Sunday January 5, 1941

EDITORIAL

A Criminal's Blueprints Still Go Unbelieved

If the Democratic quarrel survives, it is probable that historians of the future will refer to our times as The Incredible Era.

A vicious criminal, with a known hypnotic power over masses of his fellow countrymen, writes a book. In that book, he candidly sets forth his purpose (1) to worm his way into power in his own country and destroy the existing government, (2) to set up a slave society at home, (3) to conquer Europe and set up a slave society in it, and (4) to conquer the western world and all the possessions of its nations, and set up a slave society over the whole globe.

The criminal writes this book while he is in jail for having attempted violent revolution against his own government. Yet that government, with the book before it, almost immediately turns him loose, makes no effort to curb him or to prepare to defend itself.

In the book he has made it plain that he means to enslave capital as well as labor. Yet the leading capitalists of his country bring pressure on the government to make him its active head. Once in that job he does what he has proposed: he destroys the government of his country and establishes a slave society.

For the next seven years he uses that slave society for the systematic building up of a gigantic war machine, never making any real effort to hide his purpose to use it for the conquest he has outlined in the book. With startling exactness, he carries out the preliminary steps he has sketched for himself--destroys the whole structure of existing treaties in Europe, destroys and absorbs a nation far older than his own.

Then, after seven years, he suddenly summons the heads of the great nations of Europe, holds his gigantic war machine over their heads as a club and demands that they collaborate in handing over to him a nation to which he has no more claim that he has to Minnesota, but which will almost double his military resources and give him command of Central Europe.

In return he promises to ask no more territory, to keep the peace permanently. And they yield. Within a few months he is grabbing more territory. Within a year he has plunged the world into war as he enters fully upon his career of conquest.

But the great nations still do not believe that the criminal means what he said in the book, even though they are formally at war with him. Business as usual must not be interfered with, and they sleep peacefully for eight months while he feverishly increases the power of his war machine. Then he strikes. Five nations are extinguished in a few months, and he becomes master of almost the whole of Europe.

Women and children are systematically murdered, cities are smashed off the face of the earth, one million people are coldly starved to death in one nation, sterilization for the complete destruction of some nations is begun, the slave society is introduced everywhere in Europe. The great continental nations are systematically looted.

The last two European nations to defy him, one the greatest of all, the other a tiny but tough little spot, stagger under appalling blows. It is plain that they cannot survive unless they can get into position to strike him and his people far harder than they are doing.

Then wantonly he sends his bombers to kill and maim in Ireland. And after that, the Irish content themselves with a stiff protest, go on pretending that he is no real menace to them.

And in the land which alone has yet in its power to turn him back before it is too late, to bring the criminal to justice, to defeat his blueprint as laid down in the book, fifteen Senators announce that they will devote themselves to blocking efforts to turn him back and explain that they are sure that he is no menace to their country, that he has no designs on it, even though his agents are already busy in it and all its neighbors.

The Incredible Era.