Dorothy Thompson

Spokesman-Review/September 1, 1939

Do you feel as I do—a fantastic, dreamlike, unreal quality—about everything that has happened in this week of strain? Something ominous, which is not fear of war? Something that fills the nerves with foreboding, which is not foreboding of a great struggle? A sense of sickness as though all the world and everybody in it, and you and I, were sick in our nerves and in our brains and in our hearts?

We read the diplomatic notes exchanged between the heads of States. (Never did they seem more like “heads of States.” Never less like spokesmen for Nations of people.)

The letter of Premier Daladier on Saturday to Adolf Hitler. “Very esteemed Herr Reichskanzellor! . . In this hour. . . severe responsibility. . . No doubts as to my amiable feelings . . .  Strengthen peace. . . Assert an upright cooperation.”

And the reply of Adolf Hitler: “I, too, have never overlooked . . . grave responsibilities . . . old front fighter . . . horror of war . . . tried honestly to remove . . . tried year after year . . . clear decision made difficult . . . do not doubt my sense of honor.”

White Papers

The issues were carefully phrased and formulated. The Nations were preparing for war. The heads of states were writing the White Papers by which history will judge them. The issue, they said, was not Danzig or the Corridor. The issue they said was whether Germany was willing to negotiate without threat of force.

Britain, France and Poland—who are Britain, France and Poland? Did you even meet them?—had asked for peaceful negotiations.

Germany—who is Germany? Did you ever meet it?—demanded immediate “righting of a great wrong.”

The words are all hollow. It makes one sick to listen to them wherever they come from, on all sides. And now I know what it is that gives us this sense of sickness. It is that nobody in the world is saying one simple truthful word.

Nobody is saying not only what he thinks but what he knows. What everybody knows. And that simple truthful word is that the world will go on like this, in crisis after crisis, go on like this as long as the instruments of power of a great Nation are in the hands of a man who is an arsonist, a liar, a murderer, a blackmailer and a thief.

Gangster Rule

This is what makes us sick inside. The word which is meant to say strong, true things that everybody knows, that every newspaper correspondent has known for years, that Chamberlain knows, and Lord Halifax knows, and Monsieur Daladier knows, and the common people all over the world know, not excluding millions of Germans.

We know that Germany is ruled by a gang. By the superracketeers of history. We know that they came into power by lies, by promises that they never intended to keep, by throwing the country into a panic; that they made a final coup de grace by setting fire to their own Reichstag and by blaming it on somebody else; that a year later they went on a rampage of wholesale murder; we know that it is they who “occupy” a great country, and have tortured the innocent, stolen the national wealth, often for their own personal use, and preyed, like pirates, on the world.

Pilsudski’s Pistol

We know that Hitler has broken every promise that he ever gave.

He made a nonaggression pact with Poland in 1934—at the point of Marshal Pilsudski’s pistol, for the late Marshal Pilsudski understood the nature of Hitler and his movement. Hitler broke it unilaterally the moment he was ready to strike. In between, on four different occasions—the dates are January 26, 1935; November 5, 1937; February 20, 1938, and September 12, 1938—he reiterated publicly that he was satisfied with the present arrangements regarding Poland and that there was no cause of contention between the two Nations. His Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, as late as January 26, 1939, denied that Germany had any quarrel with Poland.

And on September 26, 1938, speaking in the Sportspalast in Berlin, Hitler said: “The Sudetenland is the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe.”

In Face of Duress

Therefore all this talk about “peaceful negotiations” is bunk, and everybody knows it. Everybody knows that you cannot make any kind of an agreement, undefr threat of force or without any threat of force, during a mobilization or without a mobilization, that will be worth anything from one day to another with the present “Government” of German.

Everybody knows that this “Government” rules by a camarilla, and a Pretorian Guard of finks, thugs, informers, terrorists and professional liars calling themselves propagandists; that it has corrupted the word, the word of truth, as it has never been corrupted. Everybody knows that this Government fills all countries with its spies and propagandists—propagandists who have not even anything to propagate; revolutionists without a revolutionary idea; ideologists without an ideology; for where is the ideology that can make a front against communism and switch from one moment to the next to a “Heil Hitler—Rot Front!”

Prepared to Fight

The Frenchmen who twice this year have marched to the Maginot Line have not gone in order to secure the right to “peaceful negotiations.” The Englishmen and women who have equipped themselves with gas masks and prepared for air raids for the second time this year have not done it for a legalistic conception. They are not prepared to fight for the Polish Corridor or Danzig.

They are prepared to fight to get rid of Hitler. The cry in their hearts is “End this infamy! End this rule of blackmail! End this barbarian persecution which is the more disgusting because it justifies itself in unctuous words about ‘purity of race.’”

Whatever the Governments may say in their diplomatic letters, the people of the world are becoming a posse on a manhunt. They are after somebody who has been preying on the world for too long.

This is the truth that everybody knows.

Gorges Rise

And disgust fills every heart. It rises, a gorge in every throat. To get rid of a man and a camarilla around him, a whole world, a whole civilization, 300,000,000 people may have to go to war.

These people are alike in everything essential. They live in the same kind of houses, with minor variations they eat the same kind of food; they work at the same occupations; when they are permitted to they read the same books and see the same plays; they listen to the same music; they have the same hopes; they worship the same God. Not one of them anywhere in the world wants to go to war, Not a Frenchman, not an Englishman wants to bomb a single German town; not a German wants to bomb a single English or French city.

To work up the Germans, the propaganda ministry has to invent the most egregious lies about atrocities. It has to provoke retaliations in order to claim that atrocities have been committed.

Status Quo All Wrong

There is no belief in the world in the status quo nor any desire to preserve it. There is something wrong with the status quo when in all countries there is either tyranny and slavery or unemployment and chaos.

The people of the world feel, somehow, in their nerves and hearts, and in their minds, too, that we might just as well be standing at the beginning of a great era of in intelligent and affectionate cooperation as at the beginning of universal destruction. The will to that era is everywhere in all countries, and least of all in Germany. But it is being strangled to death. It is not only at Danzig that a hand is on windpipe of a people struggling for breath. It is through the length and breadth of this earth.

That hand must be taken away.

The leaders of Stales must know this. And woe betide a Government that brings back for the second time in six months its soldiers from the trenches with another little victory for Hitler.