Life — March 28, 1918 — page 11: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“LIFE: ~ German Lies and the Half-Beast Philosophy RDINARY incredulity is not com- petent to cope with German deceit. In spite of the fullest realization that Germans who have swallowed the Prussian dope are liars, the minds of most persons remain more or less open to Ger- man assertions. The case is like that of the newspapers, only a thousand times more so. :verybody knows that newspaper reports of occurrences and things said are usually inaccurate, often misleading, and sometimes quite untrue. Everybody knows that com- plete accuracy is impossible for newspapers "ew that they have not time to secure it, and that, what with haste and fallible instruments, with the best will in the world to tell the truth, every one of them is likely to vary from it in some instances every day We know all that, and yet when we read in the paper that someone we know, or know about, has said or done something surprising or reprehensible, we are very apt to accept the story as though it was all gospel, and begin at once to comment on it. Then when in due time the cor- rection or modification comes along, we are ashamed of our heedless credulity, that after innumerable warnings in- sists on being fooled. 7 Ti is very much the way it is with us in our men- tal attitude towards the Prussianized Germans. We have not been brought up among habitual liars, and our instinct is to believe what is said to us and what we read. The German mind and the German use of falsehood in war and about it are so novel to us that we cannot get used to them. We have had no experience or practice to qualify us to deal with them. Deceived a hundred times, we disbelieve the next time, and the next, and the nex! but in ten following attempts the skilful German liar may fool us twice again, It is mortifying. It makes us seem so simple. What we must do is to install and maintain against Ger- mans an effective incredulity that will admit no lies. It will cost us something, because it will shut out now and then something that is so; but that can’t be helped. ND we must try not only to understand but to remen her without relapses what manner of mind it is that is in possession of the German people and is using it in this war. Vernon Kellogg, biologist. who was food distributor in Belgium and northern France in 113. and lived and worked with German high officers, understands about that, and has told a little about it in the March North American, He knew by reading that the German thought-masters professed to believe in wars of extinction as necessary factors of evolution, but, as he says, it was not till he “had lived in nd travelled about all « ance, seeing and hearing many incredible things, and had cr German-occupied Belgium and I 507 spent days and nights and weeks and months of much talk and enlightenment at German Great Headquarters,” that he realized that what he had read in German books was not mere reading, but “the reasoned acceptance of a ter- rible and fatal philosophy, widely and thoroughly spread among a whole people, that makes war and slaughter and rapine desirable, and justifies in the conduct of war every form of cruelty and deceit, and all surrender of personal humane and moral standards.” It is a philosophy, Dr. Kellogg s: after reading about it and watching its works near-to as they proceeded, “that puts man’s position and behavior back, not into medieval times, but into pre-historic, jacial time, when a half-beast, half-man type was all of man that earth knew, 'HIS philosophy is what has got the Germans, and it has got them, brains, belly and boots. It is what the world is up against, in a struggle that, pray God! may be decisive. Anyone who thinks any considerable body of Germans has escaped it is invited to read Charles Edward Russell's article in the March Harper's about the deportment of German Socialists before the war, and their conduct when war befell If any Germans could have been expected to escape the clutch of the half-beast philosophy it would have been the Social-Democrats. But no. Swine-like they were before the war, and when the war came, down and in they rushed with the rest, all except Liebknecht and a handful. As Socialists they had had the same thought as the rest of Germany—to be proprietors of what they went into. An awful people; strangely possessed and accursed! We must not forget it. Nobody seems fully to take it in until they have fought on the Western Front. Most of us cannot do that, but still we must take it in, and hold on to it, and present a tempered and burnished incredulity to Ger- man lies. For this is our front, and here we must fight. BuSoM. Tapping Uncle John NCLE JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER will give up thirty- eight million dollars this year to the income tax. Are we ahead that mich? Not entirely We are ahead only so much as the direction of the ex- . McAdoo, Newton Baker rs is more to our advantage than by Uncle J penditure ¢ d oth In ordinary times Uncle John directs expenditure very well, and keeps adding all the time to accumulated capital, which last exploit, in spite of the Bolsheviki, has still some standing as a useful service. like these, the accredited agents, can beat But in times of emergency Uncle Sam, through his Uncle John in the disposi- tion of funds, so that branch of his labors is partly taken feeling is that over And the accumulation of capital is postponed till after the war. And that’s what the income tax comes to. comicbooks.com