Black on White

Despite all the din about dictatorship, real or threatened, Americans have only the faintest notion of what the word means. They know its dictionary definition. They can describe it in cold, obtuse political terms. But they know nothing of its inner essence, its flavor, its overtones of terror and desperation. It has not yet been burnt into their flesh and their minds.

For six years I lived under one dictatorship and sojourned frequently under several others. Because of my special status as a foreigner and an American reporter I did not taste dictatorship in its undiluted strength. But enough of it seeped through to me to give me a working idea of its essential qualities.

And since my return, with the memory of what I had experienced even though vicariously fresh on my nerves, I have squirmed every time the word dictatorship is used lightly. I hear President Roosevelt referred to as a dictator and his economic innovations as a dictatorship. Only the Russians, the Germans, the Italians can appreciate the gargantuan absurdity of such statements.

Even so well-informed a person as Heywood Broun seems to share in the hazy, generalized notion about dictatorships and dictators held by the average American. Speaking of Roosevelt, just after the recent elections, Broun insisted that “not Hitler, nor Mussolini, nor Stalin possess greater command that has been won by the Groton boy who made good.”

To anyone who has lived under Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin long enough to penetrate below the surface, such an assertion sounds utterly wild. Yet that assertion is fairly representative of the ordinary American preconception of dictatorship, a preconception that is worlds away from the European reality.

What the average American mind conjures up as his vision of dictatorship is so much milder than the reality that to the ordinary Russian, German or Italian (unless he is in the governing minority) it would look like untrammeled freedom beyond imagining.

But I have small hope of making an American aware of dictatorship in the way that its victims are aware of it. I have tried and failed.

I have tried to evoke the picture of millions of human beings stripped not only of all rights and hopes, but of all human dignity, both their minds and their bodies the absolute chattels of a super-state. I have tried to suggest the fear that is as thick as a fog over an entire people and eats into the human fibre until it reduces all life to a bitter dust. I have tried to convey the atmosphere of dictatorship so complete that not only revolt but even martyrdom are unthinkable.

It seems to me desirable that we in America come to understand the reality of dictatorship. As far as possible the benign picture of hurrah-shouting hosannah-singing dictatorship painted on our minds by Fascist and Bolshevik publicity should be replaced by a truer understanding of the groaning drowned out by the cheers and the horr### covered by holiday bunting.

Let those who cry for the Castoria of dictatorship know, at least, what they are crying for.