Ralph Austin Bard

“ Thus conditioned to the unpleasant task of self-examination, we might ponder whether or not we have tempted adversity and slavery by trading our fine-sounding concepts of the freedom and dignity of the individual for a mess of advertising slogans and political clinches. ”

“ I see no fundamental grasp of our predicament in anti-union employers who sabotage production committees for fear that industry will be sovietized, nor in labor union leaders who are so concerned about the competitive position of their own little groups as to examine the war with regard to how their own puny fortunes will be affected if labor unity is achieved or jurisdictional lines are eradicated. ”

“ We are whistling in a graveyard to keep from facing reality. We prate about our unity of purpose. Then we retire to the woodshed with a sharp pencil and a clean shingle, to figure out whether the agricultural or the petroleum interests will grab the synthetic rubber business, and whether the British-Dutch rubber cartel will be revived after the war to threaten this new industry. ”

“ I think our insufferable and materialistic pride has rendered us incapable of realizing fully that in German nazism we are fighting a monstrous thing that started out as a god-man complex, and now is fighting to the death whether that god-man complex still exists or not, in the desperate realization that nazism and the deluded fools who are backing nazism cannot survive if they do not win and exterminate their victims. ”

“ This painful technique of realistic self-analysis might even remind us that freedom, like any other virtue, does not exist in a vacuum. It must be worked and practiced to exist at all. And like any other virtue, it imposes upon those who would have it the unpleasant tasks of discipline and sacrifice. ”

“ It would remind us that not since the Civil War has this nation been called upon to suffer greatly.
It might drive us to the realization that morale is the spiritual capacity of a people to endure pain and suffering, and not a campaign of bill posters, pep talks and band concerts. ”

“ We fell into the bumptious practice of flexing imaginary muscles, and loudly proclaimed that as soon as we had completed an intensive course at the gymnasium we would get even with our enemies. We began pointing with pride at our resources, and without a blush plunged into the amiable self-deception of using percentages. ”

“ Neither does it indicate that we have a spiritual grasp of our threatening fate when we sell bonds to help finance a war of survival or extermination on the promise of profitable monetary returns on the investment. ”

“ We hope that we can enlist the support of the masses of Latin America and our own Negroes, without having to do too much toward solving the agrarian problems of our neighbors to the south or the economic problems of our fellow-Americans. ”

“ We would find it hard to follow through the thought that the little Japs, for whom we have always entertained a rather fond contempt, consider us foppish because we equip our aviators with parachutes. It is a degrading thought to these our enemies that there should be any alternative to defeat save violent death. ”