Friday, October 6, 1939

THREE EDITORIALS

O, That War Should Catch Us In A Tight Spot Like This

Don't look now, but isn't that a billion dollars the deficit for the current fiscal year is about to crack? Thursday's report, giving the condition of the Treasury as of Oct. 3, put the excess of expenditures over receipts at $999,161,308.14.

This is the second time so far this year that the deficit has come perilously close to one billion. The first time, income tax installments on Sept. 15 brought it plunging down, but the next and final income tax due date for the year is Dec. 15. By that time, the billion mark will have been left too far behind for revenue to help a great deal.

It borders on the treasonable, to be sure, to speak of deficits and national debts and New Deal spending proclivities in a time of such acute emergency as this. But there they all are--the inevitable result of five and a half years of extravagance on a scale the modern world has never seen before. And if on top of this orgy of peace-time spending we should have to undergo a further debauch of war-time spending, why, Heaven help the national credit. It would need it.

But There's Method In This Tale, Just The Same

The cock-and-bull story transmitted to the State Department yesterday by the German Grand Admiral, Raeder (a significant name), is a characteristic piece of Nazi maneuvering.

That it was expected that our Government or any of the sensible people of this country would take any stock in it is not likely. We have too much evidence for that. The English Government has committed its crimes, but the murder of unoffending civilians for cynical purposes has never been any part of its tactics. Only the German Government and the Russian Government can claim that honor in Europe. The English, indeed, are such sticklers for doing things in decent form that they actually seem to let the Bremen escape rather than commit an act of technical piracy.

And there is the evidence of the character of Mr. Winston Churchill, who is supposed to have ordered this thing, as he is supposed, under German claims, to have ordered the sinking of the Athenia. There are grave faults in the Churchill character, but low and murderous cunning is not among them. He is no more capable of this than he is capable of beating his grandmother or plotting to replace King George with Auld Hornie.

And pray, will you tell us how Admiral Raeder knew about it? Having entered upon the dastardly plot, which could certainly bring the United States to war against his country if it were discovered, Mr. Churchill of course told a great many people, so that the German secret agent could easily find it out? Or even called in the agents and told 'em himself?

But the story did nevertheless achieve two things. It forced the Washington Government to dispatch warships to sea, for you did not tell another Government direct that it is lying, and you can take no chances whatever under such circumstances. After all, it is possible that if you ignore the warning the German submarine might hoist the British flag and sink the ship. And the strafing of the Washington Government after this fashion would give the Germans, who bitterly remember the Bremen, a great deal of delight.

But above all, the thing achieves the purpose of arming the strange coalition of Coughlin, Fritz Kuhn, Earl Browder, Arthur Vandenberg, William E. Borah, Hiram Johnson, Champ Clark & Co. with new ammunition to whip up the pussyheads in the land with the notion that it is England which is our true enemy--that she is so determined to drag us into her "imperialistic" war that she is equal to any crime in order to do it--and so to rally more clamor against the repeal of the arms embargo, which itself is very valuable to Germany.

These Noises Have By Now Become All Too Familiar

This speech Adolf Hitler made this morning was the same old speech he has made us many times already. And it was undoubtedly based on the same premise that same old speech has always been based upon: that the world is inhabited by fools with memories too short to remember anything longer than three days, and that therefore, any lie (the more brazen the better) is sure to go over with them, if only you keep repeating it with sufficient emphasis and confidence.

He was, he said, working for nothing but the peace of Europe. That is what he has been saying steadily since the day he seized control of the German Government by an act of treachery and violence. But in that whole period the world has lived everlastingly in uproars and between the choice of letting him have his whole way or going to war.

Certainly, he wants peace, the peace of the dead lamb in the vulture's claws. Certainly, he wants England and France to surrender without a fight, for he well knows that he may lose that fight and so come to the choice of blasting out his own brains or dangling on the rope like any other felon. And besides it would save him a great deal of trouble in any case.

Yes, and he wanted a disarmament conference to disarm all the nations. That is another thing he has said he has wanted all along, but from the very first day he said it, he was secretly engaged in building up the most powerful armaments ever heard of on earth, and openly creating a social order which, in its nature, could have only one possible object--conquest abroad. Certainly he wants England, France, the United States, his dangerous ally Russia, to disarm. Certainly he wants them to trust his own "solemnly given word" to do the same thing. Even if they caught him soon or late and established the fact that he was double-crossing them, he would still stand to have fooled them into weakening themselves at least.

Yes, and this was the "last territorial request (sic)" he had to make, save of course as regards the colonies. But, oh, no, he would never think of appealing to force about them but only to "justice."

At the Sportspalast in Berlin last September, he solemnly assured the world that the Sudetenland was the "last territorial demand in Europe" he had to make. When he marched into Austria in the Spring of 1938, he made exactly the same solemn promise. And before that he had made it in reference to the Rhineland, and the Saar--was to make again at Memel and again when he snapped up the remainder of Czecho-slovakia. And As for his "justice," it is always in the name of "justice" that he begins his campaigns. It is in the name of "justice" that he has just committed the greatest crime of this century--the rape of Poland, a crime which promises to set rivers of blood running for another century.

And at last, writhing in holy agony on the double-double-cross, the great man exhibited to us his noble chivalry. With his hands dripping with the blood of women and children executed by his brutal butchers to no other end and for no other justification than temporarily satiating his insatiable lust for conquest, he gave himself to us as one who had deliberately made great sacrifices to avoid killing women and children.

There is only one way to understand the speech. It is one devised by the most cunning criminal intelligence the western world has produced to the sole purpose of confusing the peoples of England and France--and, secondarily, those of the United States.