War, as never before, is a menace to human survival. And war (military,
economic, social war) has been made unnecessary, as never before, by our
modern mastery of means of production, distribution, communication,
whereby it is feasible today _for all men_ to live in plenty and with
leisure, without enslaving or exploiting others.
The United States Congress Against War represents a good impulse. But
men’s protest against war is not a new event in the so-called Christian
world. It has been futile, throughout the ages, _because war was organic
in men’s way of living_. Similarly, this congress will not pass the
limits of “good intentions” unless it writes down formally in its record
that the abolition of war means revolution. Fundamental revolution.
Revolution in the social structure of the nations, and revolution in the
souls of men and women.
_ii. To the Students of Cuba_
(_April, 1931_)
I am following with deep emotion your struggle to renovate—indeed to
re-create—the life of Cuba. I am poignantly aware of the terrible
dilemma that confronts you. Your government is the slave of
irresponsible financial interests of the United States, and of the State
Department at Washington which with cynical hypocrisy is launched on a
deliberate campaign to imperialize the entire Caribbean. If your
prostitute government remains in office, Cuba will continue to be a
“factory” for American investments, a “factory” protected by no laws
such as limit exploitation on American soil; since you Cubans are not
citizens of the United States and your political “independence” more and
more is coming to mean the privilege of our exploiters to work in your
country with a ruthless irresponsibility which they would not dare to
display in their own. Yet, if you overthrow this government, it may mean
the landing of American marines in Havana and the swift setting up of a
new rule which will be the replica of Machado’s—the other horn of the
dilemma!
What can you do? What can a citizen of the United States urge you to do?
In a way I am ashamed to speak to you, ashamed to mention my own sorrow
and my shame, as a native of the oppressor country, who is helpless to
help you. Men like myself in the United States are powerless. There is
no enlightened public opinion here with any _punch_ to it. Most of our
good will is Platonic, in the bad sense of the word. And who, here, is
interested in a _students’_ revolutionary movement? Our intellectuals,
as a body, have lost contact with the spiritual, the _human_ source of
art; our student groups are too pampered and too infantile to get
excited over anything but football.[14] You are alone in your fight,
alone with the student bodies and the workers of other Hispano-American
countries who, for the most part, are as dispossessed as you. You are
alone with the truth!
Yet I can say to you: Go on! If for no other reason, _go on because only
then will you be happy_. Do not let so-called practical affairs and
worldly wisdom compromise your ideal. Look at the men who have made
these “necessary compromises”: the successful men, the rulers of the
world. See what ugly, misshapen, miserable men they are. Look well at
the “practical” men, and do not go the hideous way which they have gone,
and of which the ignoble shambles of the modern world is the result.
Even if you are imprisoned, even if you are shot down (as some of you
have been), you must have the satisfaction of knowing that you are
living the sole way that makes life tolerable. The enemies who have sold
themselves for dollars are not happy; the indifferent ones, in Cuba, in
the United States, who follow opportunism—for success, for pleasure, for
power—are not happy. They must drug themselves with ever more success,
more pleasure, more power, lest they awake to the intolerableness of
their way of living. And that is why they hate you: because you are the
constant revealers to themselves of their own nullity. They must deny
their nullity; and by a common psychologic mechanism they do so by
denying _you_ who make them cognizant of it.
I cannot promise you success in your present endeavor to free Cuba and
to bring Cuba to real independence. It would be false to promise it.
_You_ may not succeed in actually overthrowing the hideous anarchy of
which men like Machado are mere minor servants. So to do requires more
than your good will; it requires method, technique and long hard work.
But this triumphant method can come only from such will as yours. Before
you achieve it, perhaps you individually will be crushed, since the
ordered anarchy and greed of the modern world _has_ method. But even if
this is so—this worst which must be bravely envisaged, it makes no
difference in what you must do, not merely from a sense of duty, but in
order to be happy! You must go on struggling to free and to reorganize
your country; knowing that that labor is its own reward; that the man
who gives his life for freedom, by that fact is alive and is free.
