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PROCLAIM LIBERTY!
ALSO by GILBERT SELDES
On Related Subjects
Your Money and Your Life
Mainland
The Years of the Locust
Against Revolution
The Stammering Century
The Seven Living Arts
The United States and the War
(London, 1917)
This is America
(Moving Picture)
AND
The Movies Come From America
The Movies and the Talkies
The Future of Drinking
The Wings of the Eagle
Lysistrata (A Modern Version)
_Proclaim_
LIBERTY!
_By_
GILBERT SELDES
Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the
inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto them....
Leviticus xxv, 10.
[Illustration]
THE GREYSTONE PRESS
NEW YORK
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE WILLIAM BYRD PRESS, INC.
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
TO THE CHILDREN
who will have
to live in the world
we are making
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are given to the Macmillan Company for their permission to
quote several paragraphs from Arthur Koestler's _Darkness at Noon_ in
my first chapter. _The Grand Strategy_ by H.A. Sargeaunt and Geoffrey
West, referred to in chapter two, is published by Thomas Y. Crowell
Co.
G.S.
Contents
PAGE
CHAPTER I TOTAL VICTORY 13
CHAPTER II STRATEGY FOR THE CITIZEN 29
CHAPTER III UNITED...? 44
CHAPTER IV "THE STRATEGY OF TRUTH" 61
CHAPTER V THE FORGOTTEN DOCUMENT 77
CHAPTER VI "THE POPULATION OF THESE STATES" 92
CHAPTER VII ADDRESS TO EUROPE 111
CHAPTER VIII THE SCIENCE OF SHORT WAVE 119
CHAPTER IX DEFINITION OF AMERICA 129
CHAPTER X POPULARITY AND POLITICS 156
CHAPTER XI THE TOOLS OF DEMOCRACY 163
CHAPTER XII DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 170
CHAPTER XIII THE LIBERTY BELL 199
PROCLAIM LIBERTY!
CHAPTER I
Total Victory
The peril we are in today is this:
For the first time since we became a nation, a power exists strong
enough to destroy us.
This book is about the strength we have to destroy our enemies--where
it lies, what hinders it, how we can use it. It is not about
munitions, but about men and women; it deals with the unity we have to
create, the victory we have to win; it deals with the character of
America, what it has been and is and will be. And since character is
destiny, this book is about the destiny of America.
The next few pages are in the nature of counter-propaganda. With the
best of motives, and the worst results, Americans for months after
December 7, 1941, said that Pearl Harbor was a costly blessing because
it united all Americans and made us understand why the war was
inevitable. A fifty-mile bus trip outside of New York--perhaps even a
subway ride within its borders--would have proved both of these
statements blandly and dangerously false. American unity could not be
made in Japan; like most other imports from that country, it was a
cheap imitation, lasting a short time, and costly in the long run; and
recognition of the nature of the war can never come as the result of
anything but a realistic analysis of our own purposes as well as those
of our enemies.
What follows is, obviously, the work of a citizen, not a specialist.
For some twenty years I have observed the sources of American unity
and dispersion; during the past fifteen years my stake in the future
of American liberty has been the most important thing in my life, as
it is the most important thing in the life of anyone whose children
will live in the world we are now creating. I am therefore not
writing frivolously, or merely to testify to my devotion; I am
writing to persuade--to uncover sources of strength which others may
have overlooked, to create new weapons, to stir new thoughts. If I
thought the war for freedom could be won by writing lies, I would
write lies. I am afraid the war will be lost if we do not face the
truth, so I write what I believe to be true about America--about its
past and present and future, meaning its history and character and
destiny--but mostly about the present, with only a glance at our
forgotten past, and a declaration of faith in the future which is, I
hope, the inevitable result of our victory.
We know the name and character of our enemy--the Axis; but after
months of war we are not entirely convinced that it intends to destroy
us because we do not see why it has to destroy us. Destroy; not
defeat. The desperate war we are fighting is still taken as a gigantic
maneuvre; obviously the Axis wants to "win" battles and dictate "peace
terms". We still use these phrases of 1918, unaware that the purpose
of Axis war is not defeat of an enemy, but destruction of his national
life. We have seen it happen in France and Poland and Norway and
Holland; but we cannot imagine that the Nazis intend actually to
appoint a German Governor General over the Mississippi Valley, a
Gauleiter in the New England provinces, and forbid us to read
newspapers, go to the movies or drink coffee; we cannot believe that
the Axis intends to destroy the character of America, annihilating the
liberties our ancestors fought for, and the level of comfort which we
cherished so scrupulously in later generations. In moments of pure
speculation, when we wonder what would happen "at worst", we think of
a humiliating defeat on land and sea, bombardment of our cities,
surrender--and a peace conference at which we and Britain agree to pay
indemnities; perhaps, until we pay off, German and Japanese soldiers
would be quartered in our houses, police our streets; but we assume
that after the "shooting war" was over, they would not ravish our
women.
