These Alliances Look Toward Peace By Terror

The whole astonishing business being engineered from Berlin is undoubtedly simply a part of Adolf Hitler's planned localized war, to jockey himself into the position of getting Poland without having to fight in the West. It is probable that he is quite truthful when he says he wants no such war. His policy is to divide and paralyze his victims, then eat them by piecemeal. And he himself has laid down the axiom that once a nation has shamefully yielded, it is not likely ever again to feel that any particular demand made upon it is worth fighting over. It did not quite work after the shameful yielding at Munich. But it has half worked, for the French and British people are clearly already semi-paralyzed, are going about this war with an appalling lack of energy and spirit. And if only Adolf can cajole and terrify them into yielding again, all in the name of sweet reason, then he may safely hope to obtain the mastery of the Western world without a fight.

To this end, Adolf goes out and rigs up his strange treaties of alliance. To the end of facing the people of England and France--and always the United States--with what he shrewdly calculates will be taken as overwhelming force.

As a matter of fact, it may well be doubted that any German-Russian-Japanese-Italian-Turkish alliance is actually overwhelming force, even as against Britain and France. Such an alliance is one of pasteboard if not of tissue paper. Cutthroat Hitler does not dare trust Cutthroat Stalin, and Cutthroat Stalin does not dare trust Cutthroat Hitler. Do you think Hitler really dares to pull his legions away from Poland now? Or that he really dares to bring great hordes of Red soldiers into Germany to fight on the Western Front? We hear a great deal from the radio, indeed, to the effect that Russia is going to strike England elsewhere. But it would be illuminating if the boys would look at their maps and tell us precisely where. Through the Pamirs? Moreover, Russia is far from being the inexhaustible storehouse of supplies she is painted as being. Potentially perhaps, but in actuality she produces little more than she herself needs, is going to have her productive capacity sharply curtailed by mobilization.

As for Japan, she has her hands full in China. She may take the relatively unimportant British concessions in that land, but if she attempts to move against England elsewhere, she has Singapore to reckon with. And even as regards French Indo-China--the American battle fleet still lies at Pearl Harbor, an enigma which the little brown man will not forget to consider.

And as for Cutthroat Mussolini, he is playing with his own destruction. For the Catholic Church, to which nearly all Italians adhere, is against an alliance with the Reds.

Turkey is the most dangerous of all, for it can close the Dardanelles. But even that is not irreparable, as witness the last war.

But it is not to the fact that Mr. Hitler has appealed, not even to governments. His moves are all addressed to mass hysteria, to the problem of utterly demoralizing the people of the nations opposed to him, to reducing them into the hopeless conviction that they are up against the impossible and had better grant him what terms they can.

More, it is just possible that it may work. For already the English Government is plainly playing with the idea of ducking out of its obligation to Poland. These English statesmen, say the reports, "wonder if aggression is possible against a nation which has ceased to exist." Of course, the treaty was precisely a promise never to admit that Poland has ceased to exist, to fight until she was liberated and restored. But England has welshed before. She may welsh again.