You know that your problem as Cubans struggling for independence is not
apart from that of most of the other nations of America Hispana. Yet you
are divided from your allies, not alone by mountains and deserts and
seas, but by proud persistent nationalisms, by differences of race and
culture—the differences of Indian, Negro, mestizo, criollo. You are all
rich in plunder, and the imperialist power feeds on it the better by
exciting the disunities between you. But you are profoundly gifted
peoples; your resources of the spirit are as great as the resources of
your lands—greater, surely, than the difficulties inherited from your
historic pasts. You will help yourselves and one another, synchronously,
by deeper self-understanding. For brothers who fulfill themselves
achieve thereby not homogeneity, but harmony. Without harmony, both your
lands and your cultures would be taken from you. But you are already far
on the way to achieving this organic unity among you, in cultural terms
and in terms of political aspiration.
The imperialist power exploits you and incites you to fratricidal war,
because it has allies within your borders: your own capitalists and
their servants, the politicians. If you effectively fight the domestic
enemy, the foreign enemy will at last be helpless against you, even as
he was helpless against revolutionary Russia. I know that your task is
more complex than was Russia’s, because you are not politically united.
But, essentially, it is one problem.
And it is our problem, too. We in the United States fight the same foe
as you. This, when we attain a conscious intelligentsia and a conscious
working class, will serve to unite us.
Only from the platform of War Against Capitalism can you effectively
meet your national problem. For your foe is only superficially an alien
government; more deeply it is the capitalist power with its twin heads:
the Machados at home, the armed Dollar abroad. Most deeply, it is the
ignorance of all the people—in Cuba, in America Hispana, in the United
States.
Students of Cuba, you have come out into the clear air of action; you
have created leaders for yourselves, and a program. You are blessed in
this. I find myself almost envying you, rather than pitying you despite
your anguish and your struggles. My heart and my mind are with you. If I
could feel that my word warmed you in the slightest degree, heartened
your perseverance, it would be for me an inexpressible joy, who am alone
here in this great country—alone, and unable to act for and with men
like you who stand for everything I cherish.
NOTE: _This is one of many messages by the author clandestinely
introduced, printed in pamphlet form, and distributed, in
Latin-American countries under brutal dictatorships. It has been
re-Englished from the Spanish text._
_iii. The Touchstone_
_on the anniversary of the October Revolution, 1935_
More than ever, in this day of spiritual and social confusion, the
attitude of men toward Soviet Russia is a touchstone of the quality of
their good will. By this criterion three large groups stand forth.
There are, first, the enemies of the Soviet Union: and these are the
souls whose true love, despite all their fine words of God and Man and
Freedom, is for their pocket-books. Their real nature is manifest in
their leaders, archetypes of human ugliness and degeneration—the
Hearsts, the Hitlers, the Hoovers. A second group consists of the
“liberals,” the “socialists,” the idealistic “revolutionaries” who are
so busy deploring the mistakes and injustices committed in the Soviet
Union that they have no time to understand or to defend it. These are
men (when they are sincere) so infatuated with their own private notion
of what truth and justice should look like that the spectacle of a great
nation, heroically serving truth and justice with the humble tools of
humble human nature, leaves them cold. Essentially, these are men
devoted to their own egos: men whose professional love for mankind masks
a childish and shallow and ill-tempered self-adoration.
The third group consists of those who know that in the Soviet Union a
people is dedicated to the task for which in all ages the inspired
few—the prophets and the poets—have given their lives: the task of
founding upon earth, at last, a culture not of slaves but of men, a
society of universal justice, in which human truths shall be sought and
expressed by the common and communal life of all men and women. They
know that this people consists not of gods, but of humans. They know
that this people must meet and overcome, in their great undertaking, the
obstacles of a hostile world and, no less, the obstacles of their own
enslaved past and of their faulty natures as human beings. They know
that the labor of the Soviet Union is the more precious because it is
the work of humble men and women, subject to trial and error; and that
those who reject this labor because of its failures and imperfections
are at heart cowards. They know that if the dark years, in which we have
lived since the Great War, shall appear in the perspective of history as
the time of a great Dawning, the reason is the light that has come since
1917 from Russia.