_Victory_ (_Axis Model_)
All this is the war of 1918. In 1942 the purpose of Axis victory is
the destruction of the American system, the annihilation of the
financial and industrial power of the United States, the reduction of
this country to an inferior position in the world and the enslavement
of the American people by depriving them of their liberty and of their
wealth. The actual physical slavery of the American people and the
deliberate taking over of our factories and farms and houses and motor
cars and radios are both implied in an Axis victory; the enslavement
is automatic, the robbery of our wealth will depend on Axis economic
strategy: if we can produce more _for them_ by remaining in technical
possession of our factories, they will let us keep them.
We cannot believe this is so because we see no reason for it. Our
intentions toward the German and Italian people are not to enslave and
impoverish; on the contrary, we think of the defeat of their leaders
as the beginning of liberty. We do not intend to make Venice a
tributary city, nor Essen a factory town run by American government
officials. We may police the streets of Berlin until a democratic
government proves its strength by punishing the SS and the Gestapo,
until the broken prisoners of Dachau return in whatever triumph they
can still enjoy. But our basic purpose is still to defeat the armed
forces of the Axis and to insure ourselves against another war by the
creation of free governments everywhere.
(Neither the American people nor their leaders have believed that a
responsible peaceable government can be erected _now_ in Japan. Toward
the Japanese our unclarified intentions are simple: annihilation of
the power, to such an extent that it cannot rise again--as a military
or a commercial rival. The average citizen would probably be glad to
hand over to the Chinese the job of governing Japan.)
Fortunately, the purposes of any war alter as the war goes on; as we
fight we discover the reasons for fighting and the intensity of our
effort, the cost of victory, the danger of defeat, all compel us to
think desperately about the kind of peace for which we are fighting.
The vengeful articles of the treaty of Versailles were written after
the Armistice by politicians; the constructive ones were created
during the war, and it is quite possible that they would have been
accepted by Americans if the United States had fought longer and
therefore thought longer about them.
We shall probably have time to think out a good peace in this war. But
we will not create peace of any kind unless we know why an Axis peace
means annihilation for us; and why, at the risk of defeat in the field
and revolution at home, the Axis powers had to go to war on the United
States.
If we impose our moral ideas upon the future, the attack on Pearl
Harbor will stand as the infamous immediate cause of the war; by Axis
standards, Pearl Harbor was the final incident of one series of
events, the first incident of another, all having the same purpose,
the destruction of American democracy--which, so long as it endured,
undermined the strength of the totalitarian powers.
Why? Why are Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo insecure if we survive? Why
were we in danger so long as they were victorious? The answer lies in
the character of the two groups of nations; in all great tragedy, the
_reason_ has to be found in the character of those involved; the war
is tragic, in noble proportions, and we have to know the character of
our enemy, the character of our own people, too, to understand why it
was inevitable--and how we will win.
Our character, molded by our past, upholds or betrays us in our
present crisis, and so creates our future. That is the sense in which
character is Destiny.
We know everything hateful about our enemies; long before the war
began we knew the treachery of the Japanese military caste, the jackal
aggression of Mussolini, the brutality and falseness of Hitler; and
the enthusiastic subservience of millions of people to each of these
leaders.
But these things do not explain why we are a danger to the Axis, and
the Axis to us.
"_Historic Necessity_"
The profound necessity underlying this war rises from the nature of
fascism: it is a combination of forces and ideas; the forces are new,
but the basic ideas have occurred at least once before in history, as
the Feudal Order. Democracy destroyed Feudalism; and Feudalism,
returning in a new form as Fascism, must destroy democracy or go down
in the attempt; the New Order and the New World cannot exist side by
side, because they are both expanding forces; they have touched one
another and only one will survive. We might blindly let the new
despotism live although it is the most expansive and dynamic force
since 1776; but it cannot let us live. We could co-exist with Czarism
because it was a shrinking force; or with British Imperialism because
its peak of expansion was actually reached before ours began. We could
not have lived side by side with Trotskyite Communism because it was
as aggressive as the exploding racialism of the German Nazis.
