Attacks and Answers

Chief of the North American section of the Ministry of Information is Andre Lefebvre de Laboulaye, onetime Ambassador to the U. S., grandson of the man who first thought up the idea of France's giving the U. S. the Statue of Liberty. One of M. Laboulaye's brightest assistants is Pierre de Lanux, who learned about the U. S. while lecturing here for the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace and The League of Nations Association. More over, he has a tall, slender, beautiful, U. S.-born wife.

Personable M. Lanux is due to arrive soon in the U. S. for a "propaganda tour." Preceding him last week came a 15-page mimeographed handout entitled Anti-French Opinion in the United States. Propagandist Lanux shrewdly assembled the hardest, most awkward and embarrassing things he could imagine a U. S. citizen saying about France and listed them as the "Twelve Chief Attacks." Then he shrewdly wrote his "Twelve Answers Concerning France." Altogether M. Lanux' attacks are better than his answers. Excerpts:

Attack 1: France is imperialistic.

Answer: "France, like England and the United States and most other nations for that matter, wishes to preserve what she possesses. Unlike some of them, she does not wish to acquire any new territory."

Attack 2 : France was guilty of cruelty to Germany at Versailles, hence is responsible for Hitler's rise.

Answer: "At Versailles not a single province of Germany was taken away that had a population with a German majority. . . . The reparations imposed on Germany were but a small part of the cost of rebuilding the devastated regions of France, Belgium, etc. . . . It is quite true that during four years (but four years only) following the war, the victors did not seek nor practice a liberal application of the Treaty. . . . If Hitler had risen to power in 1923, I suppose we should have been largely to blame. But he did not. And our policies changed totally in late 1923 and 1924."

Attack 3 : France blocked disarmament, thus causing the eventual war.

Answer: "One nation, and one nation only, wrecked disarmament, and it was Hitler's Germany in 1933."

Attack 4: France does not pay her honest debts -- i.e., to the U. S. -- although she supports the biggest Army in the world.

Answer: "With Germany relieved from reparations, France was holding the bag. . . . Why was it wrong for us to collect money from Germany for the rebuilding of our homes and factories destroyed by the German invasion, but right for America to collect from us? Why two rules?"

Attack 5: France was an accomplice or at least a benevolent spectator when Japan attacked China, Italy attacked Ethiopia, Germany and Italy attacked Spain.

Answer: "France's attitude was not different from that of other powers, including England and America. . . . Anyway, France and England and they only have taken up arms against the aggressor in 1939. If they are to blame for not doing it sooner, what about the other spectators?"

Attack 6 : France is no longer a democracy.

Answer: "M. Daladier's 'full powers' are not a dictatorship, since Parliament remains in activity and votes, and its committees are functioning."

Attack 7: The "merchants of death" and the 200 families are running France.

Answer: "Please note that all private manufacturing and trade in arms and ammunition was abolished in France in 1936. . . . The Schneider armament plants at Le Creusot, all airplane factories, etc., were permanently nationalized long before the war broke out."

Attack 8: France is thoroughly communistic . . . it is the rascals who run the country.

Answer: "The French people, including most of the ex-communists, have made up their minds about Stalin, his gang and his promises."

Attack 9: The French press is the lowest in the world.

Answer: "This is very much exaggerated."

Attack 10: German and Spanish refugees have been treated in the most ignoble manner while Hitler's envoys and Franco's spies are wined and dined.

Answer: "In the course of the last 20 years, France has had to absorb a refugee population of Russians, Italians, Jews, Germans, Austrians, Spaniards and Czechs, amounting to nearly 4,000,000 -- one-tenth of the total population. . . . To compare the fate of these refugees to that of liberals in Germany, Russia or Spain today is nonsense."

Attack 1 1 : France has a secret deal with Hitler not to fight the war seriously.

Answer: "Is it so hard to understand that our high command avoids sensational massacres and the spending of our resources in spectacular but useless blows?"

Attack 12: As a war aim France wants to cut Germany to pieces and deprive every German of his right to existence.

Answer: "War aim No. 1 is peace itself. . . . Once we get it, we want to 'live and let live.' That applies to the German people as well as to anybody else. But not to the German war machine, which must be destroyed and put out of existence."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.