The Charlotte News

Wednesday, July 1, 1942

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Today's editorial page begins by plumping for the type of cooperation in Charlotte, a luncheon among business leaders held March 2, which led to Charlotte obtaining the shell-loading plant, to be operated by the U.S. Rubber Co., thus benefiting all business in the area.

It proceeds in "The Decorators" to laud future Senate Minority Leader, Republican Everett Dirksen of Illinois, then a member of the House, for his stand in trying to whittle down the 24 million dollars added in appropriations to the Department of Interior contained in the Senate bill over and above that appropriated by the House version.

Raymond Clapper tells, simply but poignantly, of the loading of a troop ship for transport to the staging ground of Northern Ireland, where preparations were beginning for the invasion of North Africa in November. Many of these men, it is well to remember, would never come home again. Many who would come home were vastly different from when they left, some physically and emotionally, some only emotionally. It is a sad piece when so viewed, the loading of men onto ships embarking to a lonely and uncertain destiny, all to fight a war made necessary by madmen bent on empire.

A piece from The Baltimore Sun tells of the growing distance between Hitler and the people of Germany, the fortress erected by the Party sub-fuehrers around Der Fuehrer to insulate His Highness from the reality which was Germany at the time--growing discontent both with the war and the overall abject conditions prevailing at home, the benefits conferred upon the Party hierarchy at the expense of the ordinary German consigned to work in the factories to build the armament to send their sons and husbands and brothers and fathers off to die on the Russian front or in the deserts of Africa. The proud German had quickly become the embittered fruit of high hopes delivered in the earlier sermonettes of judgment on all of their supposed enemies who had waylaid German Aryan prowess in the past and on whose backs would be paved the Tomorrow which belonged to them and to all the Horst Wessels who had laid down their lives in sacrifice such that the dream of Germania might be realized.

Der Fuehrer, in short, was insane and divorced from reality. His situation by this point is not without analogy to that of Richard Nixon circa 1970 and onward. The only difference is that Richard Nixon never obtained the opportunity to put people in concentration camps. But when the President does something, it's not against the law. Nixon said that; so did Hitler.

You don't like our comment? Then move to Argentina, and stop messing with our freedom of speech.

Pardon us. We just watched "Frost/Nixon" and our hackles are up all over again.