Askov American. [volume] (Askov, Pine County, Minn.) 1914-current, 1935-06-20
A Commercial War.

A Commercial War.
Beloved America, stay out. Remem
Der Woodrow Wilson's admission, upon
the conclusion of the last World war.
when he spoke at st. Louis, he ad-
mitted, ut was a commercial war;
Think of it! A war for greed and
profit. Commercial. And think of
the veterans of that war in their ap
peal for economic help at Washington,
which was met with bayOnet and evic-
ton. Think of the twenty millions
of young human beings. and old ones,
and young ones, and children, hurled
to violent death by the life cutting
scythe of wholesale homicide.
We're scarcely two decades removed
from that world holacust. Can't we at
least consider the costs to you and
l and all our world flung human fam
lily? Surely, we haven't so soon for
gotten the price of that world in
sanity. Or weren't you caught in a
shell hole, with your intestines laid
bare and a foul gangrene setting in
shrapnel sieved leg, while overhead
the maniacal shrek of death dealing
shells ripped through your very I'M
consciousness? And for what? To
save the world fOr-anOther war in
sanity? Are we towards to forget
what those boys died for? In their
hearts they believed the propagandists
who told them it was war to bring
brotherhood upon earth, and to end
future wars. Again, mankind be-
trayed.
| To disgress for a mOment-the con-
gress has just approved four billion
dollar economic relief measure. From
greed cramped quarters, before the
passage of the bill, erupted a howl
of denunciation at the ALLEGATION of so
much money to put bread. milk and
meat into the bodies of our needy.
Four billions. Where was it to come
from-all those myriad dollars? We.
the taxpayers? They'll take it from
us, angrily shouted the millionaires
and the DilliOnaires: No spending
like that in all history, came further
indictments.
Relief Cost Trifling.
Ask those dissenters of the work
relief bill what the last world war
cost in actual dollars. Will they in
form us that the cost in money, of the
late World war was four hundred bill
lions of dollars? Will they tell us
that every sixty minutes of that in
sanity of killing and destruction cost
million dollars? Isn't it dementia
in people when they denOunce a few
billions for constructive human help?
Or do they so lust for either the per-
verted sensuosity of killing, or the
piling up of profits that a cost Like
four hundred billion dollars is fair
price to blow human beings by the
millions to hell?
But there is another cost of war
and that cost is the clOuding and
stunning of the world mind and emo
tiOnS. There is a cost that staggers
all Imagination. 1t is the unacceptable
aftermath of every war. 1t unbal-
ances the faculties of all humanity.
We are a world of mentally sick peo-
| pie today, as a result of the last war.
No one escapes, with the exception
of the war prOfiteers, who were never
in possession of a human mind to be-
gin with, but whom we permit to
make killers of us for their glorifica-
ton. They are merchandisers in
death. And they are masceratOrs of
the mind, as we'll as of the body, of
humanity.
Can't We Keep Peace!
| repeat, no one escapes the blight
ing of mental faculties i'm the after
math of war. Not even the finest
minds. True and great statesmen, en-
lowed with the rarest mental gifts,
are also stricken. During the World
war, truly inspired leaders pilOted
their peoples through the bloody
maelstrom with undimmed perspec-
tive but upon the elimination Of hos
tilities, buckled and broke, mentally
and physically. Their gifted minds,
and all other grades of mind, down to
the humblest little peasant war moth
er, could not escape the nerve and
mind Infringing of the wars ordeal.
What a cost!
And still, glOrified homicide, SYM
bolized in The Arc de Triumphe, strad-
dies the world. Man still arms
against man. Sabres rattle and
breach coverings are taken from the
never satiated maws of cannon and
rifle. Can't the Nazarene's, BE we
kind to one another" ever arrest the
hatreds, the belligerency, the colossal
insanity?
Intelligence, awake. The war to
end wars lied to humanity. Another
war, even il it doesn't wipe our spe-