The Charlotte News

Tuesday, June 17, 1941

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "A Murder", April 17, regarding the shooting down in Chicago of John F. Arena, Italian news sheet editor, probably at the behest of the Italian embassy, entrains today's "Scram!" indicating the final expulsion from the United States of the German consuls. The earlier piece had hinted that Mr. Arena's was not the first such murder ordered by either or both the Italian and German embassies. It was time to be rid of them.

As further evidence that the Administration had seen enough of Hitler's and Mussolini's minions at work in the country, the start of the weekend FBI bust of the 32 Nazi agents in New York and New Jersey, after two years of undercover work, was but eleven days away.

All as another letter writer, a lady from McBee, S.C., takes the measure of Nell Russell of Clement Avenue. But it was only because Ms. Russell was Giving It To Them, those, doubtless, of the energumenically New Guinea possessed and propagandered masses. --Pardon us, ladies, while we take our leave. We don't wish to let our mazard's pitted orbs clap on blood bespilt, which hazards ill-fitted absorb, shun the flap o' goads a-tilt.

We would, incidentally, make comment on the unusual number of mispelled, or misprinted, words on today's page, such as "concatination" and "laisez-faire" in the otherwise illuminating piece, even if lacking some laissez vibrer titinnabulation in this second part of the examination of the mazy snare of the hazy stair, by the chairman of the Davidson psychology department; but since we cringe upon a few such misprints of ourselves occasionally, including one recently where "Colombo" came out with instead a "u" in its middle, even if in that instance no doubt naval in its feckless implications, we are enervated from it.

Instead, insofar as the professor's piece, we shall content ourselves with a quick recapitulation of the five facts he believed, rightly we think, that America most needed to face at this critical juncture of mid-1941 with respect to confronting the Nazi Wave: 1) that the object of Nazism was to conquer through division; 2) that the method for effecting this division was its supreme and only true ethic, the lie, and the bigger, the better; 3) that it defied both the history of megalomaniacal dictatorial will in general, and that specifically of Hitler, to believe that the Nazi would be content with only rule of Europe, that there was any way to live in peaceful co-existence with such a regime finding as its only raison d'être the god-like will for power over others' destinies; 4) that Germany had an eight-year headstart on America in developing its military, while doing so in a manner where military was synonymous with state, the apparent object of the America Firsters, consistent with the first two facts, being to retard American ability to counter with equipment of its own or aid to others sufficient to withstand this new German deus ex machina; and, 5) that direct and physical "attack" as the only casus belli was a misleading formula when considered against the Nazi methodology most often employed to insinuate itself initially to its enemies, the methods indicated by the first two facts, long before any physical attack.

The Entscheidungsproblem of these realizations, which, suddenly and in an immanent cold rush, came finally to grip the whole of the American public in the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor, arose after the war, when the natural fear implanted by such a war's lessons balked a complete return to normalcy, to a state not so determined to insure the ability to make war, not so inured to the industry generated by it, that it had to prove every few years that it still possessed that sufficient ability, to instill fear in the enemies of democracy as deterrent to war and dictatorial regimes bent on them--so much so, finally, that the enemies of democracy needed only to sit back and create sufficient paranoia within the intractably insistent, self-rationalizing paranoiacs to accomplish their purpose without firing so much as a shot--, to a state inclined more to avoid that paradox, antithetical to democracy, than to perpetuate it: this became the strictest and most arduous tightrope test of the long half century of "the hard and bitter peace", to formulate a doctrine whereby the assurance of the "social security" stated in the Newfoundland Atlantic Charter of August, 1941 as a goal to be sought post-war among nations might be maintained by peace rather than war, by mutual accord to afford community rather than mutual distrust as deterrent to afford isolation.

Installment 14 of Out of the Night is here. Whether either the Mermaid or Wimpy deserved that, we don't know. But their sandy saturnalian abandon turned quite saturnine there on the beach. In any event, reports Jan, they were singing the Horst Wessel lied in the German hofbraus by April, 1930. Americans, meanwhile, when not partaking of something remotely like unto Hoffmann's Anodyne, were drinking, at least by the report of the Scouts, plenty of Royal Crown Cola for a nickel a pop, six for two bits of pieces of eight, mate.

So, drink up me hearty joho. There's work to be done for to make ready for sail.