"This Means You"

The British Foreign Office, like the U.S. State Department, has been trying to wheedle Spain's Caudillo Francisco Franco away from the Axis. But the British press and little Britons in their pubs have long been fed up with Foreign Office gentility. They have demanded that British words and actions directed toward Franco be short and pointed enough to yank him off the Axis platform. Last week two official Britons served public notice that Great Britain is going to tolerate much less arrogance from fat, Fascist Franco:

P:In cosmopolitan Tangier--an international zone until Franco grabbed it in 1940--pro-Ally Arabs and Jews have been flogged and imprisoned; Franco's police picketed the British Tangier Gazette and halted its publication. After British Consul General A. D. F. Gascoigne called on General Uriarte, Spanish Governor General of the zone, the Gazette reappeared, and General Uriarte announced that "the German-inspired" anti-Jewish campaign would stop, all arrested Jews would be freed.

P:To Franco's Axis-timed request that aerial bombardment should be "humanized," Laborite Lord Winster publicly responded: "General Franco has been kind enough to suggest that we should be thinking about peace and ought to stop bombing, which is repugnant to his gentle soul. We remember, of course, how his humanity was stirred when Germany and Italy bombed Guernica and other Spanish cities. ... It is kind of General Franco to spare time from his preoccupation as a ruler of the most backward, derelict, poverty-stricken, starving, illiterate, reactionary country in Europe to tell us how to manage our affairs. This great Christian would not of course tell a lie.. . . As he is the head of a state, he is entitled to courtesy. Instead, therefore, of replying to him in a sailor's phrase of two words we will politely use five often to be found on office doors 'Keep out! This means you!' . . If Germany and Italy do not like our bombing, that is just too bad, but they are in the fortunate position of being able to stop it by merely saying 'Unconditional surrender!' "

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