LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

Or has someone been MiSinformed ? and IF so, who misinformed him ?
Accordin’ to the reports of the American press now available to the aver
age European, someone in charge of American destiny miscalculated
somethin’ or other.
An “inquiry” is in progress, at least as they print here. It bein’ my
private belief that I could have avoided a war with Japan, if anybody had
had the unlikely idea of sending me out there, with any sort of official
powers.
The Japanese have a past. Of course when I talk to ’em now, they are
apt to remind me that they have ALSO a presertt.
They have not mentioned the future in our conversations.
The last American journalist I saw, and that was the night before Arbour
Day, told me the Japs would never etc., etc.
A nation evolves by process of history. Japan to me consists in part of
what I learned from a sort of half trunk full of the late Ernest Fenollosa’s
papers. Anybody who has read the plays entitled Kumasaka and
Kagekiyo, would have AVOIDED the sort of bilge printed in Time and
the American press, and the sort of fetid imbecility I heard a few nights
ago from the British Broadcasting Company.
There are certain depths of ignorance that can be fatal to a man or a
nation. When these are conjoined with malice and baseness of spirit, it
seems almost useless to mention them.
A BBC commentator somewhere about January 8 was telling his
presumably music hall audience that the Japs were jackals, and that they
had just recently, I think he said, within living men’s lifetime, emerged
from barbarism. I don’t know what patriotic end you think, or he thinks,
or the British authorities think (if that is the verb), is served by such fetid
ignorance.