THE EDITOR RESERVES THE LAST COLUMN
The Editor Reserves. . . The Last Column Curious Silence In all the recent and current uproar over the need for drafting manpower, the Administration has been curiously silent about the need for...
...The League Again Press and radio commentators who peddle the Administration's views on foreign policy without questioning any of its facts or investigating any of its handouts read and sound identically alike on some days...
...Confirmation From Germany Two arguments about Germany long made in The Progressive—often in the face of bitter criticism and charges of "appeasement"—are now being confirmed in the press dispatches from impeccable sources...
...One argument, that our stupid and short-sighted policy of demanding Unconditional Surrender and planning the destruction and dismemberment of the Reich is needlessly prolonging the war and costing countless lives, was confirmed by Christer Jaederlung, Berlin correspondent for the Stockholm Tidningen, who has just returned to Stockholm after 17 years in Berlin...
...Writes Mr...
...Aircraft and parts, 1,686 per cent...
...It is rare when our troops meet hard glances...
...Certainly these disclosures make a mockery of the Administration's promise to "take the profit out of war" and expose the one-sidedness of its demand for a draft of manpower without a corresponding draft of wealth...
...Welles: "The first 3 years of the League were marked with many successes...
...Powerful evidence of profiteering on a scale more fantastic than had been imagined was available in Government circles last week in a confidential table of industrial earnings prepared by the OP A. Covering the profits of 1,120 leading industrial corporations for the first half of 1944, broken down by type of production, the report shows the following percentage profit gains over the 1936-1939 pre-war period: Motor vehicles and parts, 896 per cent...
...To the best of available information, in all occupied Germany only two or three cases of sniping by civilians has been reported and these are unconfirmed...
...Tanned and finjshed leather, 5,403 per cent...
...Printing and publishing, 389 per cent...
...It regulated a number of minor disputes between countries with auspicious results...
...M. H. R...
...But in 1923, when Italy bombarded the Greek island of Corfu, the League's decision in effect rewarded the aggressor and after that its prestige declined...
...None of these [vicious acts of terrorism by the German people] has occurred," Wilhelm wrote...
...Rubber products, 697 per cent, and Textile mill products, 522 per cent...
...One of the best brief comments on the League's failure appears in Sumner Welles' An Intelligent American's Guide to the Peace...
...None of the boys bothered to point out that on some occasions, the United States took a more forthright role than the League in seeking to prevent aggression and preserve peace, or that Hitler and Nazism came to power and plunged Europe and the world into war not because America was not in the League, but because the Tory ruling cliques in Britain and France did not have the will to stop Hitler, preferring to build him up as a bulwark against Soviet Russia...
...Iron and steel products, 251 per cent...
...Railroad equipment, 317 per cent...
...Actual operation of Germany by American troops has been peaceful on the whole...
...In a series of articles cabled to this country by the Associated Press, Jaederlung wrote: "Today the Germans are fighting on because they feel that they are postponing a decision which appears to them even more terrifying than the war itself...
...The Last Column Curious Silence In all the recent and current uproar over the need for drafting manpower, the Administration has been curiously silent about the need for drafting wealth—and profits...
...Last week, for instance, there was a rash of comment on the anniversary of the defeat of the League of Nations in the Senate a quarter of a century ago, with most of the columnists and commentators using almost identical language to argue that if the United States had joined the League, the world would not today be up to its ears in mud and blood...
...In Cologne, many Germans told us how they had waited anxiously for the arrival of the Americans...
...Another point we have long made—that there is a major difference between the Nazis and the mass of German people—was corroborated last week by John Wilhelm, war correspondent for Marshall Field's Chicago Sun...
...These figures, of course, are profits before taxes, but the U. S. Treasury estimates that even after admittedly stiff war taxes, profits of these industries are still 200 to 300 per cent above pre-war levels...
...In some communities the German peasants displayed amiable attitudes toward the Americans...
...Lumber and timber, 1,064 per cent...
...Wilhelm has been discovering that all the preconceived notions regarding the German people planted by the hate cult in this country have been blowing up in the light of realities...
...Even at Remagen, the little Rhineland town where we captured our first bridgehead over the Rhine, the stolid Teutonic residents gaped open-mouthed at the American troops, then took another puff of their pipes and went about their business without attempting to halt them long enough to save the bridge...
...Electrical machinery, 1,064 per cent...
...There is nothing to indicate that American "isolationism" had anything to do with that failure...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 14
