Word: defeatists
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Last week Britain's R. A. F. announced an important change. Sir Cyril Louis Norton Newall was replaced as Chief of Air Staff by Sir Charles Frederick Algernon Portal, formerly head of the bomber command. Sir Cyril was immediately branded by unofficial gossip as a defeatist, a Chamberlain appointee whom soft-hearted colleagues did not wish to bounce until Chamberlain was bounced, a hard worker but a man in whom the offensive spirit burned somewhat low. It was said that because he is a social butterfly and his wife an American climber, he should be a great success...
What really rubbed Britons the wrong way was enforcement. Last week 17 people were sentenced and fined a total of 123 weeks and ?162 for defeatist chatter, most of it harmless. Harry Blessingdon, a young engineer who had built an airport, was caught telling a Church of England canon about it in a hotel lobby. Sentence: three months, ?60. William Henry Garbett, a Birmingham clerk and Oxford Grouper, said over lunch: "It will be a good job when the British Empire is finished." Sentence: one year. A Leicester schoolteacher, Kathleen Mary Bursnall, got two months, ?20, for saying to soldiers...
...Hitler would be reasonable. Daladier returned to Paris with a new sense of power, and the resolve to rally his nation. Tactics which the Allies then belatedly began to fight: 1) Whispering campaigns. A relativly few hired whisperers could start - and also stop - on orders from Berlin, waves of defeatist rumors and false news which swept French society. In 1939 the French Government knew enough to take this strategy seriously, established counter-whispering squads...
...Jews but simply to get the Gentiles fighting among themselves over the Jewish question. Reactionaries in the French Army, like reactionaries everywhere, were reluctant to believe this until they read about the strategy of Jew-baiting in Nazi propa ganda manuals." 3) Synchronization of Communist and Nazi defeatist propaganda. In the early days of the war the French police arrested several people hired by the Communist Party to be "professional weepers," i.e., to drive around in open cars wearing deep mourning and making a show of grief...
...Deal is not essentially defeatist. True, it now emphasizes planned reform and regulation of private enterprise, but only because further expansion is impossible until the unjust distribution of wealth inherited from the older system is rooted out. Thus the New Deal concentrates on restoring health to the present economic structure, and rightly looks for expansion only after the patient is well...