The Charlotte News

Wednesday, February 25, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Both Dorothy Thompson and Paul Mallon write this date of the remarkable blandishments provided Joe Stalin by Doug MacArthur. Write it down. Doug MacArthur, who later in 1951 wanted to start a war with the Chinese Communists over Korea, even to the point of publicly disagreeing with the President's orders to desist and not cross the Yalu River. The same Doug MacArthur here gave praise to the most notorious Communist of all time for orchestrating "the greatest military achievement of all time".

But it was well-deserved and of course the praise was not, per se, for Stalin himself, but rather for his fierce generals and fighting forces which had knocked the Nazi in the jaw repeatedly across the 2,000 mile front of its invasion, scotched their progress, and forced them in three months to give up territory won at the expense of a couple of million of Hitler's best crack troops.

As Mr. Mallon reports, the strategy was simple: when surrounded, flanked, outmaneuvered and trapped by superior forces, attack fiercely right into the center of the enemy camp, while they are provisioning troops and machinery and bringing up reinforcements or waiting for their own flanking maneuvers to wear through the enemy. Such was that which Stalin did, (with a lot of help from the early winter), which MacArthur did on Bataan, which Rommel did to the British in Libya after he had been chased halfway back across Africa (with a little help from the Japanese necessitating diversion of British troops and planes from Egypt to protect Malaya and Burma).

Dorothy Thompson's piece provides a roadmap for what led to the Cold War involving Asia and Southeast Asia--that Stalin was perceived as the strong man in World War II by many in the Far East and Near East, that he was the man on the white horse who got things done, while the British and Americans spent time, early on anyway, in retreat.

Of course, by 1944, that scenario would change as the British and Americans took the offensive decisively at Normandy and as the Navy was taking the offensive in the Pacific. But Stalin had a decisive advantage, one which men such as MacArthur likely admired in their secret moments. He did not have to contend with democracy. He gave orders and if they were not obeyed, men disappeared. But that seeming penalty of living with democracy is not in fact a penalty at all of course. For there is only one man with that supreme sort of power in dictatorships. And, inevitably, he is a mad tyrant. For in order to live, he must always sleep with his back to an armored wall, always fear even his closest ally as if his potential enemy. There is no freedom in tyranny, even for the tyrant who possesses all manner of power to the point of near human omnipotence. He remains, notwithstanding, a pawn to his own fears, the basis for all tyranny in the first instance.

As we said, we hold no brief for General MacArthur in the general sense, precisely because of his defiance of presidential orders and failure fully to appreciate that the American system relies on a civilian Commander in Chief to distinguish it from tyrannical and totalitarian systems, a civilian not merely acted upon by the military as a compliant supplicant to the martial orders of the moment, but one capable of true leadership, one who directs the grand strategy, even if traditionally leaving the more detailed formulation of strategy and tactics to the commanders in the field.

Undeniably, however, MacArthur was a hero of the Pacific war. Sometimes, men such as Patton and MacArthur, though possessed of a streak of the tyrannical, a streak of madness, are the indispensable mad men in a democracy who are sine qua non to winning wars against mad tyrants.

Or, do we see them too much in only two dimensions? Was their fortitude and its concomitant seeming madness as much a showpiece as madness in fact, theater brass to instill in the men serving under them the courage and grit necessary to fight to the death in jungles, in freezing temperatures which defied life long before the bullets began flying?

Or, do we see them too much singly within the heroic dimension, equally as cardboard in its formation, collectively glorifying war to the point of creating it to supply sustenance to our insatiable need for neoteric replacements, living or dead, to replenish élan vital to the stone-cold friezes peopled by the heroes of the ancients, a Hector or Jackson here, an Achilles or Lee there, Ulysses everywhere? Do we feed on war vicariously to tamp down in ourselves the steady tramp of instinct toward aggression, especially aggression toward those with whom we have readily perceptible physical differences based on race and color, or against whom we have a common prejudice because of a given political system under which they live?

Well, all questions deriving from today's subject: extraordinary praise of the head Commie Joe, and his minions of strong, brave fighters, by Doug, the new hero of the Philippines in 1942, even in his loss of them.

As "The Killer" suggests sub rosa, perhaps we ought instead decorate those with unblemished traffic records, those who don't speed. Or do we trifle? Isn't it the old maxim that the overly cautious motorist who creeps with the turtles leaves in their wake a dozen who will by nightfall sleep with the fishes? Counter-attack when surrounded, men and ladies. Tell the patrolman that Doug MacArthur, his best friend Joe Stalin, and their common mentor, Erwin Rommel, told you that it was the way out of the jam.