As it happened, Stalin, not Trotsky, took over from Lenin; Socialism
in one country supplanted "the permanent revolution". Stalin made a
sort of peace with all the world; he called off his dogs of
propaganda; he allowed German Communism to be beaten to death in
concentration camps; and, as Trotsky might have said, the "historical
obligation" to destroy capitalist-democracy was undertaken not by the
bearded old Marxian enemies of Capital, but by Capital's own young
sadists, the Storm Troopers, called in by the frightened bankers and
manufacturers of Italy and Germany. That is why, since 1932, realist
democrats have known that the enemy had to be Hitler, not Stalin. It
was not a choice between ideologies; it was a choice between degrees
of expansion. Moreover, Stalin himself recognized the explosive force
of fascism in Germany and shrank within his own borders; he withdrew
factories to the Urals, he dispersed his units of force as far from
the German border as he could. By doing so, he became the ideal ally
of all those powers whom Hitler's expanding pressure was discommoding.
The relatively static democratic nations of Europe, the shrinking
semi-socialist states like France and Austria, were bruised by contact
with Hitler; presently they were absorbed because the Nazi geography
demanded a continent for a military base.
The destruction of America was a geographical necessity, for Hitler;
and something more. Geographically, the United States lies between
Hitler's enemies, England and Russia; we are not accustomed to the
thought, but the fact is that we are a transatlantic base for
England's fleet; so long as we are undefeated, the fleet remains a
threat to Germany. Look at the other side: we are a potential
transpacific base for Russia; our fleet can supply the Soviets and
China; Russia can retreat toward Siberian ports and join us. So we
dominate the two northern oceans, and with Russia, the Arctic as well.
That is the geographic reason for Hitler's attack on us.
The moral reason is greater than the strategic reason: the history of
the United States must be destroyed, its future must turn black and
bitter; because fasci-feudalism, the new order, cannot rest firmly on
its foundations until Democracy perishes from the earth.
So long as a Democracy (with a comparatively high standard of living)
survives, the propaganda of fascism must fail; the essence of that
propaganda is that democratic nations cannot combine liberty and
security. In order to have security, says Hitler, you must give up
will and want, freedom of action and utterance; you must be
disciplined and ordered--because the modern world is too complex to
allow for the will of the individual. The democracies insist that the
rich complexity of the world was created by democratic freedom and
that production, distribution, security and progress have not yet
outstripped the capacity of man, so that there is room for the private
life, the undisciplined, even the un-social. The essential democratic
belief in "progress" is not a foolish optimism, it is basic belief in
the desirability of _change_; and we, democratic people, believe that
the critical unregimented individual must have some leeway so that
progress will be made. The terror of change in which dictators live is
shown in their constant appeal to permanence; we know that the only
thing permanent in life is change; when change ceases, life ceases. It
does not surprise us that the logic of fascism ends in death.
So long as the democratic nations achieve change without revolution,
and prosperity without regimentation, the Nazi states are in danger.
In a few generations they may indoctrinate their people to love
poverty and ignorance, to fear independence; for fascism, the next
twenty years are critical. Unless we, the democratic people, are
destroyed now, the fascist adults of 1940 to 1960 will still know that
freedom and wealth co-exist in this world and are better than slavery.
So much--which is enough--was true even before the declaration of war;
since then the nazi-fascists must prove that democracies cannot defend
themselves, cannot sacrifice comfort, cannot invent and produce
engines of war, cannot win victories. And we are equally compelled,
for our own safety, to destroy the _principle_ which tries to destroy
us. The alternative to victory over America is therefore not
defeat--or an inconclusive truce. The alternative is annihilation for
the fascist regime and death for hundreds of thousands of nazi party
men. They will be liquidated because when they are defeated they will
no longer have a function to perform; their only function is the
organization of victory.
The fascist powers are expanding and are situated so that with their
subordinates, they can control the world. And the purpose of their
military expansion is to exclude certain nations from the markets of
the world. Even for the "self sufficient" United States, this means
that the standard of living must go down--drastically and for ever.
The policy is not entirely new. It develops from tariff barriers and
subsidies; we have suffered from it at the hands of our best
friends--under the Stevenson Act regulating rubber prices, for
instance; we have profited by it, as when we refused to sell helium to
Germany or when our tariff laws kept Britain and France out of our
markets, so that they never were able to pay their war debts. This
means only that we have been living in a capitalist world and have
defended ourselves against other capitalists, as well as we could.
