Black on White

There is little consolation for peace advocates in the news these days.

France and England are seeking a formula for letting the Hitler regime build openly the army of 400,000 which it is building in secret anyhow. Japan stands pat on its demand for naval equality. The Soviet government has announced a regular standing army of one million. The United States Senate stands four-square on the inelegant but clear-cut platform of “to hell with Europe !”— a program which must, as Hearst proves in capital letters, be guarded by new armaments.

The blustering Italian government is mobilizing at least 250,000 armed men for immediate action, not to mention its squadrons of air bombers. Even dusky Abyssinia, in the person of Haile Selassie I, boasts that it has a million men ready to defend its honor and its frontiers.

There is an easy and comfortable logic which says in effect: War is coming anyhow, therefore let us glorify war. Our kind of war, of course, for our kind of causes. A war that will have the blessing of God or Karl Marx or whatever deity we subscribe to.

But the time to advocate peace is precisely when the danger of war is greatest. There is small risk but even smaller honor in making faces at Mars when he is snoozing. Speaking up into his bloated face when he is so near that you can see the blood in his eyes and feel the scorch of his hot breath is more hazardous but more necessary.

An analogous logic of the glorification of evil because it is seemingly inescapable is now the fashion in other departments of thought. Freedom is everywhere being forced into a straightjacket —therefore, hooray for slavery! The relative democracy enjoyed in some parts of the world is on the skids—therefore, three cheers for dictatorship!

Yet, it seems to me, the defense of freedom and at least a measure of democracy was never more important than now. Because the very concept of decency and humaneness is fading away, are the few who still remember its lineaments obligated to wipe out the memory?

Those who draw fine distinctions between good wars and bad wars are no friends of peace. Those who draw fine lines of demarcation between good dictatorships and bad dictatorships are equally the enemies of freedom. If the arbitrary slaughter of your political enemies is wrong in one country it cannot be right in any other.

I know all the sophistries used by apologists for war and slave-driving and legalized murder in many camps, and I cannot help believing that they are all panicky and disingenuous rationalizations. The realities they seek to cover up are equally monstrous.

Take the matter of that maligned and muddied thing once called democracy and now sneered at as bourgeois democracy in some quarters and Jewish democracy in others. None of the dictators have the slightest use for it, presumably. All the same they are devilishly proud of what little they have retained in a diluted form.

Defenders of Fascist methods in both Italy and Germany have argued with me lustily, seeking to prove that their “elections,” engineered by the one ruling element and guaranteed in advance to be unanimous, are superior to American or English elections. Although they would would have no traffic with democracy, they preened themselves with the paper feathers of mock elections, which, after all, are a sorry imitation of democracy.

A few weeks ago I sat at a luncheon in New York and heard a Soviet propagandist defend the Soviet elections—where voting is “open,” by a show of hands, and nobody “conceals” his views by the antiquated device of secret ballots—as superior to the American and English elections and methods of voting.

But even while this defense was being made, the Soviet government abolished voting by show of hands. As a great and glorious boon to its population it promised to institute secret balloting. That was, to say the least, letting down its foreign representatives. Just as the American public was about to shout hooray for open, above-board voting the Russians not merely restored the much-maligned old-fashioned secret ballot, but treated the restoration as a token of great progress.

The rationalization of show-of-hand elections, in a country where opposition is not always healthy, is in this instance self-exposed. It is the same sort of desperate justification which moves those who, against their better judgment and their better emotions, subscribe to the whole complex of brutalities and absurdities in one or another of the chosen lands.

In an epoch of Schrecklichkeit the temptation to adopt an intellectual faith based on Schrecklichkeit, is not easy to resist.