The Charlotte News

Monday, January 27, 1941

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Some have tried of late in early 2003 to equate the isolationist-appeasement movement of 1939-41 in the United States with the anti-war argument being put forth today. To make such an analogy or even attempt it, of course, evidences either a disturbing lack of understanding of basic high school level history or a plain mendacity of the same stamp which the isolationists themselves used in 1939-41, maybe ample measures of both. The differences between today's events and those of 1939-41 are so obvious as to bear little mention. We have made a little mention of them before and so we won't belabor it. The simple formulation is that all of Europe save Britain was by 1941 under the yoke of Nazism and tyranny, and Britain was enduring regular bombing raids on its principal ports and cities; Japan threatened action in the Pacific, as it had already taken over French Indo-China and sought to conquer China.

And as to the "liberation", some small number of them cheer today, but what of tomorrow? As someone said, "Tomorrow never knows."

But we are glad that we have given them the freedom to tear down statues, grab food from the mouths of babes for want of a male to wrest it back during the distribution, loot and generally to be disorderly. It all welcomes great promise for imported democrazee.

So go ahead, sirrah, and blindly quote your George Washington speech, tell us that they may even obtain a free press--as our press is constrained to report the story only as the government sees fit on pain of having their credentials severed--and then have your ecstatic hireling Fox lady say, a la a description of the Thanksgiving Day parade, "Look at the jubilant Iraqis, just look, you know, I mean, I think, I mean I don't know, you know..." That's when we turned off the tv--so that we could think.

If Mr.Bumble were around today, he no doubt would amend his statement: "If the tv supposes that, then the tv is a ass, a idiot."

(And as to the idiotic comedian/football announcer with the flag in his lapel who, to rehabilitate his flagging career built on invariable vapidity, has been shilling for months for this war in his inimitable elan, and who, as a true-cu coppice chainee, also advocates brashly now that we should first kill all the lawyers, weseems that, instead, first, perhaps, we should let all the motor-mouth, mumbling idiotic little vapid merryandrews, worshipping their me-so. Cal. line, twist slowly, slowly in their wind. Then the vapid little line, "And we are outta here", will have much more verity to it. And if you don't, pick apart the merrythought and you will.)

Lots of cornflakes have no doubt been sold in the last three weeks--and we are no doubt a better country for it.

So it's over the hill, boys and girls, and on to Syria?

More "go-pills" and "stop-pills" for you, Hophead?

Or have we sold enough cornflakes for this year?

"Well, we'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when..."

And, by the way, where were all those WMA's for which we went to war? Seems to us the weapons inspectors did a pretty good job--after all. Maybe they really didn’t need any more time. But what do we know?

Ah, but child's play. Take it, Maestro. "Keep smilin' through…" We got our exercise today. Alright. The Fox knows all. Let's do the ol' two-step, now. Ev-ery-body.

2, 3--Sing it…

"…Some sunny day."

Law and Morality Clash In A Murder Decision

Tom Melvin, 43-year-old Negro of Wayne County, is going to die in the gas chamber at Raleigh--barring executive clemency, which is not likely. But Mrs. Florence Ann Littleton Holmes, 38-year-old white woman, escapes death, though she is sentenced to spend the rest of her life in State Prison--may not do so in view of the fair easiness of parole or pardon.

Mrs. Holmes planned the murder of her husband. Once she had cracked him over the head with a beer bottle, another time she had used a meat cleaver, but she apparently was a little squeamish about administering a fully lethal blow with her own hand. Anyhow, she tried to hire two of her nephews to do the job. They'd shoot him from ambush, she explained, and she'd get them gloves so there would be no fingerprints and large shoes so they could not be identified by their footprints. And for that she'd give them $500.

One nephew refused. The other accepted (nice people!) but was later talked out of it by his wife. Then Mrs. Holmes hired the dumb-cluck Negro to carry out the plan. He did. But the Wayne sheriff suspected Mrs. Holmes and before long the two were in the hoosegow.

Holmes was tried for first-degree murder, convicted, automatically drew the death-penalty. The woman entered a plea of guilty as accomplice (sic) before the fact. As the judge observed sadly, in passing sentence, that's the way the law is though it obviously just reverses the true moral facts.

Mr. Bumble would have understood it:

"If the law supposes that," said he, "the law is a ass, a idiot."

Ironpants Makes It To Suit Himself, Obviously

General Hugh Johnson, in his column today, speaks with a great show of indignation of the "perfectly obscene panning that this clear-eyed and courageous American (Charles Augustus Lindbergh)" has received and of the "attempt to put him into bed with Hitler."

As nearly as we can make it out, the General's definition of "obscene" is given strictly with reference to whether or not the persons lambasted belong to his own isolationist-appeasement stamp, and includes logical conclusions drawn from quite positive evidence.

Burton Wheeler, an isolationist-appeaser, refers to the President's foreign policy as "The New Deal plan for plowing every fourth American boy under"--an obscene piece of demagoguery if there ever was one and one for which there is not a shred of evidence. But the General doesn't cheep about that. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that he approves of it. For many months he has been shouting that the President was coldly plotting to get us into an unnecessary war--which was tantamount to calling him a liar and a murderous scoundrel--without even offering a whit of evidence.

The wife of Charles A. Lindbergh writes a book in which, while regretting the murders of the Nazis, she says flatly that Nazism is the Wave of the Future and begs Americans not to oppose it but to join hands with it. On the stand Charles A. Lindbergh, asked pointedly if he favors England or Hitler, dodges the issue by saying that there are "some things" in Germany he disapproves of, says flatly that he disapproves of the aims of the British people--i.e., the heading off of Nazi tyranny for themselves and Europe. He does not anywhere say that he disapproves of Nazism as such. And he demands a peace which, if he is not an utter fool, he knows must be made on Hitler's own terms.

That seems to us to be pretty good evidence as to where Lindbergh's sympathies are. But General Johnson says it is obscene to say it.

Gas Transport Accidents Mean Fatal Accidents

Screeching of brakes, a crash, and two fast moving vehicles collide head on. Swoosh--and gasoline spilling from the gasoline tanker ignites, and there is a flood of fire.

Three lives are lost--three bodies are burned to cinders on the pavement near Monroe. People are shocked at what happened to the young woman and two men, who suffered the most excruciating agony until oblivion mercifully ended their suffering.

Whose fault was it? Was the gasoline transport observing the rules of the road, its driver alert to every slight mischance? Likewise the driver of the smaller truck? Was the failure of the equipment of either truck, the tractor truck or the gasoline transport, responsible?

Those are questions of fact which the authorities may answer as best they can from the obliterated evidence. But the statement The News is about to make, and has pondered scores of times before upon occasions that were similar to this, all of them involving a gasoline transport, some of them with even more serious result, some of them with less, has behind it all the accumulated evidence any statement could need.

For the plain certainty is that as long as vehicles move speedily over highways, there will be accidents. Accidents uncomplicated by any such destructive element of thousands of gallons of gasoline are bad enough, and account for the death of a hundred or more persons in North Carolina every month.

But in an accident involving a gas truck, no matter whose faults it is, the chance of survival is diminished in exactly the same proportion as the chance of horrible extinction is increased. Add to that the always present risk of the general holocaust from the flaming rivers of gasoline which cascade from these tanks, and you have considerations aplenty to raise the question of discontinuing them in the public interest.