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From New International, Vol. II No. 1, January 1935, Inside back cover.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Two press dispatches, one from the daily press, the other from a service issued by the Friends of the Soviet Union, are reproduced in the Neue Front (December 1934) of Paris:
The new Soviet ambassador to Rumania, Ostrovsky, gave an interview to the bourgeois papers, from which we extract the following passage: ‘I believe that I will have an easy task among you, for our peoples have a common goal, peace, and I hope to find a useful support for it in the Rumanian government, in Rumanian public opinion and in Rumanian society, which are nothing else than the triple expression of the same substance: the Rumanian people.’ Are such expressions also part of the necessities of diplomatic intercourse?
And the answer!
Bukarest (FSU) – the Rumanian government has just outlawed 32 organizations, because they are ‘communist organizations’. Among the prohibited organizations is also to be found the ‘Friends of the Soviet Union’, which was first founded in the summer of this year and the legalization of which followed in the courts a few weeks ago.
Discussing the half-muted struggle between the Reichswehr and Hermann Göring, the not badly informed Prague emigrant organ of Dr. Otto Strasser’s Black Front, Die Deutsche Revolution (January 6, 1936) writes:
This struggle now finds a highly noteworthy expression in the press: the “coordinated” press, whose concealed disaffection with the system becomes increasingly visible to the “informed reader”, is plainly intervening in the struggle in favor of the Reichswehr Ministry (of course, on the prompting of the latter, and certainly not without its backing).
This alone explains and lends purport to the fact that, for example, the Berliner Tageblatt calls Göring the – “Attila of the Air”!!
Of course, not directly, as its own opinion! But indirectly, as the opinion of England! – This takes place in the form that it publishes an article by its London correspondent, von Suttenheim, in which it says:
It is an open secret in England today that German mountains are hollowed out and that in the inside of them thousands of Nibelungen are wearing themselves out to forge weapons for the Third Reich. At night, however, the Attila of the Air, as General Göring has been baptized here, swishes through the air with his noiseless airplanes, and the only thing not clear in this report is whether there are 5,000 or 50,000 airplanes in his fleet.
This almost blasphemously graceful insulting of Göring is further emphasized by an indication of the ruinous effect of his air policy on England!
In a repetition, true to the letter and the spirit of assertions first made here by us, Göring’s air armaments of today are compared there with Tirpitz’ fleet armaments of yore, of which the Berliner Tageblatt writes:
And the conclusion of this drum-fire propaganda was that, together with France, disarmed England is also menaced by Germany, which has replaced the Tirpitz invasion by sea by Göring’s invasion by air. A new 1914, only a much more dangerous one.
Imagine the effect upon the German public of this attack on Göring – and one recognizes the skill with which the Reichswehr Ministry first repulses the aspirations of Göring and prepares to strip him of his power. (Göring, to be sure, is not Darré – and Hitler knows it!)
The London Daily Herald (December 21, 1934) prints the following Geneva dispatch concerning the African town which is threatening to provoke a war of aggression by Italy against Abyssinia:
Italy has unconsciously admitted the justice of the Abyssinian government’s charge that Ual-Ual, where fighting occurred recently, is illegally occupied by Italian troops.
The Italian government declares that the zone is in Italian territory, and that the Anglo-Ethiopian Frontier Commission, which recently visited the district, was working on Italian territory.
But today the League Secretariat, in accordance with the custom, pinned to the walls of the League Pressroom a map of the territory.
On this map, Ual-Ual lies some 125 miles within the Abyssinian frontier, as marked according to the Treaty of 1908.
The map was published in Italy, and clearly shows that after the 1908 Treaty, Italy, at any rate, regarded Ual-Ual as Abyssinian.
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