Verhovayak Lapja, 1940. január-június (23. évfolyam, 1-26. szám)

1940-03-28 / 13. szám

'Page 2

BRANCH 439 Johnstown, Penna.

“Confucius say:”

It’s time to thank some of the members and friends for their generous donations to our first Birthday Party.

Here we go:

We thank the committee for their donations and the grand work they did for our party, which was fairly successful.

Thanks to Helen and Catherine for the delicious cakes; also our thanks to Mrs. Stephen Balogh for donating the Magyar torta.

Our guests of honor for the month were: Miss Helen Molnár, Mr. Julius Stasko and Mr. Andrew Gaydos, our President.

“Confucius say:”

Man wire get girl must be regular fellow.

WHAT’S THIS??? We hear our fraternal brother (Gyula) is about to have the knot tied. “Congratulations! Gyula.” Bring her to our next birthday party.

SO-O-O: Our Secretary, Mr. Balogh, has offered a reward for the capture of THE FOX. Wonder what it is? Look out, FOX, as he might set a trap, for he’s a great hunter, you know.

“Confucius say:”

To have a grand time come to the next birthday party of the Four Hundred Thirty-Niners.

We invite all Verhovay members and friends; also out-of-towners.

Don’t forget the date: March 31st, 7:30 p. m. at St. Emerick’s Church Hall, 6th Avenue and Chestnut Street.

“Confucius say:”

It’s time to hit the hay ... Ho, hum... will be seeing ! you all. I hope, I hope.

—A FOUR HUNDRED

V THIRTY-NINER.

f--------------°---------------1 BRANCH 431, Hemphill, W. Va.

ATTENTION! Members of Branch 431 of Hemphill, West Virginia, please take note that an extraordinary and very important meeting of the Branch will be held on Sunday, April 14, 1940 at 2 P. M.

Every member is urgently and respectfully requested to attend.

The meeting will be held at the home of the Branch Secretary. A very important matter must be taken care of.

Fraternally yours,

Julius Dudás, Sec’y. Box 93, Hemphill, W. Va.--------------O-------------Many things are wrought by prayer, more than the world dreams of.

Verhovay ah Lapja

BRITISH IMPERIALISM

by RICHARD J. PHILLIPS

PART II

Last month I concluded my article by giving the reasons for the catastrophe in Europe today; also quoting from documented sources which showed that British policy and British imperialism have no place in a democracy. Let us continue this a little further and follow with me as I unfold to you events as they really are and not as painted by the press and the ‘‘literary lights”, who are here in this country to fulfill their official missions.

I am an avid reader of the magazine Time and I think I make no mistake if I say that it is the best news weekly in America today. To this magazine I shall take you and quote an excerpt which.

I believe, covers more thoroughly the causes of the present war than could be gleaned from many a volume. This article attempts to trace the conditions in Germany which caused the present holocaust. I quote:

“Defeated, exhausted, blockaded, Germany passed through a staggering cycle of panics, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary outbreaks, financial debacles, governmental upheavals. Her army disarmed, her fleet scuttled, her merchant marine forfeited, but 62,000,000 Germans nevertheless remained to be fed, clothed, housed, organized in some political community. Europe’s new states outside Germany emerged slowly, bumped shoulders, clashed over boundaries, made alliances. But Germany remained Europe’s central problem, while Russia was still split with civil war. For the first 5 years of peace, from the armistice to the Ruhr, the biggest development in Europe, outside of Russia, was France’s policy of keeping Germany weak.

“Weak, Germany certainly was. At the war’s end, after the Versailles Treaty, she had lost:

"One million and seven hundred thousand killed in battle,

4.200.000 wounded, 1,150,000 missing.

"Alsace-Lorraine, most of Posen, and west Prussia, all her colonies, other territorial concessions.

"Eighteen million of her population, over 1,000,000 square miles of her territory, 45 percent of her coal, 65 percent of her iron ore, 15 percent of her arable lands, 10 percent of her factories, 5,100,000 tons of her merchant fleet.

"To France she agreed to deliver 105,000 tons of benzol,

150.000 tons of coal tar, 90,000 tons of sulfate of ammonia, 500 stallions, 30,000 mares, 2,000 bulls, 90,000 cows, 1,000 rams,

100.000 sheep. 10,000 goats, and she agreed to pay (but paid only in part) $5,000,000,000 reparations before May 1921.

"But 62,000,000 Germans wtakened to desperation seemed as menacing to the rest of the world as, to France in her post-war mood, they seemed reassuring. Inside Germany political chaos became almost normal, marked by Communist and reactionary uprisings.”

And the article continues and tells us this:

"Outside Germany the States created by the Treaty of Versailles and the treaties which followed it were linked to France in a chain of alliances. Poland and France in the treaty of February 19, 1921, pledged themselves to mutual assistance in the event of German aggression. When Belgium and Czechoslovakia also signed with France, the ring around Germany vas closed. When Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Rumania formed another such ring around Hungary—and this ring was coordinated with the other by the Franco-Czechoslovakian alliance —French security against possible German ambitions seemed as solid as diplomatic measures, military might, economic dominance could make it.”

