Now Editorial Notes

Hitlerism in the saddle is one year old. The Republic of Germany has been strangled. The German press has been muzzled. German Kultur is in exile. Countless thousands are in concentration camps, victims of political, religious and racial persecution. Vast numbers of Jews, for #o other reason than that they are Jews, and Christians, for no other reason than that they refused to be servile to the Hitler regime, have been hounded, humiliated, tortured, and deprived of the means to earn their livelihood.

Has Germany under Hitlerism found her place in the sun? Is Hitler’s Germany a factor for peace among the nations, as Hitler wants the world to believe, or is the Germany of today precipitaing a new war in the near future?

These are the questions that people are earnestly asking. And they are also asking themselves these questions:

Is there less chauvinism in the world today as a result of the rising tide of Hitlerism? Is there less fear, less hatred, less rivalry among the European nations? Is there more mutual confidence, greater desire for co-operation, more love for one’s neighbor and less craving for power, for increased armaments, for violence, for bloodshed?

The World War sprang from the greed of some nations, from the fear of other nations, but mainly from the intrigues and machinations of systems of autocracies that maintained themselves by terrorism, by violence, by disciplinary force, by oppressing minorities, by suppressing liberty in every form and by misleading propaganda.

The World War ended in victory without peace for the victorious and in defeat without hope for the vanquished. There were no victors, only victims in the World War. Almost twenty years after the outbreak of the most dreadful war in history, we now find the world in the throes of the worst confusion and chaos, in a state of fear and panic.

Fewer people rule the world today than before the war. Autocracies have been overthrown, but new dictatorships have been established in their stead. Under the old autocracies a larger number of smaller autocrats ruled. There was at least the opporunity for the opposition to express itself. Under the dictatorships today there is not a shred of freedom of the press, of speech, of freedom of conscience. The standardzed, muzzled press under dictatorship constitutes the “public opinion” of those countries. To think otherwise than the dictator does is to run the gravest risks.

Under the German War Lord, Germany before the war was proud of her militarism, but she was also proud of her K u l t u r. For a number of years the German people, after the war, under the Republic, tried to rehabilitate themselves and their country through hard work. Having been blinded by war propaganda they smarted under the stigma of the war guilt clause in the peace treaties. They actually believed that Germany had been entirely innocent of any share in the events and intrigues that had plunged Europe into the war. The German people worked hard, but they refused to demobilize their war psychology, their war spirit. The psychosis of vengeance kept growing, despite the heroic efforts of the republican statesmen and leaders to make peace with the world, with the neighboring states, to rebuild Germany into a great power for peace and not for war.

Walter Rathenau, Germany’s most constructive statesman after the war, was murdered because he was a Jew and because he worked for peace. What militaristic Germany had lost in the war Rathenau was beginning to win back for Germany through peace. The Rapallo Conference was the first step in Germany’s restoration as a free and self-respecting people. But the agitators who preached hate and vengeance despised Ratehnau, the Jew, the man of peace, who worked wholeheartedly for the consolidation of the new Republic. He was murdered by two deluded youths who have now been proclaimed national heroes wretched economic condition after the war.

Hitler rode to power on the crest of the wave of unrest and discontent. Millions of deluded Germans believed that they found in him their country’s new savior. Unable to give work to the unemployed and bread to the hungry, he started by carrying out his promises to crush the Jews, the Jews who had lived and worked and fought for Germany, who had helped to make Germany powerful in the fields of science, art, literature, commerce and industry; the Jews whose ancestors had settled in Germany upwards of a thousand years ago. Hitler, the Austrian, instituted a policy of torture, humiliation, discrimination against the Jews of Germany, reviving exploded myths about Aryan superiority, and about the ruinous influence of the Jew on the political, economic and racial structure of Germany.

The Jewish intellectuals were the first to be driven from their posts. Their books as well as the books by intellectual non-Jews who advocated peace and liberty, were burnt at the instigation of the Hitler Government. Jewish merchants, tradesmen, artisans have had the doors of opportunity to earn their livelihood closed to them by various cruel devices. Jewish professionals have been reduced to utter ruin. Jewish children have been degraded, humiliated. And all this was done under the absurd pretext that the Teutonic Aryans were a superior race, and that no non-Aryans must have any part whatever in the economic, social and cultural life of the German people.

In this war on racial grounds, the Nazi regime commenced to persecute also Catholics and Protestants who refused to subscribe to the Nazi doctrines, and under the guise of combating communism and Marxism, they also waged war against organized labor, against liberals and radicals, and especially against pacifists, regardless of race or creed.

Germany is today intoxicated with hate and war madness, with racial and religious venom. Seeking equality among the nations, Hitler’s Germany is betraying her inferiority complex in hysterical boastfulness and the sadistic persecution of minorities. The youth of Germany today is being trained for war. The young people are being prepared to goosestep to perdition to the tune of Nazi martial music.

The liberal spirits of the world, sensing the danger behind all that is happening in Germany, have voiced their indignation and their protests. They fear that the consequences of Hitlerism will spread ruin far beyond the German frontiers, if permitted to continue. They feel that what is going on in Germany today cannot be treated merely as her own domestic problem, as an internal affair of no concern to the rest of the world. For they cannot fail to see that Hitlerism is being brazenly exported to other lands, by propaganda made and financed in Germany. Austria, Hungary, Roumania, Greece, Poland, the Scandinavian countries and even Japan are beginning to feel the effects of Nazi agitation and intrigues. Hitlerism has also stretched across the Atlantic, spreading the poison of race hatred in the United States.

The Nazis are pleading for equality among the nations, for the right to rearm, resenting any criticism or hint of interference with their internal infernal affairs, and at the same time they are deliberately spreading a net work of destructive agitation and organization in other lands. And this Hitlerite propaganda, inciting strife, discontent and unrest, is directed against democratic institutions, against liberty, against religious tolerance, against the peace of the world.

The recent understanding between Germany and Poland, the non-aggression pact, is not necessarily an earnest of Germany’s peaceful intentions. Judging by Hitler’s acts, his designs against European peace should be watched with the closest attention. Hitler’s Germany, despite the Nazi assurances that their aim is peace, is endeavoring to gain time for rearmament, preparing for a new armed conflict, in the hope of regaining her place in the sun by force of arms, with the aid of some of the other discontented nations.

There is but one way to prevent the coming of a new war which is being prepared by Hitler’s Germany. The truth about Hitler must be made widely known and understood. His propaganda machine fabricating and disseminating fantastic falsehoods abroad must be checked. In every land the education of the masses in the arts and benefits of peace, of international and interracial goodwill and harmony, must be intensified, –in the schools, in the churches, in the shops, on the farms, and in the foreign offices of various lands. Everything in religion that tends to create strife and dissension among individuals and nations should be curbed. Only that which unites and makes for sympathetic understanding should be permitted in religious teachings. The heroes of peace, rather than the heroes of war, should be glorified. The demagogues who incite religious and racial warfare, setting one element of the population against another, should be recognized as the enemies of the entire human race.

To save the world from the purple testament of bleeding war, the people everywhere should dedicate themselves to the testament of peace. If civilization fails to call a halt to war madness, war is sure to destroy civilization.