No Other Road to Freedom is a collection of Leland Stowe’s dispatches for the Chicago Daily News during the first years of World War II, before the United States declared war. Nowadays, a reporter or freelancer can jam out an article on a laptop or tablet and then upload it or email it to wherever it needs to go. No muss, no fuss, unless there’s no Internet access.
In 1939, life was very different. No Internet! Leland Stowe and his pal Bob Casey, a fellow reporter, had to fly to Europe via flying boat – a large piston-engine aircraft which landed and took off on water. Many of us, myself included, detest being cooped up in narrow seats on modern airliners with indifferent service, but at least we’re getting there via jet propulsion – a lot faster than those old piston-engine aircraft. When in war-torn Europe, he got around via ship, train, cars on weather-damaged and war-damaged roads, and finally home via slow piston-engine aircraft. The book has a pull-out map of Stowe’s travels, which were extensive enough to make any modern “digital nomad” happy.
World War II was long ago, and Stowe died in 1994. Yet his writing is fresh and exciting. He was there for the German takeover of Norway, which was accomplished with very little bloodshed. He was there for the Winter War of 1940, in which Finland, all by itself, fought off an invasion from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union won, but the Finns extracted a stiff price for the invasion. He described how the Finns set aside political and class differences to repel the invasion, and how the Finnish women (whom he referred to as “Lottas”) filled in many jobs so that the men could go to the battlefronts. Stowe skewered British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s response (no arms or troops, but allowing British citizens to join the Finnish army after the Finnish defenses had been broken): “Here at last was old Creeping-Paralysis Neville Chamberlain hobbling frantically toward a five-alarm fire with a teacupful of water.” His account of sharing an ambulance with a mortally wounded British fighter pilot in Greece was also eye opening.
The most relevant part of No Other Road to Freedom for those of us reading it long after World War II is a dispatch entitled “The Real Menace to America.” In that one, Stowe correctly named Nazism for what it was – a different form of Communism. (The word Nazi is a contraction, like writing “can’t” instead of “cannot”. The full name of the Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Worker’s Party.) Stowe referred to Soviet Communism as Red Bolshevism and Nazism as Brown Bolshevism. He stated bluntly that Nazi Germany would not fight the United States in a military engagement, but would seek to seize the United States from within. Stowe listed a lot of problems that we see today: “excessive materialism in certain strata of our society…lack of faith prevalent among so many of our American youths; the unbridled selfishness with which so many Americans, rich or poor, put their own interests and pocketbooks above the welfare of the nation and the swift completion of its defenses.” Stowe also called Nazism “political syphilis” and discussed in several of his dispatches in his book how German diplomats and businessmen worked hard to pave the way for the arrival of German forces, or to facilitate the election or installation of leaders, such as Vidkun Quisling of Norway, who would work with Nazi Germany.
I loved Stowe’s fresh, clear writing about what he saw and what he learned. Sadly, it looks like we’re facing the same thing again, against an opponent that is a lot stronger than Nazi Germany ever was. At the very least, it gives credence to the idea that history moves in cycles or “turnings”.
Today the primary menace to our country is Communist China. The U.S. government openly stated in the 2018 National Defense Strategy for the United States that the “homeland is no longer a sanctuary”. The United States is divided so badly that many are talking about another Civil War. The “political syphilis” that Stowe warned about spreads a lot faster thanks to the Internet and social media. Many current and former U.S. officials have been influenced by Communist China. Stowe described it well: “The most important factor of all was a paralyzingly efficient revolutionary technique. This was the unseen war, and the truly undeclared war. This was the thing which poisoned a nation’s morale, divided its people into bitterly hostile groups, undermined its defense forces, cripped its industrial production, disseminated fear and confusion.” (Italics were Stowe’s, not mine.) And this: “The Nazi technique of conquest from the inside is already a menace to American parliamentary government and our free institutions – yet many Americans will not face this fact.” Sound familiar? Our nation is divided into bitterly hostile groups, we haven’t as much industry as we did in the twentieth century, and even the U.S. military is being crippled by cultural Marxism, as well as by complacency and bureaucracy.
The solution to the threat of Communist China is the same that Stowe prescribed to vanquish Nazi Germany: be resistant to the divisiveness spread from abroad and by those at home who are so convinced that our country is terrible that they would welcome its destruction, or those that hope that it happens so that they can gain power or money from it.
Stowe’s writing is fresh and relevant to our current situation. It would be nice if people in high places would read this book and learn the lessons from the past, but they’d rather lead, not read.