GERMANY'S CONFIDENCE
SIR, While it is well to " be on our guard against wishful thinking," to quote a contemporary cliché, I feel that Strategicus is jumping several stages when he concludes that Germany must be confident of her ability to outlast us in the economic field simply because she does not launch a frontal attack on the Maginot Line.
Lest I be accused of wishful thinking I will not advance any alternative explanation but I would suggest that Germany may hope to bring this war to a quick end by her propaganda campaign and our war weariness.
The . perpetual reiteration of lies, at first discredited but believed simply by constant repetition, worked a miracle for the Nazis in Germany. The same technique is now being tried out on us through the wireless, and by the medium of pro-German and Pacifist and anti-war bodies in our country ; many of these bodies, the British Peoples Panty, for instance, show" a surprising tendency to accept the German propaganda arguments wholesale.
The analogy with Germany breaks down because in that country Nazi propaganda had the field to itself. We have not quite reached that pitch over here, but the extent to which our case is being allowed to go by default is flabbergasting. Methods of vigorous defence and counter-attack might bring us a victory without the loss of all those lives that the " Germany must be defeated in the field " school seem so anxious to throw away.
Some of us have a very good idea of the lines that counter- attack should take, but our Government seem determined CO do nothing at all and it is heartbreakingly impossible td bring suggestions to any competent quarter.
So while the superb courage of our fighting forces,' which the Government seems determined to blanket, has defeated the " knock out " blow on which our enemy counted, with a loss of life approximately equal to the numbers killed on the roads over the same period, our morale is left entirely undefended while the much more exposed nerves of our enemies are apparently never to be attacked by the propaganda methods they are marshalling against ourselves.—Yours faithfully, Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.I. GEORGE EDINGER.
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