Battle of Babble

Lies, rumors, jokes, canards, insults, obscenities, denials, bluffs, excuses, exhortations, explanations, reassurances, trial balloons and grotesque distortions continued to spew from the world's radios last week. Most of it was Axis concoctions; some of it was Allied counter-propaganda. Behind the radio barrage fell a blizzard of newspaper squibs, handbills, pamphlets, posters. In free countries men speculated aloud with laughter and curses; in Europe they whispered behind their hands in dim cafes and shuttered homes. It was a big week in the battle of babble.

Propaganda for home consumption may be intended as a stimulant, a sedative or a cathartic. For enemies it should be poison. Either way, German propaganda works less well than it used to. The German people are tired of constant medication, and the non-Axis world is learning to reject poison, acquiring immunity to what is absorbed inadvertently. But the Axis poisoners were trying harder than ever, and enlightened immunologists issued warnings.

Rx for the Allies. In the U.S., Director Archibald MacLeish of OFF declared the Axis campaign to spread discord among the United Nations to be "as shrewd, as ruthless as any plot of the Borgias." Axis radio spray to the U.S.: "American policy is dictated in Downing Street . . . will leave America holding the bag." To Brit ain: "The British Empire is dissolving like a lump of sugar in the Roosevelt teacup."

Rx for Latin America. As unity grew out of the Pan-American conference at Rio, said Director MacLeish, the Axis beam to South America became a frantic torrent. Since most Latin Americans are Catholics, the Italian radio portrayed "Protestant Roosevelt" in an alliance with "Atheist Stalin" against "Catholic Fascism." Another Axis broadcast asserted that the Vatican had urged Latin America not to break with the Axis. This the Vatican promptly denied.

From Unoccupied France, the Vichy radio chimed in on the South American beam. Vichy's Ambassador to Paris, Fernand de Brinon, was heard intoning: "The Marshal [Petain] believes that Bolshevism is the greatest enemy of all, and therefore earnestly desires a German victory. . . . Washington leads the alliance of Jewish capitalists and Soviet Communists." This must have made curious listening for the U.S. State Department, which still sought to avoid giving Vichy " excuses" for falling inert into Hitler's arms}.

Rx for the Home Folks. Yet men with keen ears thought that Axis propaganda weapons were getting blunt from over work: global war to the death was just too big. German setbacks in Russia were al most too big for the master propagandist, Adolf Hitler, himself. His address to his people, on the ninth anniversary of his leadership, sounded like an old phono graph record grinding away under a groove-stuck needle: "Russian winter . . . many . . plutocratic . Russian warmongers . . . winter. . . ." innocent Ger Hitler almost said in so many words that it would do the German people no good to throw the Nazis out of power and conclude peace, for Churchill and Roosevelt were warmongering monsters who had hated Germany when there were no Nazis.

On the Russian campaign, Hitler produced two desperately risky whoppers: 1) that he had sent the eastern armies to winter quarters four months ago; 2) that German losses and retreats had been caused only by cold. Even Germans with short memories could remember: 1) that the Germans had continued their overreaching onslaughts well into December; 2) that the first spectacular German defeat was the loss of Rostov in the south, where the weather was almost balmy. Putting the speech through her ferocious shredding machine last week, anti-Axis Propagandist Dorothy Thompson concluded: "The [German] masses do fear a repetition of 1918; they do have a sense of guilt; they do blame the Nazi leadership for the war; they do suspect some terrific mistakes in the eastern campaign; they do want peace."

Hitler snuggled as snugly as he could into his cloak of proletarian fervor. He contrasted himself again & again, the protector of the poor, with plutocratic foes. Lest Germans be disturbed, however, by thoughts that the Russians are also convinced proletarians of long standing, the country was plastered with posters showing German soldiers suffering from "Communistic dirt, filth, lice, disorganization, lack of most essential commodities."

Rx for the Moslems. A bomb exploded last week on a crowded dockside in Tangier, Spanish Morocco, 40 miles southwest of Gibraltar. When the smoke cleared away, 25 persons lay dead, 60 hurt. The bombs blew apart the luggage of a departing British official. As if by magic, yelling Arabs appeared from nowhere with baskets filled with rocks, began stoning the windows of British business houses. To the radio hopped Axis spokesmen, claiming that the exploded luggage had disgorged British propaganda. London called the episode an obvious Axis trick.

Other Moslems who interested the Nazis were the wild, proud Afghan tribesmen on the western borders of India. Poetic handbills printed in the Pushtu, Urdu, and Brahui languages urged the tribesmen to a jihad (holy war) "to strike off the Anglo-Saxon yoke," promised them heaping banquets and succulent maidens in the soft lands of India. Berlin proclaimed the "independence of India" from the Hotel Kaiserhop, relayed applause for the proclamation from "204 Hindu nationalists."

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