The Charlotte News

Friday, March 29, 1940

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Cash's piece this date on Bertrand Russell again joins with that of Dorothy Thompson's piece to provide a compelling argument on freedom to think and speak versus the purveyors of moral dictum as the arbiter of the limits of that freedom. It is an age-old tension in any democracy, dating to the time of the Greeks, as Cash duly points up. And it should not be lost on the student of history and philosophy that Socrates, Plato's great teacher, was forced to drink hemlock after being tried and convicted in the Athenian court for corrupting the youth of the city-state. Have we greatly progressed in that regard in 2400 years?

And, we should point out that we made a few errors and omissions yesterday in our note, but we shall leave them because minor error, as we have before suggested, may in the end prove instructive to the beginning. The errors in their order of occurrence indeed seem to form a subjective and predicative thought pattern of some description, which description we shall leave to your higher faculties to discern, should there be any meaning inherent in the concatenation and summation of the errata, as translated through your synapses into your cerebral mass, coalescing therein to award a defined idea. They proceed thusly, including one from the day before: "you not page save 1 9". You can plug the words and numerals in appropriately as they belong, or leave them out to make them into something more interesting than by filling in the blanks.

Our first thought coming to mind from these absent-minded tale-tellers is the notion that Walter Hines Page, as Cash reports in The Mind of the South, returned to his native land from New York in the latter 1890's, apparently sometime during his editorship of The Atlantic Monthly, to write about the "new ideas and goals" of the South, as he believed it had left the Civil War and Reconstruction to the discontinuity of the past, only to abandon the project as "incompatible with reality", hieing him forth then back north ultimately to become a partner in 1899 in Doubleday-Page Publishing, in which latter capacity he proceeded to publish in 1903 The Leopard Spots, that racist epic by Thomas Dixon, which later, along with The Klansman, became the basis in 1915 for D. W. Griffith's masterwork, "The Birth of a Nation", that after Woodrow Wilson had in 1913 appointed Page to be Ambassador to the Court of Sinjims, Page's well-received later memoir prompting the young John F. Kennedy to Charlotte on the second weekend of February, 1941 to find a ghost-writer for his father's memoirs to be written in a similar style, the same weekend before Monday, February 10 when The Mind of the South was published. But you may have a different take.

That, in its turn, proceeds then to remind us of Cash's fumbling on the date of publication, stating it as 1856 or 57, of Impending Crisis of the South by Hinton Helper, during his University of Texas commencement address, June 2, 1941. If he could be a year off on a few dates, then so might we.

Who knows? Maybe it's all the foundations of a blues song, written in red notes, published under the auspices of Foolscap.

Whatever it is, we shall see in a few hours whether we have predicted once again correctly.

Oh--and we almost forgot again: the post office has been stolen and the mailbox is locked.

In any event, as to the chicken named Betty, we respond, Mr. Waiter, you may hold it between your knees, poached on pumpernickel.

All Or Nothing

South Carolina Drys Shoot The Works

Over a long period of time there has been going on in this country a marathon wrestling match, wets vs. drys. Over and over they roll, now with the drys on top, now with the wets. At this juncture the drys have been pretty badly manhandled and tossed all the way out of the ring. But they will return to the fray, never fear.

As in South Carolina, whose liquor stores seem to be a source of disturbance to nobody except those who don't touch the stuff. They have about got through the Legislature a bill calling for a referendum (in the Democratic primary) on liquor. And with the characteristic "all or nothing" attitude of the drys, they have included wine and beer.

They never learn. Apparently they disdain even to examine the evidence that persons (and nations) whose taste in libations runs to wine and beer are far more temperate than those addicted to the harder, headachey stuff, even when it is prohibited.

Hitherto, this unwillingness or downright refusal to profit by mistakes of the past has characterized both wets and drys, so that the abuses of whatever system happened to be in vogue so disgusted the people that the way was prepared for the return of the other. But the wets seem to have mastered a lesson. One hears little of political corruption or even of conniving. The liquor industry is operating under a rigid code of its own devising and enforcement.

Prohibition may come back again, as it always has, but the wets are outsmarting their ancient adversaries. They have profited by their errors of the past.

Rash Move

Logic of Dutch Position Will Not Stand Analysis

The Dutch were strictly within their legal rights in shooting down the British bomber yesterday and killing a member of its crew, but, to say the least they are somewhat over-energetic in their attempt to give the Nazis no excuse for invasion.

The plain fact is that England, whatever her own motives, is inevitably fighting for the Netherlands. Let the Nazis win the present struggle, and the Netherlands are as certainly done for as Poland and Czechoslovakia. Adolf Hitler has made it amply plain that he considers the Dutch merely renegade Germans who ought to be forced to "come home."

And the Dutch empire, fourth largest in the world and extremely rich in war materials, is a prize exactly ordered to his measure.

What makes the case more unpleasant is that the Dutch have somehow failed to hit any Nazi planes so far, though they constantly fly over Dutch territory. And that the Englishman was, after all, only flying over an island off the coast.

