The Charlotte News

Saturday, December 20, 1941

FOUR EDITORIALS

The piece from The Baltimore Sun tells of the monkey wrench down in South America, the Nazi Fifth Column movement, and how it had gained recent strength, apparent by the rash of strict measures being taken to douse Nazi propaganda. When the German envoy to Argentina was called upon to testify, he promptly caught a flight on the Nazi-operated Condor line and headed back to Germany. It reports further that the London Economist had indicated that the Buenos Aires press gave praise to the umbrage expressed by the Mexican government at alleged interference by a German diplomat--to what end, however, is not revealed.

Dorothy Thompson provides a nicely encapsulated study of the Teutonic militarism besetting Germany's past and present, and likewise that of the Samurai swordsmen of Japanese lore. It is worth your while to read it.

She concludes with the ominous but astute notion that neither nation could withdraw from its chosen course of militarism without either total victory or total defeat, as the return of the millions of soldiers in Europe, in China, would choke their respective nation's tolerance and resources to death--a kind of militaristic law of diminishing returns, one might say. Each nation ultimately chose total defeat.

For it being the way of humanity, there is no utter possibility to waylay a whole nation of people for very long, placing its citizens, with all their inherent national pride, dignity and culture passed generationally, under the yoke of another for the sake of enslavement, crushing in the process its national identity. At once, malingering sets in to destroy the system from within if it is not otherwise destroyed from without. It is a stupid notion.

It is too bad that each society did not first study the British Empire's failed attempt at the task, as well that of the British Empire's cousin, America. One objective book on plantation life in nineteenth century America, well-studied, would have done the trick. But, we should not assume too much of these militarists whose reading habits appeared to have run solely to adventure and war stories, the Japanese perhaps to American westerns, not very astute at intellectual fare. (No aspersions at all meant to be cast upon the literary mark left on film by Akira Kurosawa as few ever have, or by his favorite actor, Toshiro Mifune. To the contrary.)

Indeed, we wonder if, in truth, Hitler could even read.

He certainly couldn't read something so simple as weather reports in June, 1941. Or, perhaps he deluded himself into believing that the early winter indicants at the beginning of summer were merely the result of a Communist plot to stunt his destiny revealed out by the waning moon.

We note also the letter to the editor of this day which bemoans the temperance league's return, suggestive of the need for a return to prohibition to keep the young soldier safe from his own proclivities toward dissolute escapism into the bottom of a bottle. As he wisely counsels tolerance to avoid the temptation of taboo and its supplier, the bootlegger, Mr. Gaunt however recognizes the need for discipline in the ranks.

But, Mr. Gaunt, by the published report from a few weeks back in The News, we would suggest that G.I. Joe probably could have taken a leaf from the seasoned Tommies who had already staged the fighting over there for over two years and used the drive toward escape to enable scrounging from the garbage pails of the mess hall before each bombing mission to collect empties to be dropped from the bomb bay doors onto the heads of the little Nazis, properly so, as broken glass for broken glass, just as ashes for ashes and dust for dust.