These sincere men and women, today more than ever, while the clouds of
aggressive ignorance and ill will gather upon the world, must declare
their devotion to the Cause of the Soviet Union.
_iv. To Romain Rolland on His Seventieth Birthday_
Your seventieth birthday comes at a time when France holds in her hands
the immediate destiny of the Western world. The result of the struggle
for power in France between the elements of reaction typified by the
Croix de Feu, which are the forces of death, and the elements of
re-creation typified by the Front Uni, which are the forces of life, may
well determine the result, at least as it affects those still living, of
the same struggle throughout the Occident. If France fails, Great
Britain fails; the sinister forces in the United States, emboldened by a
century of capitalist anarchy, may sweep America into the same disaster.
If France fails, Western man may fail: a period of overwhelming darkness
may intervene for us all, before that future time when our progeny once
again takes up the Torch, held aloft meanwhile—who knows for how
long?—by the Soviet Union and perhaps by certain parts of China, India,
America Hispana that prove inaccessible to fascist armies.
In this crucial scene of mankind, as so often in the past, France plays
a leading role. And we, who celebrate your seventieth birthday, Romain
Rolland, perforce look upon you as the symbol of our hope in your great
country. You are a great man, a great _person_, Romain Rolland, because
you are a symbol; because a world spirit speaks _through_ you. At this
hour of crisis and of celebration, for many in my country, you incarnate
the genius which for eight centuries has sustained French culture.
This genius is a kind of “common sense,” rare alas!—both individually
and collectively rare. It is “common” only as essence, as the universal,
is common. It is compounded of a ruthless clarity in meeting the Real
and in relating its parts together; of an invincible courage in
following whither the Real leads at whatever sacrifice of individual
peace and comfort; and of a creative vision in so mastering the facts
that they may ever more closely conform with man’s intuition of his
dignity and destiny.
As I look about me at the world in which I have now lived for over forty
years, meeting men of all qualities of mind and temperament and talent,
I am appalled at the rarity of this “common sense”; and I am no longer
amazed at the cruel and dolorous pass to which the world has come. Men
of genius in the usual sense of the word are not rare; nor men of
physical courage, nor men of imagination. But terribly rare is the man
who, capable of knowing the truth, continues to serve the truth beyond
the point at which such service begins to make him suffer; terribly rare
is the man of imagination who, finding that he can sell his gifts at
high price unto the prostitutes and exploiters who rule the world,
elects still to give his gifts into the hands of his humble brothers;
terribly rare is the man who, possessing courage, does not get drunk
with it and lose his control of reality, finding it easier to move
armies or mobs than to master his own ego.
Men of this rare “common sense” will, perhaps, someday be more common;
this, then, will be a different world. But until that time of maturity
arrives, these men are historic. You are one of them, Romain Rolland. In
you, there is no break between conviction and action; between
recognition of the truth and every word and deed within your power to
fulfill it; between the responsibility you feel for your dignity as an
heir of Man and the responsibility you feel for your dignity as a
servant of men. Ten years ago, I called you a _whole man_, Romain
Rolland. I cannot improve this term, today. The whole man is he who
possesses this common sense I speak of.
I pray that France may duly celebrate the seventieth birthday of her
great son and heir to those intellectual and ethical qualities which
have made France great. If she does so, it will have to be by her
actions. France knows where the truth lies: will she have the common
sense to serve it? She knows that truth lies first of all in fearless
realization of the collective economic freedom which can alone make
_true_ those principles of _Egalité_, _Fraternité_, _Liberté_, which now
for a hundred years she has flaunted on all her public buildings. To
this end, the people of France must grimly sever from their loyalty to
_La Patrie_ those greeds and inertias and self-indulgences of class
which are the germs of fascism and of death. The hour has come when
France must accomplish the promise of her great tradition to herself and
to the world. She must mature into realization. It will hurt, it will be
heroic. But if France fails now, she goes down; she commits that suicide
of the spirit which ever precedes decomposition of the body.
