The Charlotte News
Tuesday, June 24, 1941
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The page is here. More commentary pervades opining the best move now for the United States and Britain. Clapper recounts the President's message warning the Nazis that more acts of piracy on the high seas, as with the Robin Moor, would not be tolerated, that the United States fought the Barbary pirates. War with Germany appears more imminent than ever. Congress begins debating the issue.
Frank Porter Graham, UNC president, is attacked by the High Point Communists as a warmongering capitalist, enemy of the proletariat, just another betraying liberal. (Ten years later, a man named Helms would act as campaign manager to defeat him for the United States Senate against a Raleigh lawyer, Willis Smith.)
The Nazis closed U.S. consulates in Germany for dozens of acts of supposedly documented espionage.
Installment 20 of Out of the Night tells of the Nazi foreign espionage and propaganda operations in 1931. Jan tells us that the Nazis were active among German nationals living abroad, especially in the United States, South America, the Balkans, and, to a lesser degree, in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. He relates that one Professor Schwartz was the coordinator for Nazi spy operations in Russia. So the Comintern decided to lure Schwartz from his home in Berlin on a bogus pretext, raid it, seize his papers, ship them to Hamburg, where Jan would take them aboard a Russian steamer to Russia. The documents would then be used to supply information for conducting arrests on Nazi spies in Russia. The plan is executed, the papers seized, but Nazi spies within the Communist operation tip storm troopers of the whereabouts of the Communist nerve center in Berlin and the location of Professor Schwartz. A shootout results. As the storm troopers wore no uniforms, no one could tell friend from foe. The papers disappear in the night as the couriers lose their nerve. Several people are killed, including Professor Schwartz. Jan escapes. A general investigation by the German police follows, resulting in arrests of both Nazis and Communists. To avenge the death of Schwartz, Nazis attack Communist students at the Berlin University, causing its closure. The Communists ferret out the Nazi tipsters within the Communist movement and murder them. Hitler offers a reward for the names of the murderers.
All of which provides further clues as to why Hitler was now attacking Russia a decade later as dictator of Germany. Chaos and a power vacuum within Germany in the twenties and early thirties, a flabby weakness of the old leadership after World War I, an emaciated pride of the ordinary citizen left in defeat, a general economy in both the Soviet Union and Germany pushed to the edge of subsistence, had led to this power struggle between Nazi nuts on the one hand and Communist worker ruffians on the other for the soul of what was left of the land. Struggle to the death appeared to be the only reality that either of these opposing forces understood or respected. The goal was simple--power to impose order of the type which either side favored, to enslave the masses to the will of party chieftains on the pyramiding pretext of using people to enslave others down the line, a sort of grand Ponzi scheme. Someone dares to step out of line, the solution is also simple: murder.
A retreat, in other words, to tribal barbarism--not unlike one found in the United States during, and for at least the twenty years following, the Civil War.
In any event, the Castro incident ends, Easy is rescued, as Wash Tubbs flies to Washington to find him. Popeye continues in earnest for Davy Jones and his locker as the Mermaid shows the way. Wilmer blows away the boss, probably just sucking up so as to get a shot at part of the loot when the blackbird is finally found and cashed in, a bootless effort to impress Brigid O'Shaughnessy. Fat chance. Gutman and Cairo have other ideas. Little Beaver learns about sharks from Red Ryder--little understanding that one day it would all wind up in an L.A. courtroom.
And we ourselves were just sitting here, thinking of the salt sea, maybe even of asking the piano player over there to play it just one more time. But then, just as the thought appeared on our cortex, just as we were thinking of the waves incessantly wandering in and out from the shoreline, day in, day out through the ages of ruthless oppression, discourtesy, and black nights of stark horror, in came the Vichy gendarmes, closed the joint down, confiscated the blackjack tables, and Sam, last we heard, after intensive questioning as a suspected Socialist, was playing honky-tonk strains in some secret dive over by the wharf which fronted for a Resistance hangout.
It all just goes to show that it's a rotten life in a rotten world.
But right about then...
Framed Edition
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