at Stanford. I have profited greatly once again from discussions with Peter Hoffman, and from the guidance of Jack Granatstein, Josef Skvorecky and Pierre van den Berghe. Their sharp editing kept me from many an error. I was moved to tears by the kindly, deeply-felt letter of appraisal from Professor Otto Kimminich of Regensburg. Thanks as well to Professor Desmond Morton for supporting me to the Canada Council, and to the Canada Council itself for a timely grant which helped me go to Moscow and Stanford. Paul Tuerr and Paul Weigel of Kitchener have both helped me, especially with the organization of a conference at Massey College in Toronto to which many scholars came in spring 1996, to give papers on various aspects of the Allied occupation of Germany in 1945–50. Along with them, Karen Manion, Siegfried Fischer and Chris Klein helped to carry that burden.
To Ute and Wolfgang Spietz, vielen Dank. To Professor Hartmut Froeschle, Peter Dyck, Dr Gabriele Stüber and to Professor Richard Müller, thanks for advice and help. And to dear Annette Roser, who has taken up the cause and made it her own, as well as to Dr Ter-Nedden of Bonn, to Annaliese Barbara Baum, and especially Lotte Börgmann, friend and guide, whom I feel I know well though I have met her but once – besten Dank.
Alan Samson, my editor at Little, Brown in London, took the courageous decision to publish this book despite the harsh opposition it is bound to arouse. And then he and Andrew Gordon gave very effective advice on improving the manuscript.
Toronto, April 1997
And for this new edition, thanks to Karl and Christy Siegler for their expert and attentive editing.
Toronto, June 2007
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless’d;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Merchant of Venice
‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.’
GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch
During the century before 1914, the Western democracies began a series of reforms such as the world had never witnessed. All of them abolished cruel institutions – duelling, slavery, religious discrimination and child labour. In Ontario, the first universal, free, long-term education system in the history of the world was begun and perfected within forty years. In the US and UK, cures for diseases were discovered, electricity made useful, aeroplanes invented and hunger abolished among millions of people. All the democracies began the process of electoral reform that brought the polling booths to everyone by 1925.1 In agriculture, industry and science, advances were made that produced prosperity for the great majority of their citizens, something that had never happened before. The democracies did these things under no threat from enemies, nor to surpass other societies. These things occurred because there was a civilizing genius among the people based on their ancient beliefs.
The rapid improvement of life that seemed inevitable in 1900 was slowed to a walk by the catastrophes of the twentieth century. These were prefigured largely in the century before.
Darwin, Marx and Freud had all invented new beliefs for mankind, which had in common the idea that people must forever struggle against each other. In society, class must fight class; in the natural world, individual must compete against individual; and within the individual, ego must war with libido, or instinct with learned behaviour.
These ideas ignored the fact that the very definition of society is people co-operating to a greater good. Co-operation and trust alone enabled societies to survive, but ideas such as permanent class warfare, the Oedipus complex and survival of the fittest created conflict and mistrust in personal relations, political revolutions, wars between nations and eugenics programs which were a major part of the social catastrophes of this century.
The nineteenth-century spirit of generous reform in England, Canada, Germany, France and the US continued into the twentieth century. But now the powers of the state were being vastly extended by the reformers themselves in order to implement their generous ideals. Under the fascists and communists, the reforming passions were taken over by the state. They animated the state and were controlled by it. In the brilliant phrase of the philosopher Michael Polanyi, ‘The generous passions of our age could now covertly explode inside the engines of a pitiless machinery of violence.’2
What saved the democracies from the fate of these authoritarian states were, largely, traditions deriving from the Protestant Reformation that previously had expressed and limited the faith of people in a central power, whether church, feudal monarchy or modern state. The people had already freed their individual consciences from the priests, aristocrats and bureaucrats who had controlled them through a vast machinery of patronizing moral condescension, the class system, hypocritical imputations of basic guilt, reciprocal loyalties and violence.
Totalitarianism was far stronger in Italy, Spain and Russia, where the Protestant revolution had not occurred, or where it had been curtailed by the older authoritarian traditions, as in Germany. Among the particular traditions that protected the democracies were freedom of conscience, expressed as freedom of speech; mass literacy; habeas corpus; the extended franchise; and the various other constitutional protections of individual rights all proceeding largely from the Reformation and the Enlightenment. That these traditions did not always guide the foreign policies of the democracies was clear to see in Ireland and in the American west. But by far the most spectacular failures were in Europe, after the German wars.
Two men struggled for the soul of the west in London during the First World War. They were Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, the very model of the arrogant, conservative power of the British Empire, and Herbert Hoover. Churchill’s sea blockade, intended to strangle the German war effort, was also starving millions of Belgian children. This pained Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer from Iowa, unknown to politics. He was typical of the reforming, generous, independent spirit of many Americans: opposed to Empire and big government, with a naïve faith in the goodness of democratic peoples.
Beginning only a few months after the declaration of war in August