_Revolution in Reverse_
The new thing under nazi-fascism is the destruction of private
business, buying and selling. As trade is the basic activity of our
time, nazi-fascism is revolutionary; it is also reactionary; and there
is nothing in the world more dangerous than a reactionary revolution.
The Communist revolution was radical and whoever had any stake in the
world--a house, a car, a job--shied away from the uncertainty of the
future. But the reactionary revolution of Mussolini and Hitler
instantly captivated the rich and well-born; to them, fascism was not
a mere protection against the Reds, it was a positive return to the
days of absolute authority; it was the annihilation of a hundred and
fifty years of Democracy, it blotted out the French and American
Revolutions, it erased the names of Napoleon and Garibaldi from
Continental European history, leaving the name of Metternich all the
more splendid in its isolation. The manufacturers of motor cars and
munitions were terrified of Reds in the factories; the great bankers
and landowners looked beyond the momentary danger, and they embraced
fascism because they hoped it would destroy the power let loose by the
World War--which was first political and then economic democracy.
This was, in theory, correct; fascism meant to destroy democracy, but
it had to destroy capitalism with it. The idiots who ran the
financial and industrial world in the 1920's proved their incompetence
by the end of 1929; but their frivolous and irresponsible minds were
exposed years earlier when they began to support the power which by
its own confessed character had to destroy them. It is a pleasant
irony that ten minutes with Karl Marx or Lenin or with a parlor pink
could have shown the great tycoons that they were committing suicide.
Only an enemy can really appreciate Karl Marx. The faithful have to
concentrate on the future coming of the Communists' Millenium; but the
sceptic can admire the cool analysis of the past by which Marx arrived
at his criticism of the Capitalist System. In that analysis Marx
simplifies history so:
No economic system lives for ever.
Each system has in it the germ of its own successor.
The feudal system came to its end when Columbus broke through its
geographical walls. (Gutenburg and Leonardo and a thousand others
broke through its intellectual walls at about the same time, and
Luther through the social and religious barriers.)
With these clues we can see that Democratic Capitalism is the
successor to Feudalism.
From this point Marx had to go into prophecy and according to his
followers he did rather well in predicting the next stages: he saw, in
the 1860's, the kind of capitalism we enjoyed in 1914. He did not see
all its results--the enormous increase in the number of prosperous
families was not in his calculations and he might have been surprised
to see the least, not the most, industrialized country fall first into
Communism. But to the sceptic only one thing in the Marxian prophecy
is important. He says that in the later stages of Capitalism, it will
become incompetent; it will not be able to handle the tools of
production and distribution; and suddenly or gradually, it will change
into a _new_ system. (According to Marx, this new system will be
Communism.)
There were moments under the grim eyes of Mr. Hoover when all the
parts of this prophecy seemed to have been fulfilled. There are
apparently some Americans who wish that the New Deal had not
interposed itself between the Gold Standard and the Red Flag.
These are the great leaders (silenced now by war) who might have
studied Marx before flirting with the fascists. For even the
rudimentary analysis above shows that Capitalism cannot _grow into_
fascism; fascism moves _backward_ from democratic capitalism, it moves
into the system which democracy destroyed--the feudal system. The
capitalist system may be headed for slow or sudden death if it goes on
as it is; it may have a long life if it can adapt itself to the world
it has itself created; but in every sense of the words, capitalism has
no future if it goes back to the past. And fascism is the discarded
past of capitalism.
We think we know this now because the fasci-feudal states have
declared war on us. Now we see how natural is the alliance between the
European states who wish to restore feudalism and the Asiatic state
which never abandoned it. Now we recognize the Nazi or Fascist party
as the equivalent of feudal nobles and in "labor battalions" we see
the outlines of serfs cringing from their masters. But we do not yet
see that a feudal state cannot live in the same world as a free
state--and that we are as committed to destroy fascism as Hitler is to
destroy democracy.
We strike back at Japan because Japan attacked us, and fight Germany
and Italy because they declared war on us; but we will not win the war
until we understand that the Axis had to attack us and that we must
destroy the system which made the attack inevitable.
_Walled Town and Open Door_
At first glance, the feudal nature of fascism seems unimportant. In
pure logic, maybe, feudal and democratic systems cannot co-exist, but
in fact, feudal Japan did exist in 1830 and the United States was
enjoying Jacksonian democracy. There must be something more than
abstract hostility between the two systems.
