A POOR PEACE RECIPE
Meyer, Ernest L.
A Poor Peace Recipe WAR CRIMINALS AND PUNISHMENT, by George Creel. Robert M. McBride. ?3. Reviewed by Ernest L Meyer GEORGE CREEL, American war information chief in World War I, has written a...
...The war-loving Vikings who ravaged the coasts of Europe emerged into the peaceful and progressive Scandinavians we know today...
...Unhappily, Mr...
...Creel's book errs more profoundly in its omissions...
...He errs, first of all, in the assumption that the "national character" of the Germans is solidified...
...second, he heaps up the stark and bloody evidence of their guilt, and, third, he presents his own recipe for an enduring peace...
...Only a slight knowledge of history should brand this as nonsense...
...Creel's peace formula is weakened by untenable premises and curious omissions...
...3) an instant end to Prussia's evil, brutal domination of the German Empire...
...Reviewed by Ernest L Meyer GEORGE CREEL, American war information chief in World War I, has written a book in the current standard "what to do with Germany after the war" pattern...
...First, he offers portraits of Hitler and his gangster followers in the Axis and satellite powers...
...With the bulk of material in Mr...
...Creel's book most readers can find no quarrel...
...The cut-throats of the early Spanish conquistadores who wallowed in blood for bullion yielded to the Spanish soldier who suffered and died and lost for ends purely libertarian and idealistic which might have been achieved if the rest of the world had shared the vision...
...National character is as malleable as individual character, and any scheme which indicts a whole race or a whole nation as irretrievably vicious and damned is itself vicious and damned...
...No nation has ever been permanently molded into a commonwealth of criminals by two decades or even two centuries of buccaneering leadership...
...Ferocity and treachery" are so ingrained in the Germans, he writes, "as to be an integral part of German character...
...2) the arrest and arraignment of all war criminals, from the highest to the lowest, uncomplicated and unimpeded by the slow, tortuous processes of civil courts...
...Public opinion in England which once tolerated the looting and butchery in India changed so radically that today Gandhi is free...
...The recipe Mr...
...Creel suggest that the Allies had a hand in the shaping of Satan...
...Creel summarizes as follows: (1) unconditional surrender, followed by a military occupation that will enforce permanent demobilization and equally permanent disarmament...
...Nowhere does he hint that the hunger for profits, the prayer for the status quo of the landed gentry, created the demon who is trying to destroy us...
...Nowhere does he reflect on the blundering stupidity of the Tories in England and in France who saw in Der Fuehrer a strong man who might hold the dogs of bolshevism at bay...
...Certainly the Hitler gang and the satellite Quislings stand convicted by their own monstrous acts and utterances...
...Granted that Hitler and his crew are the fiends they really are, nowhere in the whole volume does Mr...
...And any formula for enduring peace which fails to take into account these vital political and economic concepts which forever have shaped the destiny of the world isn't worth the ink with which it was written...
Vol. 8 • June 1944 • No. 24
