This column originally appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on Oct. 18, 1941
One of my readers writes that he like to hear about the skylarks, bantams and onions and is ready to go to country fairs. Thanksgiving services and even rummage sale, but he doesn’t like my column one bit when I write about the war situation. That is something which he tries to forget. Britain is going to win the war, it is written in the stars and in the pyramids, and so let us forget it. He believes in the Red Cross, he says, and the other war services, and never refuses his aid to any good cause, but sees no reason why he should tie his mind in knots over the possible defeat of the democracies.
Easy, optimism lies like a blight across certain sections of this country. I grow tired of hearing people say “we cannot possibly lose this war” — “time is on our side” — and “God will work a miracle.” I remember that some of the French leaders spoke of miracles, too, just before the capitulation. I believe in miracles with all my heart, but they never come to the idle and indolent or the wish-thinkers.
I like to write about the green fields, too, bright with cover crops; the changing hues of autumn; the red dogwood and sumach; the bronze oak trees; the dahlias, zinnias and marigolds and Michaelmas daisies, still in full bloom though the days are growing short and the nights are chilly. The foliage of the peony has reddened along the walk; hollyhocks and violas are in their second blooming. But there is a stab in every flower as we remember what has happened to the crops of the Ukraine, the tulips of Holland, the roses of Picardy. The people of Europe once thought they were safe, too; they though they could take shelter behind the hedge of neutrality. “Leave him alone and he’ll leave you alone.”
Looking back, let us confess in sorrow that we once thought and said that anything is better than war, and in that twilight of ignorance we failed to see what was happening and how it would eventually affect us. When Britain refused to sell arms to the government of Spain, not wishing “to meddle in foreign matters,” not many of us had the courage to do more than protest at parlor meetings; even after the gallant Duchess of Athol left her party and wrote a book of fierce denunciation. When Ethiopia was attacked by Italy one of our Canadian leaders said the fate of that whole country was not worth the life of one Canadian soldier.
These unpleasant memories have a value for us as we face the present critical situation if we will honestly ask ourselves what present delusion we are holding which will seem as foolish as these a year from now.
I am convinced that one grave mistake we are making now is in assuming that all Germans are behind Hitler. People have always found a vicarious sense of action in hatred; it gives an impression of accomplishment and appeals to the primitive craving for revenge on someone. In its extreme form it is shown in the Nazi way of shooting 10 innocent people to avenge an attack on a German soldier, but like all mass remedies it is utterly wrong, and as intelligent people we must avoid it at all costs.
This is no ordinary war. This is an international civil war between those who care nothing for the rights of others and those who do care. It is not a war of nations. It is a war of ideas. It does not know geographical boundaries. All the people of Germany are not with Hitler and his murderous gang or they would not need so many concentration camps, so many spies, such a large Gestapo, armored cars and bulletproof glass. In spite of iron-clad censorship, we do know that there is resistance in Germany to the barbarism of the Nazis.
One of Germany’s writers, interned in Britain at the time when many of foreign birth were rounded up without inquiry, a man named Fraenkel, has written a book (following the excellent example of John Bunyan). In company with 1,100 of his countrymen, fenced in with barbed wire, he was privileged in having a little room to himself and a table for this purpose, and writes that he considered this an admirable place for writing. He describes the pleasant outlook and expresses gratitude for the privacy which has been given him and the privilege of bringing in the documents he needed.
What he tells about his companions is interesting. Most of them have come up through great tribulation, yet they are not hopeless or bitter, neither are they idle. They spend their time learning; they have lectures and language lessons; and, above all, they discuss the future of their country. One of the most eager of the debaters was a miner before the Nazis flung him into a concentration camp. His career abounds in dramatic escapes and some bitter disappointments, but nothing has dulled the keenness of his mind.
His best friend in the camp is a member of one of the oldest families in Germany, which still owns the mine in which the first-mentioned man worked. The young aristocrat could not bear the barbarism of the Nazis, so he lost his position, wealth, everything but his faith; and he, too, is anxious to build a better Germany. These two men, about the same age, are as far apart as two men can be in birth and heredity; but now they are just two interned patriots, united in their desire to see Nazism defeated and the curse lifted from their country.
Thoughtful people all over the world are wondering what is going to become of Germany. Has Germany no leaders, we ask our selves, who will be strong enough to bring it to decency and fair ways of living? We think of what the Nazis have done, and are doing to Poland in their brutal destruction of her leaders, their aim being to destroy Polish culture; and it appears that they have accomplished almost the same destruction in their own country, killing or exiling the best of their people.
Fortunately for the world, many of the brightest minds of Germany, though stripped, robbed and beaten, have made their way to Britain, Canada and the United States, and are now ready to perform a great service for the peace of the world. Henrick Fraenkel, in his book which he calls Help Us Germans to Beat the Nazis, says that he believes the time has come for the formation of a Free German movement, along the lines of the Free French. Such an organization would help to keep alive the flame of freedom and hope, now driven underground in Nazi Germany, and perhaps become the nucleus of a new and better society for their country.
Hitler came into power, and has remained in power, because the opposition to him was divided into a hundred warring factions. His strategy has always been to divide and conquer. There is no doubt that nothing could be more pleasing to Hitler now than the statements which are being made by some of our people that the whole German people are equally guilty with the Nazis and all must suffer.
Fraenkel, in his book, speaks about this sort of propaganda going out over the air and how eagerly it is seized upon by Goebbels and his staff. Each time that wild statements of this kind are uttered in the democratic countries the speakers are, in truth, playing Hitler’s game in dividing the opposition to his ruthless rule. They are helping to consolidate the Nazis.
I have before me, pinned on the wall beside my desk, the Atlantic Charter, that fine declaration of the war aims of the democracies and a statement of their hopes for the years to come. Surely the similarity between it and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points is apparent to all of us. I wonder to what heights of development in peace and prosperity and contentment the world might have risen if the democratic countries had the vision which President Wilson saw when he wrote this charter on January 8, 1918, and the backbone to follow it through. Now in 1941 it is again put before us; in the last paragraph we read these words:
“We believe that all the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force.”
Now, if we really do believe this, what are we going to substitute for the use of force in bringing in the new day? Surely it must be a new spirit of brotherliness and friendship and truth, and that can only come when we strip from our hearts the last vestige of prejudice. Let us try to realize that a great gift has been handed to us in the coming of statesmen and writers, doctors and artisans from the distressed countries of Europe. Let us welcome them and put them to work.
I was glad to hear a former cabinet minister of Austria — Dr. Richard Redier — speaking over the radio recently, and I hope he will be given the opportunity of talking to our 609,000 Germans telling them of the dire disorders which have come to their homeland under Nazi rule, and they need to be told, for the myth of Hitler’s greatness still exists in some minds. There is nothing so powerful as the truth, simply told.
Some of McClung’s columns from the 1930s and 1940s have been collected in a book, The Valiant Nellie McClung: Selected Writings by Canada’s Most Famous Suffragist, by Barbara Smith.
