Points on the Points

Last week Axis propagandists read the Eight Points of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill with a great flooding of adrenalin.

Yelled Nazi Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels: "Seldom has history seen such a stupid, unimaginative document as the two big guns of world plutocracy framed. . . . Whoever wants to disarm us will have to go to the little trouble of taking our weapons from us. . . . We understand clearly why these international profiteers of plutocracy hate the Fuehrer and his system. He has established a social form in which order, cleanliness and clarity reign. . . . These war and inflation profiteers, these fat capitalists and devoted Jewish servants, these perjurers of their own election promises, deserve only that the German people contemptuously spit at them and return again to its work; thus do we want to work and fight until humanity is freed from this scourge of God."

Yowled Mussomouthpiece Virginio Gayda: ". . . repellent war aims, a gross and clumsy gesture of Anglo-Saxon warmongering, useless and grotesque."

In Japan, which has recently aped Western anti-Semitism as avidly as it imitates Western bicycles and beer, the newspaper Asahi shrilled: "Jews re-elected Roosevelt for a third term. Jews coaxed Churchill to war against Germany. Jews are also backing Stalin. . . . Jews want bases in the Atlantic and Pacific, at Burma, and bases in China from which to bomb Japan."

Japan was still in a lather of indecision last week. No sooner had President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill suggested a military conference in Moscow than Dictator Stalin accepted and announced that he was making arrangements as fast as he could.* At once Japan, which has spent the past months unable to make up its mind about anything, found itself faced with a new enigma--Vladivostok. Probably U.S. supplies for Russia would be routed to Vladivostok. The Japanese General Staff began to see possibilities of an Allied pincer threat toward Japan based on Vladivostok and Singapore. As of last week, the Japanese did not know the answer.

Almost everywhere outside the Axis countries the Roosevelt-Churchill meeting got a press that must have delighted the authors of the Eight Points. Editorialists greeted the lofty peace aims of the Points with loftily expressed praise and hope. Many Latin American newspapers made it plain that they were in hearty accord with Good Neighbor Roosevelt. The Argentine press was almost as warm toward the Points as Good Neighbor Eleanor Roosevelt herself. (Wrote she in My Day: "We all listened breathlessly. . . . One felt it was an important moment in the history of world progress. . . .")

Here & there the rich harmony of approval for the Wilsonian idealism of the Points ran into discord. In the London Times, Britain's retired Diplomatic Adviser, Baron Vansittart of Denham, snorted: "His Majesty's Government did well to promise the restoration of France. But not this [Vichy] France. . . . It is useless to disguise the strength of British feeling against it. This France, His Majesty's Government cannot restore and it would be better for them to say so forthright and forthwith. . . .

"No; this time England will not forget, will not slush indiscriminate sponges over all available blackboards. Mr. Eden has said so in the case of Bulgaria but why only Bulgaria? Hungary is an even worse case. We have been regaled for generations with the legend that Hungary loves us. She has not only successfully dissembled that love but invariably tried to kick us downstairs whenever the landing looked dark enough. This also we shall not forget merely because some counts got some clothes in Sackville Street and some barons bilked some bookmakers. Nor shall we judge Rumania by her contributions to Xylophony. It is not of much import or sustenance to us that the Finns did well at their preparatory school when they have had to be expelled from their clubs. The 'Era of False Values' is closed. We shall see that it remains closed; but there will be some accounts to settle. . . .

"We have just received fresh and circumstantial evidence of the beastliness and ghastliness being perpetrated in Poland and in varying scales through all the 14 countries invaded by the German sadists. Let us at least proclaim that the offenders will be specifically remembered. The big shots go without saying; but there are legions of small squirts, SS men and 'Death's Head' camp guards who should pay the same price."

Sampling London's crowds, reporters of the Columbia Broadcasting System decided that the weight of sentiment was somewhat on the skeptical side. Said a sampled editor: "America is in the peace before she is in the war." Said a theatrical producer: "Sounds like a report from our yachting correspondent." Said an undescribed Briton: "One day the Americans decide by one vote to keep an army; the next day they decide the future of the world." A man in a pub: "Those eight points are too soft. The only thing to do with them Jerries after the war is to keep them under your thumb." Unnamed Prime Minister of an occupied country: "For me, I must confess it was disappointing." Widespread was the British feeling of disappointment that the Roosevelt-Churchill high-seas drama had not led to some more positive announcement than the high-flown peace aims.

The London News Chronicle hailed the Eight Points, saying: "This morning the enslaved peoples of Europe will feel the chains lie a little more lightly upon them." But actually no one as yet knew how the people of the world--enslaved or otherwise--felt, whether or not millions took heart as they supposedly did from Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points 23 years ago.

For their benefit the British broadcast the Eight Points in 40 languages, 300 broadcasts in three days.

* The Nazi radio reminded him: "It seems advisable to hold this Moscow conference ... as soon as possible, for otherwise the German Armed Forces might appear at the conference table."

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