The Daily Alaska Empire

SMOKE SCREEN

Always shrewd in squeezing the utmost propaganda value from their aggressions, the Nazis have not failed in the present campaign against Russia.

Hitler began by bringing forward "evidence" that Russia was preparing to attack Germany. But the main propaganda effort of the Nazi regime is the attempt to make the attack on Russia a great moral crusade against Communism.

Finland has been compelled to enter the service of the Nazis, Hungary and Rumania also are enlisted. Italy, of course, declared war on Moscow. And Spain is being encouraged to send volunteers to fight the Reds. After he discovered the real strength of the Red Army to be more than was anticipated, Hitler sent out a call for "token" armies, to be recruited from all his allies and vassals to fight an ideological war, of course.

Actually, ideologies have nothing to do with it. Hitler posed for years as the world's bulwark against Communism, and won some credence among appeasers in various countries. Then he found the Communist and Nazi creeds fitted together well enough to permit a Russo-German entente. This lasted almost two years, until the moment was ripe for a reversal. Now all the old anti-Communist slogans are being dusted off and put to work.

Nazism and Communism are amazingly similar today. There is no choice, and no need to choose. Germany is steadily pursuing a program of world conquest, using various states as allies and then destroying them one by one. Russia is pursuing a policy which is purely Russian, not ideological. But the Reich is trying to make capital out of the capitalist world's very natural hatred for Communist doctrine.

Nobody should be deceived by the attempt to make a great moral crusade out of the invasion of Russia. It is simply a military operation. The Nazis can plunder Catholic Poland, Protestant Holland, and Orthodox Greece as easily as anti-religious Soviet Russia. And the Nazis are plundering all the churches and making war on all the religions in the areas they already control. When such a power sets out on a moral crusade, it is a smoke screen and should be recognized as such.