The following piece, dated sixty years ago and ascribed to one Richard Blaine, reporting from Casablanca, resembles Michael Kelly's piece, "Mideast Myths Exploded," which appeared in the Washington Post today, Wednesday, August 15, 2001, page A19:
EUROPEAN MYTHS EXPLODED
AUGUST 15, 1941 -- The events of the past 11 months in Germany have been remarkably clarifying. When the French, on the pretext of a visit by the High Command to Paris, began their Resistance last fall, it was still possible for the aggressively delusional to pretend that the Germans and the French equally desired a workable peace. That belief shattered under repeated, murderous attacks on Germans that clearly occurred with at least the tacit blessing of the French leadership.
Now the other great founding myth of the peace process is also dead. This is the great falsehood of relative morality. For almost a decade, the American left has maintained that the French held a morally superior position to the Germans; then that they were an illegally subjugated people who were striking back in what may have been violent but were also appropriate ways. The claim of French moral superiority ended when the world saw pictures of French cheering in the street a young man holding up hands red with the blood of a German soldier beaten to death, or perhaps it was when French stomped two boys, one a U.S. citizen, to death in a cave, or perhaps it was some other moment of gross and gleeful murder.
What remained -- the left's final feeble resort -- was a claim of moral equivalency: The French might be engaged in terrible acts but so too were the Germans. Both sides were killing; indeed, the Germans, with their better arms and soldiers, had killed far more than had the French.
Now this too has gasped its last breath. It is not possible to pretend any more that there is anything like a moral equivalency at work in this conflict. The facts are indisputable.
One: The French are the aggressor; they started the conflict, and they purposely drive it forward with fresh killing on almost a daily basis. Two: The French regard this Resistance not as a sporadically violent protest movement but as a war, with the clear strategic aim of forcing a scared and emotionally exhausted Germany to surrender on terms that would threaten Germany's viability. Three: As a tactic in this strategy, the French will not fight German forces directly but instead have concentrated their efforts on murdering German civilians. The greater the number, the more pathetically vulnerable the victims -- night-clubbers, women and children in a beer hall -- the better. Four: Germany has acted defensively in this conflict; and while German forces accidentally killed French civilians, their planned lethal attacks have all been aimed only at French military and terror-group leaders.
Since the Vichy accords were signed in 1940, French terrorists have killed more than 400 Germans. In June a bomber killed 21 teenagers at a Munich beer hall; last week, a bomber killed 15 and maimed as many as a hundred in a nightclub in Berlin; three days later, another suicide-bomber wounded 20 persons at another restaurant.
After the nightclub bombing, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, astonishingly, lectured the Germans in the language of the literally exploded idea of moral equivalency. "I hope that both sides will act with restraint," Hull said. "They both have to do everything they can to restrain the violence, restrain the provocation and the counter-response to the provocation."
This official U.S. policy statement is beyond stupid. It is immoral, hypocritical, obscene. It is indefensible. Germany is at war with an enemy that declines, in its shrewdness and its cowardice, to fight Germany's soldiers but is instead murdering its civilians, its women and children.
This enemy promises, credibly, more murders. In the face of this, in the aftermath of an attack expressly and successfully designed to blow children to bits, how dare a smug, safe-in-his-bed American secretary of state urge "restraint" by "both sides?" How does the secretary imagine his own country would respond to such a "provocation" as the nightclub mass murder? (His own country brought Spain to its knees for killing ethnic Latins on the island of Cuba, let alone Americans on American soil.)
And when you get down to it, why, exactly, should Germany continue to exercise restraint? Why shouldn't it go right ahead and escalate the violence? The only point to waging war is to win. Germany is at war, and losing. It can win only by fighting the war on its terms, unleashing an overwhelming force (gosh, just what is called for in the Hull's revision of the Neutrality Act) to destroy, kill, capture and expel the armed French forces that have declared war on Germany.
So far, Germany has indeed chosen to practice restraint. But, at this point, it has every moral right to abandon that policy and to engage in the war on terms more advantageous to military victory. This is a matter for Germany, at war, to decide one way or the other. Whether Secretary Hull purses his lips or not.
[In the event, 15 months later German forces moved into the hitherto unoccupied portions of France. -Ed.]
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