Chapter 17

Another Leftist War

Whereas the fall of Czechoslovakia (consummated in March 1939)1 was a bitter blow to the left the developments later in 1939, disturbing to all people of good will, did not bother them too much. Mr. Churchill, always uninformed about the geography and history of countries away from seashores, berated in his memoirs Hungary and Poland as “beasts of prey” devouring parts of prostrate Czechoslovakia.2 The leftist press viewed Poland with even greater hostility: To them it was a country of “Fascist aristocratic landowners” inhabited by miserable serfs, a country where Jews had to live in ghettos3 and heel-clicking army officers administrated the country together with fat Roman Catholic bishops. Polish realities, however, were almost as complex as those of Imperial Russia and at the outbreak of World War II this was especially true of the social conditions and structures.4

British enthusiasm for Poland was never excessive, but Mr. Chamberlain was certain that another of Hitler’s “peaceful grabs” could not be permitted. In France pacifist feelings were strong (Nous ne voulons pas mourir pour Dantzic!), but British public opinion was outraged by Hitler’s march on Prague and regarded this, quite rightly, as a breach of promise. Negotiations were started between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union to build up a solid front against Hitler. There is very little doubt that peace would have been preserved if Germany had been faced by the specter of a two-front war. The German-Russian military pact, concluded between Ribbentrop and Molotov, gave to Hitler the necessary guarantee for a free hand in the West. Even after the joint Nazi-Communist conquest of Poland Soviet economic aid to Nazi Germany was increasing: In the fall of 1940 Nazi planes engaged in the battle of Britain were using Soviet gasoline. The prospect of a two-front war, on the other hand, would have resulted in a reorganization of the conspiratorial forces within the German army. Surprised by the political developments and the successful negotiations in Moscow, the German generals started only in November 1939 to close their ranks again.

In September 1939 there were no valid reasons or excuses whatsoever for Hitler’s attack against Poland. Contrary to a certain German propaganda, the eastern boundary of Germany, as set down in the Versailles Treaty, was not particularly unjust. As a matter of fact, certain areas which Prussia acquired in the First and Second Partitions of Poland had not been returned to Poland. The so-called “Polish Corridor” was not an iniquity: These districts were ancient Polish lands mainly inhabited by Poles. The separation of East Prussia5 from the rest of Germany involved a few minor hardships, but anybody traveling from the Continental United States to Alaska on the Alcan Highway also has to cross Canada. Hitler, however, had his eyes set on another triumph, another bloodless conquest, and there is good reason to believe that he did not expect Britain to live up to her new treaty with Poland. This speculation was unfortunately not baseless; there had been much vituperation of Poland by a considerable part of the English and the French press; and a British radio commentator, Commander Stephen King-Hall, had announced that he would shout “Sieg-Heil!” if Hitler were to invade Poland. Hitler told Ciano that he was convinced that Britain and France would never start a general conflagration by supporting Poland. Thus the surprise among the Nazi leadership when Britain’s declaration of war came on September 3rd was almost boundless. Hitler suffered from the typical Continental Anglomania6 and not even Britain’s entry into the war cured him from his complex which resulted in his passivity at the time of the evacuation at Dunkirk. Ribbentrop too, was dead certain that Britain would not move.7

All this came as a terrible surprise to the American left, the most naive people under God’s sun. Only on August 23, one week before the outbreak of the war, the “Committee on Cultural Freedom” under the signature of a huge crowd of “leading intellectuals” had published a full page advertisement in America’s most important papers. Signatories were among others Jay Allen, Henry Pratt Fairchild, Waldo Frank, Leo Hubermann, George Kaufmann, Paul de Kruif, Max Lerner, Clifford Odets, Frederick L. Schumann, George Seldes, James Thurber, Richard Wright, Dashiell Hammett, Vincent Sheean, Maxwell Stuart. Here are a few excerpts:

“The fascists . . . are intent on destroying such unity [i.e., of all “progressive forces”] at all costs . . . realizing that here in America they cannot get far with a definitely pro-Fascist appeal, they strive to pervert American anti-Fascist sentiment to their own ends . . . they have encouraged the fantastic falsehood that the USSR and the totalitarian states are basically alike. . . .

“The Soviet Union considers political dictatorship a transitional form and has shown a steadily expanding democracy in every sphere. Its epoch-making new constitution guarantees Soviet citizens universal suffrage, civil liberties, the right to employment, to leisure, to free medical care, to material security in sickness and in old age, to equality of the sexes in all fields of activity and to equality of all races and nationalities.”

Convinced “evolutionists” should remember that these brilliant facts, figures, and forecasts were stated nearly one-third of a century ago and had ample time to become reality.

World War II started with an unparalleled depression and despair among all peoples involved. Germany and Austria were countries in tears, the spontaneous demonstrations of 1914 were not repeated.8 Far from being terminated,9 the resistance of many German generals and rightist leaders was to increase as time went on until it reached its culmination in July 1944. Nor is it true that they turned against Hitler only when his star was sinking. A perusal of the diaries of Ulrich von Hassell10 shows the despair created by the successive victories in the earlier period of the war. Indeed rare is the country whose leading men are driven to think, to pray, and to act for the defeat of their fatherland. Do Germans merely love to obey orders blindly, unconditionally, and loyally? But where else could one find the chief and not just a treacherous employee of the Counterintelligence—a magnificent man such as Admiral Canaris—working full blast for the downfall of the Third Reich?11 There were men galore in Germany eager to put an end to their country’s criminal leadership and the self-destruction of Europe, but they had to fight alone and to go down in this fight because the combined, well-scheming forces of the left wanted it just that way—and the feeble and confused forces of the right among the Allies were not prepared to make a stand.

