The Charlotte News
Tuesday, August 4, 1942
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: ...And, lastly, through a hogshead of real fire.
The front page tells briefly of American author Waldo Frank having been beaten severely in Buenos Aires for having written simply that Argentina was in a state of "confusion, discontent, and discouragement, not far from consternation."
As we have suggested many times, should you find this country not suitable to your own philosophy of government, Argentina might provide you with more suitable fare.
It was reported from London that now the Italians were following suit with the Nazi tactic of wiping out whole villages to flush out resistance guerillas and retaliate for aiding and abetting their surreptitious activities. In this case, the village was in Yugoslavia, Jelini, in the Flume District. Twenty were executed, the rest of the inhabitants forced to leave, presumably interned, and the village set afire.
In India, Mohandas K. Gandhi admitted having issued in late April a written statement indicating that were India free from the British Empire, its first act would be to negotiate with the Japanese for peace, that the fight with Japan was that of the British Empire, not of India. As The News had editorialized in recent months, in the wake of Sir Stafford Cripps having failed in March to negotiate for India's cooperation with the Allies in the war effort in exchange for postwar dominion status, this sort of general attitude displayed by Gandhi of tenderness for peace with the Japanese certainly appeared ostensibly at least to be one of naivete.
For the Japanese warrior class, were they able successfully to have negotiated "peace" with India, were not going to feel any too kindly for long to the little man at the spinning wheel, clad in his loin cloth and bearing his peaceful grin. Likely, he would have been dispatched promptly, probably with plentiful plausible deniability, by some cultivated uncultivated British or American soldier of fortune, paid a healthy ransom for the bounty, thus furthering propaganda efforts against the Allies while doing away with the thorn to their empire interests, far more violently resolute in determination than ever had been Britain in creating the colony in the first place.
The Japanese rode into Thailand and Burma on elephants, like unto a circus parade. It would have been a similar spectacle had they taken over India or had India thought naively, quite so as did Chamberlain and Daladier before them in September, 1938, that it could negotiate a lasting "peace" with such a feudal, barbaric warrior mentality.
It would take two atomic bombs, after eight years of warfare in China and the deaths of millions, after three and a half years of warfare in the Pacific and the deaths of hundreds of thousands, finally to subjugate and bring to its knees this bellicose class of Japanese warrior, no better than the Nazi swine of Germany, full of his Prussian forebears and their Teutonic myths and Norse goddery, just as the Japanese bore heavy on his sleeve his prideful Samurai ancestry.
Their goal, as with Germany, was world domination, evenly divided between West and East, founded on a model of barbarism, a willingness to be more purely bestial in predation than any of their competitors for the emperial crown, devoid of the feminine trait of empathy engendered by that human weakness, consciousness breeding in turn conscience.
Soon or late, of course, after subjugating the rest of the world, the two empires, that of Germania and Japania, would have fought each other to the death. And, since Japan was not on the racetrack to Armageddon, searching for the key to unlock the incomprehensible energy from squared light speed stored within the nucleus of the infinitesimal, there likely would have eventuated by, say, 1947 or so, a rain of Nazi atomic bombs which would have wiped from the earth the entirety of Japan, as well in the bargain probably the entire West Coast of the United States. One need not think very far to come to that extrapolated extension of the warrior-racist mentality dominating Hitler's mind.
India would have soon followed also, as would the lands of all non-white, non-Aryan peoples of the earth.
Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi's friend and protege, strongly opposed the statement of Gandhi, prompting Gandhi to clarify that he only meant it for the purposes of bargaining.
Nevertheless, it was a naive statement, even if couched in terms appropriate to Gandhi's view of Satyagraha, not "passive resistance", but rather "the Force which is born of truth and love or non-violence", "firmness in a good cause".
Whether, however, that Force could have met the Samurai sword on the battlefield and been victorious, especially with the Nazi boot marching perhaps not far behind from the West, the world will never know. The Japanese warrior never got into India. Nor did the Nazi. Perhaps, the Bong of Wong kept them out. It tolls for thee...
On the editorial page, Dorothy Thompson returns to write of "The Disjointed Allies", that is, lots of talk, not enough action, as Hamlet, she suggests--or, as Cash's Freudianized, frustrate squirrel in the Charlotte First Presbyterian churchyard, on a snowy day in late January, 1940, we offer.
The editorial column attacks once again the murder rate in Charlotte, six deep in murders by whites on whites in July alone, and then proceeds to carp at Czar Petrillo for his stand against playing records on the radio's phone, even those with a slide trombone, records in the jukes, seeking instead the continued sustenance of his own middle man livelihood, not just a fluke, collecting dues from live musicians playing over the tubes, the tubes of yellows, oranges, reds, and blues.
It then shifts gears and in "Discovery" shakes its finger at Eleanor Roosevelt for belatedly realizing that there was no ceiling on the price of eggs imposed by Leon Henderson of O.P.A.
Whether 'twas 3 o'clock when she made her discovery or 9 of the clock, we know not.