Great nations mirror their powers and their vision in the lives of their
great men. Let France, today, look to herself by looking to you, Romain
Rolland. Let her study the clear progress of your thought from the
humanitarian idealism of your bourgeois youth, through the trial of war
which schooled you to find the truth in _facts_, and to the strong
revolutionary realism which is your deed, today. What France sees, in
studying you, let her understand to be the symbol of her own ineluctable
course, if she would continue to be France.
... This prayer to France, this challenge to France, this confidence in
France, is my way, Romain Rolland, of celebrating your seventieth
birthday.
_January, 1936_
NOTE: _This letter, before publication, was read at the great mass
meeting held in the Paris Trocadéro, on Romain Rolland’s birthday._
_v. To the Premier of France_
Dear Léon Blum: I presume to address you in this personal form because
you are more than the head of a French government, you are more than
leader of the People’s Front of the French nation: historic circumstance
has made you arbiter of the present destiny of Europe, perhaps of us
all. To fulfill your role, only a true man can suffice. And it is to the
man that I am speaking.
All the world knows just what is happening in Spain. The Spanish people
last February by a great majority chose a government of their
own—somewhat similar to the one you are now leading. Having created a
government of their own, they proceeded by means moderate and legal to
create a Spain of their own. And as their program began to take effect,
the enemies of the people of Spain, they who hate the people because
they exploit them and because their privilege depends on the continued
degradation of the people, took arms against the nation. Alone, these
reactionaries would have failed, for they had almost a whole nation
against them. Even with the trained mercenaries of the army, with the
resources of vested property and vested superstition, they would have
failed. But there were allies at hand—groups of the same kind, some in
power and in possession of their respective countries, dealers in
falsehood and blood, manipulators of ignorance and confusion. With the
military and economic aid of these enemies of the Spanish people, and of
their own peoples, Spain is being invaded, Spain’s democracy is being
crushed, the world is being forced to stand by day after day while the
machines manned by mercenaries and by the lusters after power destroy
the naked body of a nation.
Léon Blum, this is no civil war of Spain; this is the conquest of the
Spanish people by an armed international class to whom the destruction
of life in the defense of property is an everyday routine. This class
knows no frontiers. Its henchmen, called Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, the
Tories of Great Britain and America, may mouth national slogans, but
they are of one brotherhood, they adore one Baal and one Mammon. Was the
conquest of Ethiopia a civil war? Plenty of African troops fought with
Mussolini against the Negus who to them was a local exploiter less
desirable perhaps than the Italian. But who fights against the loyalists
in Spain? A military caste traditionally removed from sympathy with the
people, a clerical caste trained to submission to the powers that be,
all the dupes and victims of these castes—in other words, the forces,
whether in Spain, in Italy, in France or in Britain, who are the sworn
enemies of you, your party and your allies.
This is not a civil war in Spain; this is the civil war of Europe. This
is a war of attempted conquest, Léon Blum, waged by all the elements you
have devoted your life to combat against all the values you hold dear.
It is your war, Léon Blum; it is our war.
The fascists of Italy and Germany know this. They know that the fascists
of Spain are fighting _their_ battle of conquest. Therefore they are
giving aid to their own kind. And the reactionaries of Japan, the United
States, of every nation where money or privilege is in power, by the
force of credits and propaganda are helping the men of their own stamp
in Spain in order that their machines may prevail against a defense of
mere human flesh and blood.
This, Léon Blum, is the war in which you have declared that France must
remain neutral.