Also, it tells us:

"And when Poincare, on January 11, 1923, sent French troops to seize 80 percent of Germany’s coal, iron, and steel sources, in "the mad and ruinous Ruhr episode,” Great Britain’s criticism swelled, Great Britain's sympathies shifted. Lloyd George, who 4 years before had been reelected on a platform of punishment for Germany, later called It * * * the dismal and tragic episode of the Ruhr occupation, and said that it caused "untold misery to many millions of Central Europe, and put hack the clock of post-war reconstruction throughout the world, intensified unemployment problems and industrial depression, and had signally failed in its main object of extracting reparations from Germany.”

History will tell us that for 600 of the maddest days in history French troops patrolled the Ruhr; 147,000 German citizens were driven from the district in 11 months.

Funds and records of manufacturing companies were seized and their offices taken over; at least 100 people lost their lives; newspapers were suppressed, 19,000 officials in the area of the French-sponsored "Autonomous Government of the Palatinate” were deported.

In Munich, Ludendorff and Hitler attempted to set up a dictatorship. German workers in the Ruhr downed their tools, supported by the German Government, which printed more paper currency to pay them.

Germany’s economy was swept away in an avalance which threatened to break the ring around her, sweep over Europe. In |

March 28, 1940.

December, shortly before the French occupied the Ruhr, a United States dollar would buy 7,000 marks. In a month it would buy 50,000. By June it would buy 100,000. Prices were quoted by the hour, workmen paid by the day, savings wiped out, housewives rushed to spend money before nightfall, knowing morning would make it worthless. In August one United States dollar would buy 5,000,000 marks. By the midst of November the United States dollar wa# quoted at 2,500,000,000,000 in Berlin and 4,000,000,000,000 at Cologne, 300 miles away.

This is the kind of peace that was imposed on a people destroyed, starved to death, and the natural result would be Hitler. The natural result would be Nazi-ism. It rises out of the ruins, j poverty and desolation of a punitive peace as that.

This is what the Manchester Guardian, an English paper, said j about the treatment of Germany. Mind you, this is an English paper, i run by Englishmen, written for Englishmen, and are supposed to j serve the interests of the British Empire.

"The root factor in the situation is that the German I masses are exhausted and starving. You have only to see thei children in the ghastly slums, all head and no body, with thini necks and gray, ghastly skins, to realize what a magnificent) weapon a blockade is. In Berlin there are scores of thousands j of children who have never tasted milk.”

That was the peace of the democracies—the democracies wo. are expected to support to the extent of fighting for.

It is a pity that the American people who are supposed to be the most intelligent and the most civilized on the face of this earth do not want to realize that Hitler came out of the crushing of Germany. They do not understand that Hitler was the result of the terrible persecution not by the Nazis but by England and France in the occupation and destruction of Germany, so that Germany would never rise and bother them as a foreign power. We should realize that out of that came Hitler; and when Hitler was rising to power who armed him? I ask again, who armed him? Why, we find that part of the arming of Hitler was done in France and England. Hitler got his first arms from the countries which are now seeking to destroy him.

Let me quote something about the arming of Hitler. This Is an excerpt from a book on the subject "Merchants of Death.”

"The rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany was also the signal for the arme makers in other countries to offer their services and wares to a worthy cause. The British re-1 eeived an order for 60 of their superior planes. France is als») supplying raw materials for explosives to the Germans. The Dura factory, near Bordeaux, is shipping thousands of carloads of cellulose to Germany every year. This factory is mainly under) British ownership. The I. G. Farbenindustrie in Germany, which] manufactures explosives from this cellulose, is owned, to least 75 percent, by French capital. These facts are known France, but nothing is done about them.”

And the book goes on telling one thing after another showing how England and France, not proclaiming their great antagonism for Hitler, helped arm Hitler in Europe. They knew about the Treaty) of Versailles. They created a Frankenstein, which is now bothering them.

ENGLISH ATROCITIES

Invariably in every discussion I engage in, relative to the. position taken by the United States in the present conflict, they tell me that we should help England and France because of the terrible atrocities Germany has committed and is committing hi Poland and Czechoslovakia. I condemn bitterly any of the persecution and any of the atrocities of which Germany has been guilty— if she has been guilty—in Czechoslovakia and in Poland. But remember that England's hands are not so clean, England with centuries of bloodshed staining her honorable name, England who ia cursed by the unfortunates In all parts of her World Empire. I give you a few instances of the atrocities committed by England, the country who is now clamoring to rid the world of the "Hitlers” and "Stalins.” Here is one from Ireland! I quote from the booh, Ireland’s Case:

That did not occur under the control of Germany; that occurred under the control of Great Britain.

"O’Donovan Rossa, when in English prisons, serving his life sentence, and protesting against the indignities to wbleh he and his fellows were snbject, frequently had his hand« chained behind his back for days together, in solitary confinement. And to eat the bits of food that were thrust to hh» through the bars, he had to go on his knees and lap it e»j like a wild beast.”

Here is another one:

"Michael Davitt, the one-armed man, tells how he and! his fellow political prisoners in English dungeons, in order) to get a mouthful of the fresh air for which they gasped, I had oftentimes to lie on their stomachs on the floor of their cell and put their mouths to the slit at the bottom of thei door. And on passing a garbage barrel when the keeper was fortunately not watching them, the prisoners grabbed from it! the dirty ends of tallow candles, and secreted the tidbits, which at the first opportunity they ravenously devoured.”

The treatment of Irish political prisoners in English dungeon»! has been universally so brutal, so savagely inhuman, so much worse ( than anything the world is aware of that it would even tax the! imagination of a modern Jules Verne. Is there any wonder that these->