resistance. To the spread of that herd-feeling which arises from the
threat of war, and which would normally involve the entire nation,
the only groups which make serious resistance are those, of course,
which continue to identify themselves with the other nation from which
they or their parents have come. In times of peace they are for all
practical purposes citizens of their new country. They keep alive
their ethnic traditions more as a luxury than anything. Indeed these
traditions tend rapidly to die out except where they connect with
some still unresolved nationalistic cause abroad, with some struggle
for freedom, or some irredentism. If they are consciously opposed by
a too invidious policy of Americanism, they tend to be strengthened.
And in time of war, these ethnic elements which have any traditional
connection with the enemy, even though most of the individuals may have
little real sympathy with the enemy’s cause, are naturally lukewarm to
the herd-feeling of the nation which goes back to State traditions in
which they have no share. But to the natives imbued with State-feeling,
any such resistance or apathy is intolerable. This herd-feeling, this
newly awakened consciousness of the State, demands universality. The
leaders of the significant classes, who feel most intensely this
State-compulsion, demand a one hundred per cent. Americanism, among
one hundred per cent. of the population. The State is a jealous God
and will brook no rivals. Its sovereignty must pervade every one,
and all feeling must be run into the stereotyped forms of romantic
patriotic militarism which is the traditional expression of the State
herd-feeling.
Thus arises conflict within the State. War becomes almost a sport
between the hunters and the hunted. The pursuit of enemies within
outweighs in psychic attractiveness the assault on the enemy without.
The whole terrific force of the State is brought to bear against
the heretics. The nation boils with a slow insistent fever. A
white terrorism is carried on by the Government against pacifists,
Socialists, enemy aliens, and a milder unofficial persecution against
all persons or movements that can be imagined as connected with the
enemy. War, which should be the health of the State, unifies all the
bourgeois elements and the common people, and outlaws the rest. The
revolutionary proletariat shows more resistance to this unification,
is, as we have seen, psychically out of the current. Its vanguard, as
the I. W. W., is remorselessly pursued, in spite of the proof that
it is a symptom, not a cause, and its prosecution increases the
disaffection of labor and intensifies the friction instead of lessening
it.
But the emotions that play around the defense of the State do not
take into consideration the pragmatic results. A nation at war, led
by its significant classes, is engaged in liberating certain of its
impulses which have had all too little exercise in the past. It is
getting certain satisfactions and the actual conduct of the war or the
condition of the country are really incidental to the enjoyment of new
forms of virtue and power and aggressiveness. If it could be shown
conclusively that the persecution of slightly disaffected elements
actually increased enormously the difficulties of production and the
organization of the war-technique, it would be found that public policy
would scarcely change. The significant classes must have their pleasure
in hunting down and chastizing everything that they feel instinctively
to be not imbued with the current State-enthusiasm, though the State
itself be actually impeded in its efforts to carry out those objects
for which they are passionately contending. The best proof of this is
that with a pursuit of plotters that has continued with ceaseless
vigilance ever since the beginning of the war in Europe, the concrete
crimes unearthed and punished have been fewer than those prosecutions
for the mere crime of opinion or the expression of sentiments critical
of the State or the national policy. The punishment for opinion has
been far more ferocious and unintermittent than the punishment of
pragmatic crime. Unimpeachable Anglo-Saxon Americans who were freer of
pacifist or socialist utterance than the State-obsessed ruling public
opinion, received heavier penalties and even greater opprobrium, in
many instances, than the definitely hostile German plotter. A public
opinion which, almost without protest, accepts as just, adequate,
beautiful, deserved and in fitting harmony with ideals of liberty
and freedom of speech, a sentence of twenty years in prison for mere
utterances, no matter what they may be, shows itself to be suffering
from a kind of social derangement of values, a sort of social neurosis,
that deserves analysis and comprehension.
