The Wilmington morning star., 1947-09-20
AS Pegler Sees 1t
BY WESTBROOK PEGLER
Copyright, 1947, by King Features
Syndicate. Inc.)

Hitler, a massacre was a purge; Stain
calls a pogrom a liquidation. Roosevelt,
with a similar knack for euphemy, used
the term collective bargaining" to dis
| guise the degradation of the lower classes
to the status of brutes, herded by the
goons and stripped of self-respect and dig
nifty, forty years age, almost Identical
bosses of our Italian immigrants were
called padrones.
The British are not bad at that sort Of
thing, either, when occasion requires them
to deceive themselves. And 50 the British
Trades Union Congress voted six to one In
favor of direction" Of labor. The Con-
gress runs the Labor government.
Direction of labor, by its maiden
name, is conscription of labor at wages
agreed to by the employers and the gov
eminent, subject to the approval OF the
Trades Union Congress. The Congress is a
small minority of the British people, with
about $500, 600 members. It is the British
| equivalent of our A. F. of l.. and CLIO.
like these privileged American tongs, it
has private agreements with the legal gov
eminent of the nation by which the fads
and %prejudices of its boss-characters are
adopted as ''policies" of the government.
The British union membership is errone-
ously believed to be voluntary because the
law recognizes the open shop. To believe
that all those who join the unions do so
w ~ \ . AXhS SAAS bAA6 SAA~S 0@ HSA0OH0
who tip dirty walters for slovenly service
do so voluntarily. The British unioneer has
not yet learned to jam the obstinate free
mans bike into the oncoming ]orry or to
threaten to slit his children's threats. But
he has other coercions and he has learned
a little from Hitler, a little from Uncle Joe
and a lot from our own Fays and Doves.
He has always had a controlled capacity
for meanness and his stupidity was painted
up with little posies of homely humor, and
sold in the export trade as innate inte]li-
gence. Actually, his betters, the upper
classes, had a monopoly on the good sense
of the country and, by humorlng the sal
low, snuffling dolt, were able to deter him
from hurting himself, and them, until now.
The aristocrats had time for scholarship,
craftsmanship, management and politics in
the intellectual sense of the word.
After the second big war, by a con-
spiracy of conditions, the lower orders
were SO manipulated that they seemed to
win an election and the right to try their
hand at government. This was a terrible
thing for Britain but no less awful for
the working classes than for the %aristoc-
racy.
lievably flabby, frightened and detected
gang of white-collar cockneys when the
perils and problems called for the finest
intelligence, ability, courage and dignity in
the kingdom. TIL Labor government could
only try irreparable experiments in nation
alization. When this vandalism had pro-
duced only the melancholy wreckage of a
great system, the very miners themselves
made sure that their own class should fail
and prove it's foreseen incompetence to
manage the nation, by loafing, malingering
and striking. Such is the actual intelli-
gence of labor as a mass.
The experiment was capricious and mad.
1t was obvious that people educated and
trained for generations in the science of
government should govern better than a
crew of roustabouts. The unioneers had
through apprenticeship. They wouldn't let
a navy run a loom. But they had the
reckless nerve to bid for the job of run
ming the country, and the misfortune to
win.
And so, in this short while, we now hear
the Trades Union Congress voting the
British people back into serfdom, 6 to l.
If any British government of any other
political stripe had come whining to the
TUG. for the right to conscript labor as
the only means of meeting any ~"crisis'' in
time of peace, the labor movement would
have howled for bloody revolution. Con-
scription of labor was Hitler's way. That is
how the bloody Nazis did it, and Musso-
lini, and, of course, the backward bolshe-
viks. But Britons never, never, never
would be slaves until September of 1947
when the Trades Union Congress, the po-
litical holding company of the government,
representing a small minority of the popu-
lation, and the least intellectual, agreed
to the "direction'' of labor.
Here again the democratic process so
often admired so fatuous1y by so many
Americans is employed to Illustrate fools
who have never examined the meaning of
the term. A private and unofficial organi-
cation from which the elected national gov
competent, groping roomful of political
slobs the right to send a British working
man to prison for refusal to 60 where he
may be sent and work to the satisfaction
OF boss-robots, for wages decided without
consultation with him, all in the national
interest. That is actually good democracy.
The sullen proviso that the coupon-clip-
per shall be drafted for labor, too, was a
pathetic but infallible appeal to the stupid
ity of the convention. Now the British
workingman is in for it, because the same
government can say to him that he must
obey because the aristocracy have been
sent to the pits and the docks, too. The
CONSUMPTION of property, called the "direc-
ton of materials" into essential industry,
and the confiscation of money by a process
called NATURALIZATION round out the Hit
lerian program. All these things, Hitler
did long ago. Now the British lave the
essentials of Nazism themselves. Anti-Se-
mitism is all they lack of true Hitlerism,
and given a little more experience in Pal
estine and fulfillment of threats to bomb
London in lions. cause, the British YER
sion of Hitlerism will have that piquant
flavor, too.