If the Dutch are going to enforce the letter of their rights against Britain, regardless, then it is only logical that they should also attempt to enforce the letter of their rights against the Nazis and resist the sinking of their ships without warning, the drowning of their sailors, by the use of naval and air forces; something they have made no attempt to do so far. Britain will not be likely to pass up the opportunity to insist on this now, under threat of penalty for refusal.

Large Order

If This Bars Russell, It Bars Plato And Others

Justice John E. McGeehan of the New York Supreme Court (equivalent to our own Superior Court) is in danger of biting off a great deal. Eagerly seizing on the request of a "housewife" that he bar Bertrand Russell from teaching mathematics at City College of New York on the ground that his books "condone sexual irregularity" and "wink at homosexuality," he half judges the case before hearing it and announces hotly that if he finds to his satisfaction that such is true he is going to write such a decision barring Russell that no court of appeals will dare tear it up.

Russell's books, as all who have read them know, "condone sexual irregularity" by doubting the established marriage code; "wink at homosexuality" by arguing that these people are unfortunate psychic cripples and to treat them as criminals is useless and wrong. If that is ground to bar Russell, then it is also ground to bar Plato, who has been an eminently respectable part of the school curriculum in the Western world for 2,300 years. In the Republic, he advocates the community of women as against monogamy; in the Symposium and other dialogues he treats homosexuality as a normal phenomenon.

Furthermore, Russell's views on sexual aberrations are not new, but represent the accepted ideas of the leading psychiatrists now in practice; are taught in most of the medical schools and advanced psychology courses in the country. If Russell is to be barred because of them, then Krafft-Ebbing, Freud, Stekel, etc., will have to be heaved out of the curriculum.

The whole thing is a splendid reductio ad absurdum. Carry its logic through, and we should have the courts selecting all other college professors and passing on what should and should not be taught.

Site Ed. Note: Annam, mentioned below, was the central region of Vietnam, between Tonkin in the north and Cochin China in the south. The area was largely taken over as part of South Vietnam at the time of the division of the country in 1954. Annam included Hue and Da Nang. Part of China from the second through tenth centuries, the area remained largely an independent sovereignty until the French in 1884 established a protectorate over it and Tonkin, having started military operations in Cochin in 1858, and eventually taken over the rule there, on the basis of mistreatment of French nationals and Vietnamese Christians by the ruling imperial government. In 1887, Annam became part of the Union of Indochina, the name "Vietnam" being abolished by the French. The Japanese of course overran and occupied Vietnam during World War II, giving rise at the time to the peasant movement led by Ho Chi Minh, modeling himself on George Washington and the guerilla tactics of the American revolutionists, to liberate the country from foreign imperialism, ultimately becoming the war between North and South in the 1950's, 60's and 70's.

Pecksniff

An English Ambassador Makes Some Odd Sounds In Tokyo

It looks as though Chiang Kai-shek may as well prepare for the likelihood of having his last main sources of munitions, British Burma and French Annam, shut off.

For the speech at Tokyo yesterday of Sir Robert Leslie Craigle, British Ambassador to Japan, was plainly a fishing expedition, looking to the selling out of China in return for Japan's calling off its anti-British campaign--perhaps even a bid for Japanese help in check-mating Russia.

Main trouble with British-Japanese relations, he told the Nipponese, has been misunderstanding. But they had the same fundamental purposes, Japan and Britain. Both were "maritime powers on the fringe of continents and vitally concerned in events on those continents." And both "ultimately are striving for the same objective, namely a lasting peace and preservation of our institutions from extraneous, subversive influences."

That, let it be noted, plops completely for the proposition that Japan is justified in the campaign to subjugate China on the ground that she herself has continually urged, tongue in cheek, that it was necessary to save her from a Red Peril. And it throws an astounding light on British war aims in Europe. Does England propose to take over the Continent by way of heading off a Red-Nazi peril? That is precisely the logic of the Craigle speech.

It is easy to understand and sympathize with Britain's desire to avoid making more enemies, to conciliate some of those she has in order to have her hands free to deal with her most dangerous and implacable one, Nazi Germany. Nor can we well blame her if, in the showdown, she prefers her own interest to that of China. We are presently doing exactly the same thing.

But such exercises in Pecksniffery as indulged in do England's reputation no good. Japan's objectives are not fundamentally akin to England's, or if they are, then England is the most arrant hypocrite among nations. That we prefer not to believe.

Propaganda

These Pained Cries Are For American Consumption

The new German cries about the Allies "violating neutral rights," are nominally concerned with alleged flights over Danish, Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourg territory. But it is not probable that they are mainly aimed at Danish, Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourg opinion.

All these people know very well who has most violated their rights under international law--remember their daily loss of ships sunk without warning, their long list of drowned dead.

So far as the cries are not merely by way of laying the groundwork for future German violation of these territories, they are probably aimed at the United States.

It happens that the only overt violations of our rights which have been committed in this war have been the work of the Allies. Reason for that is quite simply that we surrendered all our rights on the seas as against Germany when the war broke out--with the so-called Neutrality Bill.

But she hopes to make us forget that, has succeeded in making many people forget it already.

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