On our entrance into the war, there were many persons who predicted
exactly this derangement of values, who feared lest democracy suffer
more at home from an America at war than could be gained for democracy
abroad. That fear has been amply justified. The question whether
the American nation would act like an enlightened democracy going
to war for the sake of high ideals, or like a State-obsessed herd,
has been decisively answered. The record is written and cannot be
erased. History will decide whether the terrorization of opinion, and
the regimentation of life was justified under the most idealistic of
democratic administrations. It will see that when the American nation
had ostensibly a chance to conduct a gallant war, with scrupulous
regard to the safety of democratic values at home, it chose rather
to adopt all the most obnoxious and coercive techniques of the enemy
and of the other countries at war, and to rival in intimidation and
ferocity of punishment the worst governmental systems of the age. For
its former unconsciousness and disrespect of the State ideal, the
nation apparently paid the penalty in a violent swing to the other
extreme. It acted so exactly like a herd in its irrational coercion of
minorities that there is no artificiality in interpreting the progress
of the war in terms of the herd psychology. It unwittingly brought out
into the strongest relief the true characteristics of the State and
its intimate alliance with war. It provided for the enemies of war and
the critics of the State the most telling arguments possible. The new
passion for the State ideal unwittingly set in motion and encouraged
forces that threaten very materially to reform the State. It has shown
those who are really determined to end war that the problem is not the
mere simple one of finishing a war that will end war.
For war is a complicated way in which a nation acts, and it acts so
out of a spiritual compulsion which pushes it on, perhaps against
all its interests, all its real desires, and all its real sense of
values. It is States that make wars and not nations, and the very
thought and almost necessity of war is bound up with the ideal of
the State. Not for centuries have nations made war; in fact the only
historical example of nations making war is the great barbarian
invasions into southern Europe, the invasions of Russia from the East,
and perhaps the sweep of Islam through Northern Africa into Europe
after Mohammed’s death. And the motivations for such wars were either
the restless expansion of migratory tribes or the flame of religious
fanaticism. Perhaps these great movements could scarcely be called
wars at all, for war implies an organized people drilled and led; in
fact, it necessitates the State. Ever since Europe has had any such
organization, such huge conflicts between nations--nations, that is, as
cultural groups--have been unthinkable. It is preposterous to assume
that for centuries in Europe there would have been any possibility of a
people _en masse_, (with their own leaders, and not with the leaders of
their duly constituted State), rising up and overflowing their borders
in a war raid upon a neighboring people. The wars of the Revolutionary
armies of France were clearly in defense of an imperiled freedom, and,
moreover, they were clearly directed not against other peoples, but
against the autocratic governments that were combining to crush the
Revolution. There is no instance in history of a genuinely national
war. There are instances of national defenses, among primitive
civilizations such as the Balkan peoples, against intolerable invasion
by neighboring despots or oppression. But war, as such, cannot occur
except in a system of competing States, which have relations with each
other through the channels of diplomacy.
War is a function of this system of States, and could not occur except
in such a system. Nations organized for internal administration,
nations organized as a federation of free communities, nations
organized in any way except that of a political centralization of a
dynasty, or the reformed descendant of a dynasty, could not possibly
make war upon each other. They would not only have no motive for
conflict, but they would be unable to muster the concentrated force
to make war effective. There might be all sorts of amateur marauding,
there might be guerilla expeditions of group against group, but there
could not be that terrible war _en masse_ of the national State, that
exploitation of the nation in the interests of the State, that abuse of
the national life and resource in the frenzied mutual suicide, which is
modern war.
It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and
not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States. War
is a very artificial thing. It is not the naïve spontaneous outburst
of herd pugnacity; it is no more primary than is formal religion.
War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military
establishment cannot exist without a State organization. War has an
immemorial tradition and heredity only because the State has a long
tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally
joined. We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly
against the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure,
that this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take
measures to end the State in its traditional form. The State is not the
nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present
form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of
the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the
nation will be liberated. If the State’s chief function is war, then
the State must suck out of the nation a large part of its energy for
its purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression. It devotes to
waste or to actual destruction as much as it can of the vitality of the
nation. No one will deny that war is a vast complex of life-destroying
and life-crippling forces. If the State’s chief function is war, then
it is chiefly concerned with coördinating and developing the powers
and techniques which make for destruction. And this means not only the
actual and potential destruction of the enemy, but of the nation at
home as well. For the very existence of a State in a system of States
means that the nation lies always under a risk of war and invasion, and
the calling away of energy into military pursuits means a crippling of
the productive and life-enhancing processes of the national life.
