It was the aim of Lenin to make it the nucleus of a world government; there are in every country parties loyal only to the Soviets, in whose eyes the domestic governments are usurpers. It is not the merit of the Bolsheviks that these ambitious plans have not succeeded up to now and that the expected world revolution has not appeared. The Nazis have not changed the official designation of their country, the Deutsches Reich. But their literary champions consider the Reich the only legitimate government, and their political chiefs openly crave world hegemony. The intellectual leaders of Japan have been imbued at European universities with the spirit of etatism, and, back home, have revived the old tenet that their divine Emperor, the son of Heaven, has a fair title to rule all peoples. Even the Duce, in spite of the military impotence of his country, proclaimed his intention to reconstruct the ancient Roman Empire. Spanish Falangists babble about a restoration of the domain of Philip II.
In such an atmosphere there is no room left for the peaceful coöperation of nations. The ordeal through which mankind is going in our day is not the outcome of the operation of uncontrollable natural forces. It is rather the inevitable result of the working of doctrines and policies popular with millions of our contemporaries.
However, it would be a fateful mistake to assume that a return to the policies of liberalism abandoned by the civilized nations some decades ago could cure these evils and open the way toward peaceful coöperation of nations and toward prosperity. If Europeans and the peoples of European descent in other parts of the earth had not yielded to etatism, if they had not embarked upon vast schemes of government interference with business, our recent political, social, and economic disasters could have been avoided. Men would live today under more satisfactory conditions and would not apply all their skill and all their intellectual powers to mutual extermination. But these years of antagonism and conflict have left a deep impression on human mentality, which cannot easily be eradicated. They have marked the souls of men, they have disintegrated the spirit of human coöperation, and have engendered hatreds which can vanish only in centuries. Under present conditions the adoption of a policy of outright laissez faire and laissez passer on the part of the civilized nations of the West would be equivalent to an unconditional surrender to the totalitarian nations. Take, for instance, the case of migration barriers. Unrestrictedly opening the doors of the Americas, of Australia, and of Western Europe to immigrants would today be equivalent to opening the doors to the vanguards of the armies of Germany, Italy, and Japan.
There is no other system which could safeguard the smooth coördination of the peaceful efforts of individuals and nations but the system today commonly scorned as Manchesterism. We may hope—although such hopes are rather feeble—that the peoples of the Western democratic world will be prepared to acknowledge this fact, and to abandon their present-day totalitarian tendencies. But there can be no doubt that to the immense majority of men militarist ideas appeal much more than those of liberalism. The most that can be expected for the immediate future is the separation of the world into two sections: a liberal, democratic, and capitalist West with about one quarter of the total world population, and a militarist and totalitarian East embracing the much greater part of the earth’s surface and its population. Such a state of affairs will force upon the West policies of defense which will seriously hamper its efforts to make life more civilized and economic conditions more prosperous.
Even this melancholy image may prove too optimistic. There are no signs that the peoples of the West are prepared to abandon their policies of etatism. But then they will be prevented from giving up their mutual economic warfare, their economic nationalism, and from establishing peaceful relations among their own countries. Then we shall stand where the world stood in the period between the two world wars. The result will be a third war, more dreadful and more disastrous than its precursors.
It is the task of the last part of this book to discuss the conditions which could preserve at least for the Western democracies some amount of political and economic security. It is its aim to find out whether there is any imaginable scheme which could make for durable peace in this age of the omnipotence of the state.
The main obstacle both to every attempt to study in an unbiased way the social, political, and economic problems of our day, and to all endeavors to substitute more satisfactory policies for those which have resulted in the present crisis of civilization, is to be found in the stubborn, intransigent dogmatism of our age. A new type of superstition has got hold of people’s minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!
The case is obvious with present-day Russia and Germany. One cannot dispose of this fact by calling the Russians and the Germans barbarians and saying that such things cannot and will not happen with the more civilized nations of the West. There are only a few friends of tolerance left in the West. The parties of the Left and of the Right are everywhere highly suspicious of freedom of thought. It is very characteristic that in these years of the desperate struggle against the Nazi aggression a distinguished British pro-Soviet author has the boldness to champion the cause of inquisition. “Inquisition,” says T. G. Crowther, “is beneficial to science when it protects a rising class.”* For “the danger or value of an inquisition depends on whether it is used on behalf of a reactionary or a progressiving governing class.”† But who is “progressive” and who is “reactionary”? There is a remarkable difference with regard to this issue between Harold Laski3 and Alfred Rosenberg.4
It is true that outside of Russia and Germany dissenters do not yet risk the firing squad or slow death in a concentration camp.‡ But few are any longer ready to pay serious attention to dissenting views. If a man tries to question the doctrines of etatism or nationalism, hardly anyone ventures to weigh his arguments. The heretic is ridiculed, called names, ignored. It has come to be regarded as insolent or outrageous to criticize the views of powerful pressure groups or political parties, or to doubt the beneficial effects of state omnipotence. Public opinion has espoused a set of dogmas which there is less and less freedom to attack. In the name of progress and freedom both progress and freedom are being outlawed.
Every doctrine that has recourse to the police power or to other methods of violence or threat for its protection reveals its inner weakness. If we had no other means to judge the Nazi doctrines, the single fact that they seek shelter behind the Gestapo would be sufficient evidence against them. Doctrines which can stand the trial of logic and reason can do without persecuting skeptics.
This war was not caused by Nazism alone. The failure of all other nations to stop the rise of Nazism in time and to erect a barrier against a new German aggression was not less instrumental in bringing about the disaster than were the events of Germany’s domestic evolution. There was no secrecy about the ambitions of the Nazis. The Nazis themselves advertised them in innumerable books and pamphlets, and in every issue of their numerous newspapers and periodicals. Nobody can reproach the Nazis with having concocted their plots clandestinely. He who had ears to hear and eyes to see could not help but know all about their aspirations.
The responsibility for the present state of world affairs lies with those doctrines and parties that have dominated the course of politics in the last decades. Indicting Nazism is a queer way to exculpate the culprits. Yes, the Nazis and their allies are bad people. But it should be the primary aim of politics to protect nations against the dangers originating from the hostile attitudes of bad people. If there were no bad people, there would not be any need for a government. If those in a position to direct the activities of governments do not succeed in preventing disaster, they have given proof that they are not equal to their task.
There was in the last twenty-five years but one political problem: to prevent the catastrophe of this war. But the politicians were either struck with blindness or incapable of doing anything to avoid the impending disaster.
