Sunday, April 25, 1937

Site Ed. Note: For an interview with Herr Hitler himself just nine days after this editorial, see F.D.R. Library, German Diplomatic Files. Note the candor with which he speaks about his intentions not to interfere with the independence of Poland, with perhaps the exception that the Danzig question shall be resolved by "cooperation"; ditto on the Czecho-Slovakian question, save of course the mistreatment of the Germans there which must be dealt with; the Austrian question, which should be put to a fair vote of the people, Anschloss being clearly what the people want but which is being prohibited by the Papal influence on the government there to the extent that they would punish people with jail for putting flowers on the graves of Hitler's parents; and that France and England, goodness me, would never be the object of any aggressive action by Germany, that the Fuehrer respects the British people and always had, even before he began writing. He proposes an English cooperation pact such that Germany may have some of its own colonies with which to feed its people just as France and Germany, Holland and Belgium. And all these nasty newspapers talking about Guernica in such an unfair manner...

And when you are through reading it, there is a bridge out in the desert in Arizona which we own. If you would like to buy it, write us. We'll make you a good deal, mein herr. Seine oder nighte sein...

Our candidate for the prize booby in the European booby-cote is Colonel Francois Roderic de la Rocque. The Colonel is, of course, the gasconading trooper who is out to sell the French people the idea of embracing the Fascist form of collectivism and making him dictator, in order to head off their hypothetical plunge into the Communist form of collectivism. And of all the excursions into idiocy recorded in history this just about tops the heap.

For about the French people, nothing is more certain than that, as a whole, they are congenitally, constitutionally, and incurably immune to both Communism and Fascism. The Colonel might, indeed, get somewhere in Paris--as might the Reds also. Paris is notoriously a dizzy and a bloody jade. But Paris is not France, though she sometimes assumes to be. The real France lies outside her gates, and of the population of that France 65% are landholding peasants. And as for selling these peasants his collectivist-dictatorship medicine, the Colonel might as well be trying to dispose of it to our Scotch-Irish hillbillies around, say, Shelton Laurel.