INTERNATIONAL: Decade of Humiliation

All civilized people ought to have poured the dust of penitence upon their heads. But only one nation remembered last week that ten years ago began the downfall of the post-war world, the illness of civilization which has stricken the whole of Europe and still spreads.

The one people who did not forget were the Chinese, who live on the opposite side of the earth from Western civilization and celebrate upside-down holidays called National Humiliation Days. For ten years their most important National Humiliation Day has been Chiu I Pa. (pronounced Jo Ee Ba, translated Nine-One-Eight, meaning Sept. 18). On Sept. 18, 1931 a strip of Japanese-owned railway north of Mukden was blown up by a person or persons unknown. The Japanese Kwantung Army used the incident as an excuse to seize Manchuria in defiance of the Japanese Empire’s treaty obligations. A crime condoned, the Manchurian Incident was followed by other acts of international brigandage until the entire code of international morality disintegrated.

The decade which began Sept. 18, 1931 echoed with hollow words of peace. It knew no peace worth the name. Down through the decade came the rattle of musketry in the Shanghai Incident (1932), the spit of rifle-fire in the Chaco (1932-35), the bursting of bombs in Ethiopian villages (1935-36), the volleys of firing squads in Spanish bull rings (1936-39), the screams of murdered Chinese civilians (1937-?), the tramp of Nazi boots through Austria (1938) and Czecho-Slovakia (1939), and at last the mounting crescendo of World War II.

A few statesmen, notably U.S. Secretary of State Henry Lewis Stimson, met the crisis of Sept. 18, 1931 with courage and a sense of international ethics. A few news papers, notably the New York World-Telegram, met it with prescience and responsibility. Last week the World-Telegram reprinted its editorial of Sept. 19, 1931. Excerpts:

“Unless the Washington Government acts soon to restore the integrity of its treaties in the Manchurian crisis, the peace machinery built up after the travail of the World War will be worthless junk. . . . Settlement of Japan’s war of aggression against China is in itself a serious enough problem. But it is insignificant compared with the larger issue of rescuing the world’s peace machinery. . . .

“Japan has violated the Nine-Power Pacific treaty and the Kellogg Pact—not to mention her League of Nations obligation. The only way to keep those treaties alive is for one or more of the signatories, who guarantee those treaties, to take action under those treaties. . . .

“Otherwise a precedent has been set by which any nation in the world can violate those treaties without fear of international intervention to preserve peace. Any aggressor nation hereafter can say, and justly, that the powers accepted Japan’s action as not violating these treaties. That is not an imaginary danger. . . .”

The Chinese in occupied China last week celebrated Jo Ee Ba in the fashion the decade had set. A bomb wrecked the Japanese-operated radio station at Shanghai. Two Japanese merchants were shot in the International Settlement there. A bomb let go in Nanking’s Central Railway Station, killing eight people. Four bombs commemorated Jo Ee Ba in Canton. The right-side-up nations on the other side of the earth, who so loved peace in 1931, no longer remember either Jo Ee Ba or peace.