But we do know that she was one lady egg-wipt, such that she never went into the game without her headgear solidly in place, even if sometimes slightly tipped.
Thus, that she discovered no ceiling on the eggs may have meant only that she was hep to her time and understood that the Pribolofs comprised the sealing capital of the world, sublime, thus making Mrs. R. the original Walrus--is that what we find?
Wonder what Joltin' Joe was hitting these days. We don't bother to look too much at the sports page. You'll have to find that out for yourself.
Anyway, Ernie Pyle was still in Belfast zipping about the country, traversible in three hours in his peep.
We have a mind to think that, while it could be done so, physically, in that quarter pace about the dial to keep, it would likely vest no less than in a lifetime, as with any such place, truly to acquire an inkling of understanding of its wens, warts, penny whistles, vales, myriad vistas, sheep, and sundry aught of strife's clime along the walling rails.
But, he probably understood that, too.
It was still a long, long way to Tipperary and Brian Boru.
In any event, we say good-bye again to Mr. Pyle and thank him for his Irish correspondence thus delivered for this while. We shall probably encounter him somewhere again, further on up the road.
A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch takes issue with The News editorials of Thursday and Friday last, and that which the Times-Dispatch thought they sought to hatch, finding Colonel Kenneth Royall of questionable ethics in presenting the woefully wayward defense of "escape" from Nazi Germany on behalf of the eight Nazi saboteurs caught entering via U-boat the states of New York and Florida fully egg-wipt with explosives, detonators, timers, and plans for how to deploy them and to train others to do so. The Times-Dispatch, as we also commented, makes note of the ethical duties of Colonel Royall to provide effective representation for his clients at the bar of justice, where science is not always the art of the following, even if the defense was absurd in the abstract, in fiction abounding, in chaotic thought wallowing. The News rejoinders in recognition of this fact, but counters still that the man, Colonel Royall, was in this memorable episode most thoroughly out of his trade in jack.
It is not ethical for an attorney in a civil case to present any old defense or cause, for no one is entitled to representation by law or right in a civil case, even Santa Claus. But in a criminal case, the accused is assured by the Sixth Amendment of the right to counsel, which has been interpreted to mean effective counsel, not just some defective topsail sitting elective as the cops' tool. Still, that does not alleviate the defense from all ethical considerations and the accused is not entitled to any old whimsical defense, nor excessive peroration, nor does it stand the accused in good stead with the trier of fact in any event to resort so fancifully to obvious fictional prepense of the bode dead, viz.: The Martians with their little probes they use done made me do it, man. It really wasn't me. It was their plan. It was them working through me, you know? You know how it is. You've been there, right? When you've been there, you've just got to go. It's out of sight. It's a real horror-show.
The ethical and effective defense counsel, we suggest, will not just take up any old absurd line and seek to invest the truth with that the defendant comes to provide, making pretense to confess. For the defendant may be quite mad, after all. One must compensate for the decompensating and his stories tall. The best defense is the most reasonable and logical one available, not just the one within the immediate grasp and maul of the decompensating jailable, to be echoed by defense counsel, with reality unattainable, then also thought perhaps by the trier of fact to be decompensated as well, assailable as just some ruthless hack, maybe living down, himself, on the wrong side of the wrong, hiding tracks. (And, usually, criminal defense counsel are not very well compensated, so...)
So, we tend to find ourselves somewhere in between the Times-Dispatch and The News on this one. Again, putting ourselves in the shoes of Colonel Royall's blitzed position and viewing the evidence against his clients, we think we might have grabbed the Darrow leaf with rueful compliance, pleaded them guilty and concentrated effort on sparing their necks the rope, appealing to traits of basic humanity and to the notion that to execute these loathsome Nazi swinish dopes would be little more than providing Herr Goebbels with plentiful propaganda to stimulate his loose marbles rolling along his chopped-top veranda way to cope, to exhort his people to embrace apace the concept of a martyred band and thus become by it a more unified nation of Lies, to make Das Vaterland seem at once all knowing and wise.
The result, of course, might have been the same, but at least it would have made some sense, as the defense plainly did not.
The cut off quote of the day: "Treason doth never prosper: What's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason." --Sir John Harrington
Herblock makes note of the largest killer so far of Americans in the war, that of industrial accidents, claiming 30,000 lives since December 7, against 4,801 in actual combat, including the 2,341 soldiers and sailors killed at Pearl Harbor.
While all of that was going on, in Cleveland, nearby where today resides the Rock 'n' Roll Museum's throne, the Ringling Brothers tents had exploded in flame, resulting in the deaths of numerous circus animals, the wild in part tamed, not subject soon to replacement for their habitats being cut off by the war from the trappers' paced tents, mercifully perhaps, encased dire straits' sense.
Gargantua and Toto, however, everyone, no doubt, was relieved to learn, escaped injury.
Have you heard of the ship called the good Reuben James?
No?
Well, then perhaps you remember when the nightingale told his fairy tale of paradise where roses grew, in the stardust--of a song.
Framed Edition
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