Beobachter's Parallel

One day 336 years before Christ was born, old man Diogenes was sunbathing on a Corinthian hillside. Beside him was the tub in which he lived, and his only real friend, a mangy dog. Suddenly a chariot charged up, out of which stepped an elegant, arrogant young man with ruddy cheeks, melting eyes, hair like a lion's.

"I am Alexander, the King," said the youth.

"And I am Diogenes, the Cynic," said the old man, scarcely looking up.

"Is there anything I can do for you?" asked Alexander.

"Yes," said Diogenes. "Don't stand there between me and the sun."

Alexander the Great was tickled by the philosopher's request, but it did not keep him from spending the rest of his short life elbowing others out of the best place in the sun. His romantic ambition drove him, leading victorious armies, from Macedonia up to the turgid Danube, across to storied Thebes, to Troy, down through Asia Minor to defeat Darius and his Persians, on to Egypt, to India.

Two millenniums and a quarter later, last week, Adolf Hitler's newspaper Voelkischer Beobachter drew a fanciful parallel: Joseph Stalin with Alexander the Great. No two men could be less alike. Alexander loved gaud and baubles; Stalin likes big boots and old brown tunics. Vain Alexander refused to grow a beard on the specious grounds that it would afford a handle which an opponent in war might grasp; diffident Stalin wears huge mustachios to make himself look more inscrutable. Alexander was imaginative, athletic, quick as an ocelot; Stalin is practical, ponderous, deliberate as a bear. Only similarity: Diogenes, out looking for an honest man, would not shine his lamp in either Alexander's or Stalin's visage very long.

Voelkischer Beobachter was actually indulging in wishful thinking. Joseph Stalin, Friend of Peace, had metamorphosed into Joseph Stalin, Aggressor. And unfortunately his aggression was taking great bites out of German spheres of ambition. Would it not be better, suggested the newspaper, if, like Alexander, Joseph Stalin buckled on his breastplate and greaves and struck out for Illyria, Phoenicia, Babylonia, the empires of Persia and those lands which are watered by the Indus?

Next day came an apparent answer to Voelkischer Beobachter's prayer. In Moscow Communist International,official organ of the Communist Party, warned Rumania that she had better conclude an immediate pact with Russia, similar to those granted by the Baltic States and refused by unlucky Finland, and turn over the lost province of Bessarabia. In Moscow, New York Times Correspondent G. E. R. Gedye said he had learned "from a highly qualified observer" that Rumania did not even intend to defend the province--had no fortifications and not a single soldier there, was evacuating Rumanian businesses from the area, was mobilizing behind the River Prut, which divides Bessarabia from Rumania proper.

Up to here, the tune had gone merrily for Germany. But all of a sudden the notes began to go flat. Finland was putting up such a fight that Russia evidently could not take on a new adventure. Moreover, in Rome the Fascist Grand Council, highest governing body of Italy, met in a lengthy night session, heard Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano expound for two hours and a half and finally conclude that "everything that may happen in the Danube Basin and the Balkans cannot help but directly interest Italy." The Soviet Government took the almost unprecedented step of squelching Communist International for its article. It was at about this point that Germany let a flight of 80 Italian airplanes cross her territory to Finland, sent a few herself, and otherwise began taking less fanciful measures toward Joseph the Great.

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