In all Europe there are three governments that can claim with validity
to represent the interests of the entire people. They are Spain, which
is fighting for life; your government, and the Soviet Union. The
U.S.S.R., far removed from the immediate scene of battle and menaced by
the two most aggressive militarist states of the world, Germany and
Japan, cannot act alone; cannot act at all without regard to the
decision of its sole ally, the French Republic. If the Soviet Union made
legal its overwhelming sympathy for the Spanish nation as against your
neutrality pact, you, Léon Blum, would fall; the People’s Front of
France would fall; there would be chaos in France to match Spain’s, and
perhaps a similar fascist uprising.
What does this mean, Léon Blum? It means that yours is the decision. In
all Europe, France alone can act; France by the unified nature of its
government and by the immediate threat to it both east and south, must
act.
The world knows where your heart lies in this struggle. We know that if
you could purchase victory for Spain with your life, you would gladly
give your life. We know that what holds you back is the refusal of the
British government to join you, is the criminal leadership of English
Labor, is—in a word—your fear of war waged against the lives of your
people by the united fascists. Yes, that is the superiority of the
fascists over men and women of the democracies. The fascists, despising
life, readily risk it; despising the lives of others, readily mislead
and destroy them; whereas at the Left are they who hesitate because they
think, because they feel, because they are more wholly human.
But, Léon Blum, it is a true saying: He who hesitates is lost. There is
another old saying: He who loses his life shall find it. The words
originally had a supernatural meaning. We can give to them a modern,
psychological, rational form. We can say: “He who through fear of losing
what he values dares not run risks is sure to lose what he values.” You
fear war if you aid the Spanish people; you fear to alienate Britain;
you fear to provoke the enemy who are giving aid to their factions by
every means in their power. And your fear is helping the enemy; your
fear is making more hopeless the cause of the people not only in Spain
but in Germany and Italy, who need encouragement to rise against their
executioners. Your fear is making more assured the position of the
fascists when at last, made mad by their successes, they choose to
unleash their war against you. Your fear—if need be—to risk war now is
making war inevitable; and meantime your hesitancy and caution are
throwing to the fascists the first battles.
Léon Blum, we who in everything human know ourselves superior to the
fascists must equal them in daring and in resolution. Otherwise, our
hatred of war and love of humanity will defeat us and deliver the world
to the war makers. There are times when the best strategy is to get
one’s eye on the goal and to move toward it. This is the strategy of the
fascists, and it has been victorious in Ethiopia, on the Rhine and
elsewhere. It is a strategy not every nation is able to pursue. Britain
is too divided to pursue it. France has the power, the perspective, the
government—and the incentive!—to pursue it.
Already the aid of the fascists to their kind in Spain, while France
rigidly and solitarily remains neutral, is demoralizing the masses of
all countries. They say to themselves, in England, in France, in Brazil,
in the United States: “The fascists help their gangs; we leave our
people to be massacred and their cities to be bombed.” The masses do not
understand that the U.S.S.R. must act with France, must uphold _your_
hand, Léon Blum. None of us understands what holds you back. Your
“neutrality” is breaking the heart and spirit of the peoples,
everywhere, who soon or late must fight _your_ battle.
If I have presumed to address this letter to you, Léon Blum, it is
because I know that my anguish is that of millions before the tragedy of
Spain; and that my expectation of your leadership is that of millions
everywhere—not excluding those in Italy and Germany—who cannot act
alone, but who are waiting to follow.
We implore you: Recognize the facts in Spain. Recognize that _there is
no neutrality_ in this irrepressible conflict between the two possible
futures of mankind—the way forward to human dignity, the way backward to
slavery. Open the frontiers of France for aid to the legitimate
government of Spain before it is too late! Help them with food, guns,
planes, credit, and above all with the moral force that will be theirs
when they know that the French are their comrades. If you do this, at
once, you will be doing merely what one legitimate government should do
for another; you will be doing merely what the fascists, the world over,
are doing for their conspirators in Spain.
If you do less than this, Léon Blum, you are betraying what your country
represents, what your People’s Front gave you the mandate to perform.
You will be betraying mankind.
_October, 1936_
_vi. Values of the Revolutionary Writer_