All this organizing of death-dealing energy and technique is not a
natural but a very sophisticated process. Particularly in modern
nations, but also all through the course of modern European history,
it could never exist without the State. For it meets the demands of no
other institution, it follows the desires of no religious, industrial,
political group. If the demand for military organization and a
military establishment seems to come not from the officers of the State
but from the public, it is only that it comes from the State-obsessed
portion of the public, those groups which feel most keenly the State
ideal. And in this country we have had evidence all too indubitable how
powerless the pacifically minded officers of State may be in the face
of a State-obsession of the significant classes. If a powerful section
of the significant classes feels more intensely the attitudes of the
State, then they will most infallibly mold the Government in time to
their wishes, bring it back to act as the embodiment of the State which
it pretends to be. In every country we have seen groups that were more
loyal than the king--more patriotic than the Government--the Ulsterites
in Great Britain, the Junkers in Prussia, l’Action Française in France,
our patrioteers in America. These groups exist to keep the steering
wheel of the State straight, and they prevent the nation from ever
veering very far from the State ideal.
Militarism expresses the desires and satisfies the major impulse
only of this class. The other classes, left to themselves, have too
many necessities and interests and ambitions, to concern themselves
with so expensive and destructive a game. But the State-obsessed
group is either able to get control of the machinery of the State or
to intimidate those in control, so that it is able through use of
the collective force to regiment the other grudging and reluctant
classes into a military programme. State idealism percolates down
through the strata of society; capturing groups and individuals just
in proportion to the prestige of this dominant class. So that we have
the herd actually strung along between two extremes, the militaristic
patriots at one end, who are scarcely distinguishable in attitude and
animus from the most reactionary Bourbons of an Empire, and unskilled
labor groups, which entirely lack the State sense. But the State
acts as a whole, and the class that controls governmental machinery
can swing the effective action of the herd as a whole. The herd is
not actually a whole, emotionally. But by an ingenious mixture of
cajolery, agitation, intimidation, the herd is licked into shape, into
an effective mechanical unity, if not into a spiritual whole. Men are
told simultaneously that they will enter the military establishment of
their own volition, as their splendid sacrifice for their country’s
welfare, and that if they do not enter they will be hunted down and
punished with the most horrid penalties; and under a most indescribable
confusion of democratic pride and personal fear they submit to the
destruction of their livelihood if not their lives, in a way that would
formerly have seemed to them so obnoxious as to be incredible.
In this great herd-machinery, dissent is like sand in the bearings. The
State ideal is primarily a sort of blind animal push towards military
unity. Any interference with that unity turns the whole vast impulse
towards crushing it. Dissent is speedily outlawed, and the Government,
backed by the significant classes and those who in every locality,
however small, identify themselves with them, proceeds against the
outlaws, regardless of their value to the other institutions of the
nation, or to the effect their persecution may have on public opinion.
The herd becomes divided into the hunters and the hunted, and
war-enterprise becomes not only a technical game but a sport as well.
It must never be forgotten that nations do not declare war on each
other, nor in the strictest sense is it nations that fight each other.
Much has been said to the effect that modern wars are wars of whole
peoples and not of dynasties. Because the entire nation is regimented
and the whole resources of the country are levied on for war, this does
not mean that it is the country _qua_ country which is fighting. It is
the country organized as a State that is fighting, and only as a State
would it possibly fight. So, literally, it is States which make war on
each other and not peoples. Governments are the agents of States, and
it is Governments which declare war on each other, acting truest to
form in the interests of the great State ideal they represent. There
is no case known in modern times of the people being consulted in the
initiation of a war. The present demand for democratic control of
foreign policy indicates how completely, even in the most democratic of
modern nations, foreign policy has been the secret private possession
of the executive branch of the Government.
However representative of the people Parliaments and Congresses may
be in all that concerns the internal administration of a country’s
political affairs, in international relations it has never been
possible to maintain that the popular body acted except as a wholly
mechanical ratifier of the Executive’s will. The formality by which
Parliaments and Congresses declare war is the merest technicality.
