It may be a fine idea to fight Hitlerism and not worry about the nature of what we are fighting, or the weapons with which we are fighrting. To me the method seems to expose us to inevitabel defeat, and I fear that if we pursue it the post mortem will be ours. Eeven in the Great War, stratetists were able to discuss publicly methods of fighting, and quarrelled about them, and different schools of strategy desplaced those who began the fighting, both in the civil Governments and the Supreme Military Command And men like the present Britist Premire, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, were not gagged when they expressed their view that other meth ods than fighting should be tried.
The point is that whateve we may think, the world will not fight
Hitlerism for our sake. The world has its own interests, and if any country can gain an economic or military advantage by entering into some arrangement with Germany, no thought of the plight of the Jews will hinder it. Even Communists get no more than sympathy from the Soviets, who continue to maintain friendly relations with Germnay. Jews, as a section of the population of any country, cannot successfully fight a State with which their own Government is in friendly relations. The other day, the Irish Free State Government placed a big order in Germany. Will the Jewish tax-payers in Ireland refuse to pay taxes? Only a State can wage war against a State.
MISTAKEN STRATEGY
The Jewish movement against Hitlerism depends on the belief that the Liberal and Democratic opinion of the world will help in the fight against Hitlerism. That is the sense of the appeals to the conscience of the world, the petitions to the League of Nations the hopes reposed in the High Commissioner for Refugees, the resolutions demanding that Britain open the doors of Palestine. Sneering at Lloyd George and Shaw, who are not our enemies, but who cannot see only our side of the case, will not increase our chances of getting outside help. Nor will failure to see the strength of our foe. Rushing with shield and buckler at a modern fortress may be heroic, but it is not war. The processions through the streets of London and New York, it is now admitted, were nothing more than letting off steam. Underestimating your opponent and meeting him inadequately armed is not the way to win a fight.
Hitlerism has been born our of certain conditions which created Bolshevism in Russia and Fascism in Italy, and is driving many other countries to similar form of Government. What is the use of shutting our eyes to the inevitanbility so such development? I am afraid at may be coming in England and America, too.
NEW ORDER EMERGING
Whether it is Communism or Fascism, there is a new corporate order of society emerging in which the distinctive forms of life that have been adopted by Jews voluntarily or under compulsion, have no place. We were declassed and uprooted in Russia. We are being declassed and uprooted in Poland. Today’s Manchester Guardian has a long review of the situation fo the Jews in Germany, in which this sentence occurs: “The economic situation of the German Jews in Germany, bad as it is, remains far better than that of the Polish Jews in Poland.”
Sir Norman Angell and H. N. Brailsford, speaking of the chances of Fascism in England, cmae to the conclusion that there is no reason why it should no come Fascism always comes on the heels of an economic slumpl,” said Mr. Brailsford. “The same danger threatens us. There is nothing in our national character that would prevent Fescism in this country.”
And Sir Norman Angell found Nazi mania “completely sincere and completely blind.” “Such mania has again and again, in one form or another,” he said, “captured the minds of untold millions over great surfaces o the earth for thousands of years. It gave us the holy wars of Mohammedanism, the Inquisitions and the St. Bartholomew massacres of Christianity. Once the mind of a multitude becomes so possessed, the dictator must bow to them. The Hitler who shold oppoe his followes would soon replaced by a Goebbels or a Goering who would not hesitate to pander ot it.”
CANNOT STAY SUSPENDED
The place into which the Jews fitted in the old Democratic systmes is no longer there. To stay suspended, as we are doing, between heaven and earth in the place to get on to terra firma, and complain that we have had the ground cut from under our feet, is silly. We must change the structure of Jewish life. There is an attempt being made in Palestine to adapt Jews to productive work, though the growth of the cities there seems to suggest that most Jews going to Palestine, too, old forms of life, in themistaken hope that they will flourish anew in the new soil. The attempt has been forced on the Jews of Soviet Russia. In Germany the Jews find obstacles in the way, because their Government is hostile, and yet there, too, one of the members of the Executive has been complaining this week that while the German Jews are bearing their misfortunes with dignity, he could, unfortunately, see no sign of a new orientation among them towards the new conditions.
The present state of the world is one that does not make for generosity and tolerance. The intellectuals who want jobs are the most bitter enemies of the Jews. And if Jews continue to engage preponderantly in the progessions, and in middleman trading, and continue to display those shortcomings and faults which the abnormalities of Jewish life have developed in us, it will not be we who will vanquish Hitlerism, but teh forces that created Hitlerism in Germany that will crush us in every country of the world.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
