COZY NONSENSE
Cozy Nonsense READERS of The Progressive know*, that we have long emphasized the fact that there is a basic difference between the mass of German people and their tyrannical Nazi masters, and that...
...Nevins, who doubles as an historian at Columbia University when he isn't goosestepping in the parade of the war total-itarians, wrote that "any reader of ThetfProgressive will see writers in that journal waving the first whitebrushes at the war guilt of the Nazis...
...Before the polls open Nov...
...Thomas E. Dewey, seems busy these days "analyzing" and "interpreting" the Republican plank on foreign policy so as to satisfy the more rampant adherents of the "peace-by-force" school of thought...
...What men like Nevins and others of the hate cult are trying to get across is their belief that there is no difference between the Nazi clique and the mass of Germans, and it is The Progressive's insistence to the contrary that infuriates them into palming oif their cowardly innuendos...
...This position of The Progressive has been distorted from time to time and never more maliciously than at present when victory against the Nazis appears imminent...
...PROOF of the soundness of The Progressive's position is coming daily from front-line dispatches filed where the fighting is thickest in the Siegfried Line area...
...But, as the New York Times tells us, except for one dealing with the Good Neighbor Policy in Central and South America, "they all steer clear of foreign policy and postwar world relations...
...These people were really Germans...
...Political 'Elasticity' THE intellectuals whp have attached themselves to the Democratic Party are fond of insisting that the issues of foreign policy are paramount in this campaign, that the establishment of a world organization backed by force of arms takes precedence over all other needs...
...Eleven have already been prepared and a 12th is in preparation...
...The Democratic National Committee has prepared a series of slick-paper, elaborately illustrated pamphlets presenting the Democratic position on major issues...
...One candidate can insist oh the -preservation of American "sovereignty" and another, appealing to the station-wagon set, can argue for "Union Now" and other devices to deprive us of sovereignty...
...The Democrats, of course, have no monopoly on "elasticity...
...This is what has been known as "removing the issue from politics...
...It was something of a surprise," he wrote, "when we clattered past the old customs house into the border town on the German side and found the same sort of reception that might have been given a circus parade...
...Now, "any reader of The Progressive" will know how contemptible a distortion this is...
...7, both parties will have taken a firm stand on all sides of the issue...
...One candidate can carry the ball one way, and another the other way...
...The two dispatches quoted here are typical of many another appearing in the American press during the past week...
...Together these stories confirm, more eloquently than anything we can say, that there is a fundamental difference within Germany, and that this difference must be reckoned with in the shaping of the peace settlement...
...A dozen or more columns, articles, and broadcasts have singled us out for special attack in recent weeks on the charge that we favor soft treatment of the Nazis...
...All cf us have been waiting for you...
...Robert J. Casey, war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, radioed from a:t advance American base in Germany that American troops are being warmly received by typical German families...
...Allan Nevins in the current American Legion Magazine...
...Anxious that nothing be allowed to interfere with their philosophy of total vengeance, the hate ".It is busy misrepresenting our position...
...Typical of the cheap misrepresentation was the statement by Prof...
...The correspondent, almost overcome by the shock of discovering that not all Germans were Nazis, quo'tsd a typical German in the area as follows : "We are Germans here west of the Rhine, but not Nazis...
...The people may not have been exactly enthusiastic, but they certainly seemed friendly...
...It was explained," said the Times after consulting Democratic officials on this curious omission, "that 'the candidates will carry the ball on those subjects.' " This, of course, provides for great "elasticity...
...However, the politicians and publicists in the Democratic Party—the men and women charged with attracting popular support and getting out the vote—appear to have a somewhat different interpretation of the relative importance of the issues...
...The fat and lazy Milwaukee Journal, which lets the New York press do most of its thinking for it, has long whined on its editor-jjj page that The Progressiye was "appeasement-minded" because it insisted that there is a difference between the hateful Nazis and the rest of the German people...
...Cozy Nonsense READERS of The Progressive know*, that we have long emphasized the fact that there is a basic difference between the mass of German people and their tyrannical Nazi masters, and that any peace settlement which fails to recognize this fact is bound to founder on a boomeranging spirit of revenge...
...This correspondent, apparently a victim of the "lu'te-all-the-Germans" propaganda in his own paper, admitted that "the warm welcome of the first civilians to ccme out of their air raid shelter was probably or.e of the most surprising turns of the campaign...
...We don't like this' war...
...From the i(ery beginning.The Progressive has underscored the fact that by and large the common people of Germany have been enslaved and tyrannized by the Nazi brutalitarians who are in abundant measure responsible for the Reich's present plight, not to mention the plight of the world...
...Any other interpretation plays squarely into the hands of the imperialists and the reactionaries— the makers of the next war—because if we fall for the cozy nonsense that the German people are alone responsible for all the world's ills, it follows quite logically that nothing very basic need be done to get at the causes of war, except to punish and police the Germans...
...Last week, while the editorial page was still croaking this tune, a dispatch from a special correspondent with American forces in Germany cabled that "the first German civilians they saw greeted them not with snipers' bullets, but with hot coffee and cognac...
...Adherence to this kind of dangerous interpretation can only speed the outbreak of World War III...
...The Republican standard-bearer, Gov...
...Take another example...
Vol. 8 • September 1944 • No. 39
