ARMS FOR THE DEVIL
Arms For The Devil IN THE PAST few months we have read at least half a dozen plans entitled "What to do with Germany after the war." They vary enormously in objective, but all are agreed on the...
...We are glad to report that the enthusiasm with which servicemen write us about the current postwar employment series in The Progressive indicates the growth of a similar attitude in our own armed forces...
...But the conclusion cannot be avoided, if one follows closely the letters and reports coming back from the war theaters, that there is a growing awareness, especially among the men who have been in the heaviest fighting, that the war aims of the Allies have not been too well denned...
...The story of that black chapter in history is best told in "Days of Our Years," by Pierre Van Paassen, noted Dutch-American author and foreign correspondent...
...A recent reflection of this trend is contained in the widely quoted article written by a soldier in Britain's valorous Eighth Army, whose brilliant achievement in North Africa won the respect and devotion of the Allied World...
...They are looking to the causes of war, and how and where they can do something about them...
...We believe this expression from the British veteran reflects a healthy concern over fundamentals...
...For it is precisely they, the international Tories, who eventually supplied our current Satan, Hitler, with his horns and hoofs...
...Mr...
...Wagner's, for a nationwide, federally supported system of public medical and hospital care...
...It is no exaggeration to say that one of the "principal assurances against the outbreak of "* World War Three," he writes, "would be the establishment of a firm working understanding between the Soviet Union, on one side, and the United States and Great Britain, on the other...
...The German bourgeoisie began sending up alarm signals...
...He remembered that in 1871, before peace was concluded between France and Germany, Bismarck had loaned Adolph Thiers the necessary cannon to extinguish the Commune of Paris...
...Her rearming, from its earliest stages, had the Allies' active cooperation...
...After the last war Germany was rendered impotent as a military nation...
...Men who have watched their comrades blown to bits think deeper than the stay-at-home plotters and planners who see a world police force as the answer to everything...
...Sensible Advice IN HIS excellent book, "The Russian Enigma," William Henry Chamberlin offers some sensible advice to the nation...
...It is widely assumed that the Hitler gang rose to power only because the Germans, secretly and to the horror of the Allies, piled up a vast armament stockpile...
...It is not the superficial forms of peace with which these men are concerned...
...Healthy Concern IT IS ABSURD, of course, to attribute to servicemen and women a uniform pattern of thinking on social, economic, and political questions...
...Nothing could be farther from the truth...
...Indiscriminate praise or condemnation can only lead us down a treacherous road...
...The staggering figure should be set down as a commentary on the fact that for a dozen years Congress, swayed by a lobby of entrenched medical interests, has put aside every plan, such as Sen...
...The German bourgeoisie was permitted to organize a civic guard of 400,000 men, the so-called Reichswehr (of which the world was' to hear more), because England insisted that total disarmament would deliver the Reich up to Socialism...
...World events again are moving inexorably toward that eternal conflict between reaction and reform...
...These are the grim facts behind the genesis of Germany's "secret" rearmament...
...Europe's bourgeoisie consented to every complicity in order to maintain the established social order...
...And if the reactionaries in the next peace interlude again supply arms to slaughter political progressives, theirs again will be the red harvest...
...We want a land fit to walk erect in...
...And any plan for "what to do with Germany after the war" which fails to take cognizance of these historical precedents is without value...
...Nearly four million misfits, physical and mental, in our supposedly most robust age-group...
...They know their greatest contribution can be made in the fight for a better life right in their own country...
...It lies rather in an adult effort to comprehend intelligently the new Soviet order, its psychology, ideals, and objectives...
...They vary enormously in objective, but all are agreed on the fundamental premise that Germany must be permanently disarmed...
...Safety lies in honest, open, and realistic dealing based on a factual, not an emotional, approach...
...In December, 1918, the 'Tiger of France' returned the compliment by stipulating that 50,000 German machine guns were to be excepted from destruction to enable Ebert and Noske to shoot down the Spartacists in Berlin and the Soviets in Bavaria...
...The article was published in the Eighth Army's paper, "The Crusader...
...Chamberlin's advice is equally sound in planning our relations with any other nation, a victorious Great Britain or China, a revived France, or a conquered Germany or Japan...
...trinaire like or dislike...
...The key to such an understanding does not i Me in the childish attitude of indiscriminately ,| praising or indiscriminately condemning every-| thing in Russia because of some preconceived doc...
...He writes that after the 1917 Armistice : "Without transition, the imperialist war turned into a war of the imperialisms against the peoples...
...Undoubtedly expressing the views of thousands of those who endured the indescribable hardships of the famous desert campaign, the article proclaims the determination of these men "to stand-on our feet after the whistle has blown and demand a land fit for fighters to live in and not a gilded cage for worn-out warriors...
...Wake Up, America...
...If we were as sure of winning the battle with Britain," writes the Eighth Army veteran, "as we are of winning the battle with Germany and Japan, we might well be happy men, but if we don't win the first, we may just as well have lost the second...
...STARTLING are statistics released by Army medical officers showing that of the 3,836,000 rejected for Army service up to April 1, 1944, about 1,340,000 were turned down on neuropsychiatry grounds...
...Their views are just as diversified as those held by people in civilian life...
...Our present vast army of physical and mental defectives is the inevitable harvest of stupidity...
...With the approval of the Allied high command a German army was rushed to the aid of the White Guards of Finland and helped to exterminate the 40,000 Socialists of Helsingfors...
...There is an increasing tendency, now that the Axis has its back to the wall, to ask, "What are we fighting for...
...Clemenceau knew his history...
...It is time we woke up...
Vol. 8 • June 1944 • No. 23