There is. Feudalism is a walled town; democracy is a ship at sea and a
covered wagon. The capitalist pioneer gaps every wall in his path and
his path is everywhere. The defender of the wall must destroy the
invader before he comes near. In commercial terms, the fascists must
conquer us in order to eliminate us as competitors for world trade. We
can understand the method if we compare fascism at peace with
democracy at war.
In the first days of the war we abandoned several essential freedoms:
speech and press and radio and assembly as far as they might affect
the conduct of the war; and then, with more of a struggle, we gave up
the right to manufacture motor cars, the right to buy or sell tires;
we accepted an allotment of sugar; we abandoned the right to go into
the business of manufacturing radio sets; we allowed the government to
limit our installment buying; we neither got nor gave credit as freely
as before; we gave up, in short, the system of civil liberty and free
business enterprise--in order to win the war.
Six hundred years ago, all over Europe the economy of peace was
exactly our economy of war. In the Middle Ages, the _right_ to become
a watchmaker did not exist; the guild of watchmakers accepted or
rejected an applicant. By this limitation, the total number of watches
produced was roughly governed; the price was also established (and
overcharging was a grave offense in the Middle Ages). Foreign
competition was excluded; credit was for financiers, and the
installment system had not been invented.
The feudalism of six hundred years ago is the peace-time fascism of
six years ago. The fascist version of feudalism is State control of
production. In Nazi Germany the liberty to work at a trade, to
manufacture a given article, to stop working, to change professions,
were all seriously limited. The supply of materials was regulated by
the State, the number of radios to be exported was set by the State
in connection with the purchase of strategic imports; the State could
encourage or prevent the importation of coffee or helium or silk
stockings; it could and did force men and women to raise crops, to
make fuses, to learn flying, to stop reading. It created a feudal
state far more benighted than any in the actual Middle Ages; it was in
peace _totally_ coordinated for production--far more so than we are
now, at war.
The purpose of our sacrifice of liberty is to make things a thousand
times faster than before; to save raw materials we abolish the cuff on
our trousers and we use agate pots instead of aluminum; we work longer
hours and work harder; we keep machines going twenty-four hours a day,
seven days a week--all for the single purpose of maximum output.
For the same purpose, the fascist state is organized _at peace_--to
out-produce and _under-sell_ its competitors.
The harried German people gave up their freedom in order to recover
prosperity. They became a nation of war-workers in an economic war. A
vast amount of their production went into tanks and Stukas; another
segment went into export goods to be traded for strategic materials;
and only a small amount went for food and the comforts of life. Almost
nothing went into luxuries.
_Burning Books--and Underselling_
That is why the _internal_ affairs of Germany became of surpassing
importance to us. Whether we knew it or not, we were in competition
with the labor battalions. When we denounced the Nazi suppression of
free speech, the jailing of religious leaders, the silencing of
Catholics, the persecution of Jews, we were as correct economically as
we were ethically; the destruction of liberty had to be accomplished
in Germany as the comfort level fell, to prevent criticism and
conflict. Because liberals were tortured and books burned and Jews and
Catholics given over to satisfy a frightful appetite for hatred, the
people of Germany were kept longer at their work, and got less and
less butter, and made more and more steel to undersell us in Soviet
Russia or the Argentine; they made also more and more submarines to
sink our ships if we ever came to war. Every liberty erased by Hitler
was an economic attack on us, it made slave labor a more effective
competitor to our free labor. The concentration camp and the
blackguards on the streets were all part of an _economic_ policy, to
create a feudal serfdom in the place of free labor. If the policy
succeeds, we will have to break down our standard of living and give
up entirely our habits of freedom, in order to meet the competition of
slave labor.
It means today that we will not have cheap motor cars and presently it
may mean that we will not have high test steel or meat every day.
Victory for the Axis system means that we work for the Germans and the
Japanese, literally, actually, on their terms, in factories bossed by
their local representatives; and anything less than complete victory
for us means that we work harder and longer for less and less, paying
for defeat by accepting a mean standard of living, not daring to fight
our way into the markets of the world which fascism has closed to us.
Readers of _You Can't Do Business With Hitler_ will not need to be
convinced again that the two systems--his and ours--are mutually
incompatible. Fortunately for us, they are also mutually destructive.