Before such a declaration can take place, the country will have
been brought to the very brink of war by the foreign policy of the
Executive. A long series of steps on the downward path, each one
more fatally committing the unsuspecting country to a warlike course
of action will have been taken without either the people or its
representatives being consulted or expressing its feeling. When the
declaration of war is finally demanded by the Executive, the Parliament
or Congress could not refuse it without reversing the course of
history, without repudiating what has been representing itself in
the eyes of the other States as the symbol and interpreter of the
nation’s will and animus. To repudiate an Executive at that time would
be to publish to the entire world the evidence that the country had
been grossly deceived by its own Government, that the country with
an almost criminal carelessness had allowed its Government to commit
it to gigantic national enterprises in which it had no heart. In
such a crisis, even a Parliament which in the most democratic States
represents the common man and not the significant classes who most
strongly cherish the State ideal, will cheerfully sustain the foreign
policy which it understands even less than it would care for if it
understood, and will vote almost unanimously for an incalculable war,
in which the nation may be brought well nigh to ruin. That is why the
referendum which was advocated by some people as a test of American
sentiment in entering the war was considered even by thoughtful
democrats to be something subtly improper. The die had been cast.
Popular whim could only derange and bungle monstrously the majestic
march of State policy in its new crusade for the peace of the world.
The irresistible State ideal got hold of the bowels of men. Whereas
up to this time, it had been irreproachable to be neutral in word and
deed, for the foreign policy of the State had so decided it, henceforth
it became the most arrant crime to remain neutral. The Middle West,
which had been soddenly pacifistic in our days of neutrality, became
in a few months just as soddenly bellicose, and in its zeal for
witch-burnings and its scent for enemies within gave precedence to
no section of the country. The herd-mind followed faithfully the
State-mind and, the agitation for a referendum being soon forgotten,
the country fell into the universal conclusion that, since its Congress
had formally declared the war, the nation itself had in the most
solemn and universal way devised and brought on the entire affair.
Oppression of minorities became justified on the plea that the latter
were perversely resisting the rationally constructed and solemnly
declared will of a majority of the nation. The herd-coalescence of
opinion which became inevitable the moment the State had set flowing
the war-attitudes became interpreted as a pre-war popular decision,
and disinclination to bow to the herd was treated as a monstrously
anti-social act. So that the State, which had vigorously resisted the
idea of a referendum and clung tenaciously and, of course, with entire
success to its autocratic and absolute control of foreign policy, had
the pleasure of seeing the country, within a few months, given over to
the retrospective impression that a genuine referendum had taken place.
When once a country has lapped up these State attitudes, its memory
fades; it conceives itself not as merely accepting, but of having
itself willed the whole policy and technique of war. The significant
classes with their trailing satellites, identify themselves with the
State, so that what the State, through the agency of the Government,
has willed, this majority conceives itself to have willed.
All of which goes to show that the State represents all the autocratic,
arbitrary, coercive, belligerent forces within a social group, it
is a sort of complexus of everything most distasteful to the modern
free creative spirit, the feeling for life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness. War is the health of the State. Only when the State is
at war does the modern society function with that unity of sentiment,
simple uncritical patriotic devotion, coöperation of services, which
have always been the ideal of the State lover. With the ravages of
democratic ideas, however, the modern republic cannot go to war under
the old conceptions of autocracy and death-dealing belligerency. If a
successful animus for war requires a renaissance of State ideals, they
can only come back under democratic forms, under this retrospective
conviction of democratic control of foreign policy, democratic desire
for war, and particularly of this identification of the democracy
with the State. How unregenerate the ancient State may be, however,
is indicated by the laws against sedition, and by the Government’s
unreformed attitude on foreign policy. One of the first demands of the
more far-seeing democrats in the democracies of the Alliance was that
secret diplomacy must go. The war was seen to have been made possible
by a web of secret agreements between States, alliances that were made
by Governments without the shadow of popular support or even popular
knowledge, and vague, half-understood commitments that scarcely reached
the stage of a treaty or agreement, but which proved binding in the
event. Certainly, said these democratic thinkers, war can scarcely be
avoided unless this poisonous underground system of secret diplomacy is
destroyed, this system by which a nation’s power, wealth and manhood
may be signed away like a blank check to an allied nation to be cashed
in at some future crisis. Agreements which are to affect the lives of
whole peoples must be made between peoples and not by Governments, or
at least by their representatives in the full glare of publicity and
criticism.