Evening Post TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 1941. MORE MAGGOT SIGNS IN THE APPLE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXII, Issue 43, 19 August 1941, Page 6

Evening Post TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 1941. MORE MAGGOT SIGNS IN THE APPLE

Anybody who realises that we are fighting Prussianism that is centuries old, and not merely fighting a Hitlerism that is only a generation old, has been loath to give undue credence to stories of fissures and divisions among the Hitlerites. Hesitation to emphasise this Nazi fissuring has been based on two solid grounds: (1) that the cracks may be merely surface cracks, failing to penetrate from superficial Nazism down to that hai'd core of Prussianism which is Europe's permanent evil; (2) that any tendency in the democratic populations to jump to the false conclusion that Germany will defeat herself by Nazi dissensions, or that Germany will be defeated by the Russian army alone, is a delusion and a danger, especially if it tends to produce any slackening of our own effort. It is far better that democrats should believe the German apple to be solid all through —pulp, core, and pips—than to persuade themselves that the apple will rot and drop of its own accord, without the very hardest shock that the Democratic West can administer. When Mr. Bernard Shaw was reported as saying that we can "sit back and smile" while Stalin smashes | Hitler, he probably did not mean to be taken literally. No other serious thinker believes that we can either smile or sit back. Signs of fissuring in Nazidom must not be given more than a surface value—an encouragement to us to hit harder and more often. Hess, said Mr. Churchill, is a sign that the maggot is in the apple. But no one has done more than Mr. Churchill to drive home the fact that maggots by themselves do not win first-class wats. The work of the borer must be helped by bombs. Winning the war requires our total effort. Subject to the reservation emphasised in the foregoing paragraph, it lis reasonable to take note of the evidence of Nazi dissension, assembled on the authority of the diplomatic correspondent of the "Daily Telegraph." Unlike sortie of its predecessors, this statement is balanced and judicial and carries an atmosphere of truth. The very important observation that the dissension "affects men in the middle and lower grades of the Nazi hierarchy, cuts deeply into the fabric of the regime, I and is more serious for Hitler than any clash ivith ambitious individuals among the party leaders" can be regarded as based on independent evidence available to the "Daily Telegraph's" diplomatic correspondent. As such, it is vastly different from mere wishful thinking. But the democracies must never forget that Prussian militarism is a far deeper and more permanent tiling than Nazism. Nazism is an ulcer that may burst and disperse itself, but Prussianism is a malignant growth that is far deeper seated and will need a combined surgical operation by peoples of the East and the West, the North and the South, pledged to secure a cure of Europe's scourge at any price. There is no sitting back and smiling in the democracies' task as Dorothy Thompson sees it:

The recurrent German dream has to be blotted out of history once and for all, if ever we are to have peace. That dream did not originate with Hitler or with National Socialism. Nazism is instead merely a smoke screen, a fake revolution behind which the German war lords are prepared to make that dream a reality. That dream is to make a new Rome, a new vast land and sea empire that will eventually embrace the earth—an earth in which there will be Germans and lesser breeds of various gradations. And there is a clear, realistic German programme for realising such a planetary empire. Is Germany's "planetary empire" already a physical impossibility? | Emphatically,, it is not. Only our maximum and sustained efforts can put the seal of impossibility upon it. Here is a warning against undue optimism—a warning which Mr. Coates brings back from America: There were some who thought that Hitler would bog down in Russia, that it was an accomplished fact. It was j not. . . . Those who argued that Britain and the United States were turning out tremendous quantities of ammunition and other war equipment —as they were—should not lose sight of the fact that Hitler had captured factories in overrun Europe that could for the time being match the resources pitted against him. "The outlook today," Mr. Coates stated, is "just as serious as ever it was." And this is true. Let us not forget it when estimating the slowly-growing strength of our invisible allies—the maggots in the Nazi-Prussian apple