The basis of fascism is, as I have noted, the feudal hope of a fixed
unchangeable form of society which will last forever; the basis of
democracy is change (which we call progress). Hitler announces that
nazism will last a thousand years; the Japanese assert that their
society has lasted longer; and the voice of Mussolini, when it used to
be heard, spoke of Ancient Rome. We who are too impatient of the past,
and need to understand our tradition, are at any rate aware of one
thing--it is a tradition of change. (Jefferson to Lincoln to Theodore
Roosevelt--the acceptance of change, even of radical change, is basic
in American history.)
We might tolerate the tactics of fascism; the racial hatred, the false
system of education, the attack on religion, all might pass if they
weren't part of the great strategic process of the fascists, which is
our mortal enemy, as our process is theirs. They exclude and we
penetrate; they have to _destroy_ liberty in order to control making
and buying and selling and using steel and bread and radios, and we
have to _create_ liberty in order to create more customers for more
things. They have to suppress dissent because dissent means difference
which no feudal system can afford; we have to encourage criticism
because only free inquiry destroys error and discovers new and useful
truths.
These hostile actions make us enemies because our penetration will not
accept the Axis wall thrown up around nations normally free and
friendly to us; and the Axis must make us into fascists because there
can be no exceptions in a system dedicated to conformity. The whole
world must accept a world-system.
In particular, we must be eliminated because we do expose the fraud of
fascism--which is that liberty must be sacrificed to attain power.
This is an open principle of fascism, as it is of all dictatorships
and "total" states. It is very appealing to tyrants and to weaklings,
and the ruthlessness of the attack on liberty seems "realistic" even
to believers in democracy--especially during the critical moments when
action is needed and democracies seem to do nothing but talk. The
truth is that our Executive is tremendously prompt and unhampered in
war time; the appeaser of fascism does not tell the truth; he wants an
end to talk, which is dangerous, because he is always at war and the
secret fascist would have to admit that his perpetual war is against
the people of the United States. So he says only that in modern times,
liberty is too great a luxury, too easily abused; he says that a great
State is too delicately balanced to tolerate the whims and
idiosyncrasies of individuals; if the State has discovered the best
diet for all the citizens, then no citizen can "prefer" another diet,
and no expert may cast doubt on the official rations. To cause
uncertainty is to diminish efficiency; to back "wrong" ideas is
treason.
One of the best descriptions of this state of mind occurs in a page of
Arthur Koester's _Darkness at Noon_. It is fiction, but not untrue:
"A short time ago, our leading agriculturist, B., was shot with
thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion
that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash. No. 1 is
all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had to be
liquidated as _saboteurs_. In a nationally centralized
agriculture, the alternative of nitrate or potash is of
enormous importance: it can decide the issue of the next war.
If No. 1 was in the right, history will absolve him, and the
execution of the thirty-one men will be a mere bagatelle. If he
was wrong....
"It is that alone that matters: who is objectively in the
right. The cricket-moralists are agitated by quite another
problem: whether B. was subjectively in good faith when he
recommended nitrogen. If he was not, according to their ethics
he should be shot, even if it should subsequently be shown that
nitrogen would have been better after all. If he was in good
faith, then he should be acquitted and allowed to continue
making propaganda for nitrate, even if the country should be
ruined by it....
"That is, of course, complete nonsense. For us the question of
subjective good faith is of no interest. He who is in the wrong
must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. That is the
law of historical credit; it was our law."
Intellectual fascists are particularly liable to the error of thinking
that this sort of thing is above morality, beyond good and evil. The
"cricket-moralists" are people like ourselves and the English, who are
agitated because "innocent" men are put to death; the hard-headed ones
answer that innocence isn't important; effectiveness is what counts.
Yet the democratic-cricket-morality is in the long run more realistic
than the tough school which kills its enemies first and then finds out
if they were guilty. The reason we allow a scientist to cry for
nitrates after we have decided on potash is that we have to keep
scientific investigation alive; we cannot trust ourselves for too long
to the potash group. In five years, both nitrate and potash may be
discarded because we have found something better. And no scientist
will for long retain his critical pioneering spirit if an official
superior can reject his research. (An Army board rejected the research
of General William Mitchell and it took a generation for Army men to
recover initiative; and this was in an organization accustomed to
respect rank and tradition. In science, which is more sensitive, the
only practical thing is to reward the heretic and the explorer even
while one adopts the idea of the orthodox.)
This question of heresy, apparently so trifling, is critical for us
because it is a clue to the weakness of Hitlerism and it provides us
with the only strategy by which Hitlerism can be destroyed.