, would not, however, lose his scholarship; instead, he led the first Russian offensive in late November, driving back by 40 miles a Nazi 500-mile putsch which had been led, sluggishly because of the weather and unexpected fierce Russian resistance, but nevertheless persistently, by General von Rundstedt, penetrating the Soviet southern interior as far as Rostov, the easternmost port city on the Sea of Azou leading into the Black Sea. The Nazis held Rostov, however, thanks to Timoshenko's counter-offensive, only for a week. It was the first significant sign that the tide may turn and that the paper-hanging house painter's initially self-proclaimed ten-week, 200-division blitz to conquer the Communist land along a 2,000-mile front between Archangel on the White Sea to Leningrad on the Baltic to the Ukraine on the Black Sea, already turned to 22 mud-sloshed and snow-freezing weeks by late November, might yet become instead the bear devouring the wolf by lure into its freezing, forested den without provender or means by which to obtain it--the bear having been accustomed, by its centuries of nativity, to laying up supply for winter hibernation, and having followed a scorched earth strategy in retreating further inland behind the stacked lines of Moscow and Stalingrad, inured to any sacrifice for the preservation of home and country.

"Tactics" defines, via the Chinese military's dollar analysis as reported by Ernest Hemingway, the difference between Russian and German military strategy--the German, says the Chinese student of both strategies, blitzes with two dollars and loses only about fifteen cents, while the Russian timorously throws in a quarter and winds up spending a dollar and a half. Nevertheless, within the 18 months ahead, the Chinese metaphor would be proved arced the other way about.

And, meanwhile back in Charlotte, the red-faced man told the thin man on the bus of his planned Sunday activities, unchanged as a result of now available Sunday baseball and movies: he'd go instead, as he always had before, to the bootlegger--probably that Daniel of whom the column often spoke as being impervious to the seepage of the law, the one who bid au revoir and walked out of the court repeatedly with impunity--, get soundly lassoed and larruped by the busthead, and then "raise a little hell".

No doubt the Blue Law Sunday proponents took the suggestion as proof that Blue Laws had no ameliorative impact where it counted most, among the heathen derelict, only took otherwise good church-going folk down the road to inexorable perdition via the unrighteous counsel of Sunday baseball and movies, leading through the Belial turnstile, a one-way ticket to the hell of the red-faced man and his bootlegger, the final price of admission.

Meanwhile, we learn that checkers is still a game revered by young and old alike.

And as the world turns, staggering, punch-drunk, the search for undercover G-Man Easy, via the inner groove, leads to a little black and white fox terrier--"Checkers", for want of a name, we'll call him--the foreign agent's dog. But to no avail. The barge has set sail with Easy and his kidnappers. Checkers looks befuddled.

Yet, there is hope, as the Man of Tomorrow avoids the ray-gun by ducking just in time. (At least he wasn't on the airport tarmac.)

Whatever the case, Raymond Clapper's concluding paragraph proved prophetic when examined in the light of the continuing forty-five year cold war, after the hot one concluded in 1945.