Last week Axis propagandists read the Eight Points of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill with a great flooding of adrenalin.
Yelled Nazi Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels: "Seldom has history seen such a stupid, unimaginative document as the two big guns of world plutocracy framed. . . . Whoever wants to disarm us will have to go to the little trouble of taking our weapons from us. . . . We understand clearly why these international profiteers of plutocracy hate the Führer and his system. He has established a social form in which order, cleanliness and clarity reign. . . . These war and inflation profiteers, these fat capitalists and devoted Jewish servants, these perjurers of their own election promises, deserve only that the German people contemptuously spit at them and return again to its work; thus do we want to work and fight until humanity is freed from this scourge of God."
Yowled Mussomouthpiece Virginio Gayda: ". . . repellent war aims, a gross and clumsy gesture of Anglo-Saxon warmongering, useless and grotesque."
In Japan, which has recently aped Western anti-Semitism as avidly as it imitates Western bicycles and beer, the newspaper Asahi shrilled: "Jews re-elected Roosevelt for a third term. Jews coaxed Churchill to war against Germany. Jews are also backing Stalin. . . . Jews want bases in the Atlantic and Pacific, at Burma, and bases in China from which to bomb Japan."
Japan was still in a lather of indecision last week. No sooner had President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill suggested a military conference in Moscow than Dictator Stalin accepted and announced that he was making arrangements as fast as he could.* At once Japan, which has spent the past months unable to make up its mind about anything, found itself faced with a new enigma—Vladivostok. Probably U.S. supplies for Russia would be routed to Vladivostok. The Japanese General Staff began to see possibilities of an Allied pincer threat toward Japan based on Vladivostok and Singapore. As of last week, the Japanese did not know the answer.
Almost everywhere outside the Axis countries the Roosevelt-Churchill meeting got a press that must have delighted the authors of the Eight Points. Editorialists greeted the lofty peace aims of the Points with loftily expressed praise and hope. Many Latin American newspapers made it plain that they were in hearty accord with Good Neighbor Roosevelt. The Argentine press was almost as warm toward the Points as Good Neighbor Eleanor Roosevelt herself. (Wrote she in My Day: "We all listened breathlessly. . . . One felt it was an important moment in the history of world progress. . . .")
Here & there the rich harmony of approval for the Wilsonian idealism of the Points ran into discord. In the London Times, Britain's retired Diplomatic Adviser, Baron Vansittart of Denham, snorted: "His Majesty's Government did well to promise the restoration of France. But not this [Vichy] France. . . . It is useless to disguise the strength of British feeling against it. This France, His Majesty's Government cannot restore and it would be better for them to say so forthright and forthwith. . . .