At first the Stalin-Hitler Pact, which made the war possible, and the subsequent outbreak of the fighting stunned the leftist camp all over the world. The leftists, needless to say, forgot that the Nazis were archleftists and that the alliance with the Soviet Union, concluded to destroy Poland, was by no means an act of political perversion. Hitler had always preferred communism to the free way of life and Goebbels, especially as a younger man, had a genuine admiration for a socialist Russia, the natural ally of Germany.12

Though used to acting like sheep, many leftists in the Western World discovered that they were still human beings; others stuck blindly to their Red loyalties and found that the Nazis weren’t so bad after all. Needless to say, the Brown press in Germany had made a complete volte face and all anti-Communist propaganda ceased overnight.13 Ribbentrop14 shocked not only Ciano but also certain old Nazis when he recounted how happy he had felt in Moscow among Stalin’s buddies, “men with strong faces.”15 In the Soviet Union the papers had to feature the German war news before the Allied. Soviet economy worked full blast for Nazi Germany and after the annihilation of Poland Mr. Vyatcheslav Molotov declared grandiloquently: “One blow from Germany, one from the Soviet Union, and this ugly duckling of the Versailles Treaty16 was no more.” He then accused the “ruling classes” of Britain and France of “diverting attention from their colonial problems,” adding that there was “absolutely no justification for a war of this kind. One may accept or reject the ideology of Hitlerism as well as any other: That is a matter of political views. But everybody would understand that an ideology cannot be eliminated by war. It is therefore not only senseless but criminal to wage such a war for the destruction of ‘Hitlerism’ camouflaged as a fight for ‘democracy.’ ” The Soviet Union, having just gobbled up Eastern Poland and occupied strategic places in the three Baltic republics (all with Nazi connivance), was suspected of having further designs on the latter. Mr. Molotov indignantly declared: “We stand for a scrupulous and punctilious observance of pacts on a basis of complete reciprocity and we declare that all nonsense about sovietizing the Baltic countries is only to the interest of our common enemies and of all anti-Soviet provocateurs.”17

Not much later the Soviet Union (without Nazi protest) attacked Finland and decent people all over the world were outraged.18 Of course the mere existence of Finland only sixteen miles from Leningrad was in itself an “anti-Soviet provocation.” Though Leningraders could not possibly visit the seaside resorts between Terijoki and Viipuri (Viborg), the news had leaked through to the Soviet Union’s second largest city that in Finland, a country which apart from timber had hardly any natural resources, living standards were infinitely higher than in the Workers’ Paradise. Thus the borders had to be pushed back to where they had been temporarily in the eighteenth century which also had the effect that the USSR (as once Imperial Russia) could launch a swift attack on the heart of Finland at any time. The Finnish Communist party, percentagewise one of the largest in Europe,19 was expected to rise, but nothing of the sort happened, and the “Finnish People’s Democratic Republic” under Otto Kuusinnen, established in Terijoki20 soon after the first attack, remained without visible support. Clearly the Finnish Communists wanted to have their own brand of communism and no defections occurred. After the surrender of Western Karelia in 1940 only one family remained in that area.

The leftist forces in the West slowly recovered from the blow. The switch in the German-Soviet alignment happened just as described by Orwell in his novel 1984 where in the permanent world war the change of alliances occurs during a public demonstration: The orator is given a slip of paper informing him of the startling fact and he quickly revises his message. Of course weasel words had to be used by the left; the Nazis were somehow lost from sight; the fact that Germans stranded in America now regained their Vaterland via Vladivostok was overlooked.21 Only a few days before the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact a flaming manifesto of protest against the very insinuation that such a thing were possible, signed by the whole shining phalanx of the leftist American intelligentsia appeared as a full-page advertisement in leading newspapers. Now the left quickly concentrated on the “forces of reaction” at home and denounced those who wanted to wage a “capitalist war” for bigger and better profits. Nazism? A bugbear! The American Youth Congress—as we mentioned above—hooted at President Roosevelt when he mentioned valiant Finland. In England “People’s Congresses” sprung up overnight, drew up resolutions, demanded reforms and “peace,” and protested against armaments. The Communists in the United States were entirely on the side of isolationism (so were, naturally, the members of the German-American Bund!), and Georgi Dimitrov could write in 1940: “The brave fight of American Communists against the United States being drawn into the war finds an ever-increasing sympathy among the Labor unions and even from the ranks of the A.F. of L. run by reactionaries.”22 A song was composed and distributed: The Yanks Are Not Coming.

Yet they were coming after all to repeat the old tragic performance: to win a war and to lose a peace. I do not share the frequently found opinion that a full Nazi victory in World War II would have been preferable to the present state of affairs. A victory of the German armies would have enhanced Hitler’s prestige to a point where any revolt by the army would have become unthinkable—and no other revolt there was possible. A revolt of officers, moreover, is feasible only if the soldiers obey their orders—even if they are most “unusual.” With a progressive diefication of Hitler in the eyes of the success-centered Common Man this would no longer have been the case. The rank and file of the soldiers would not have followed their officers in a rebellion against the Führer and “Supreme War Lord.”23 With Britain on her knees and the Russian war materiels under the control of Berlin, the Nazis would have become well-nigh invincible. Naturally our argument falls flat with the completion of the A-bomb in August 1945. But would it have existed without America’s entry into the war? The German scientists certainly had boycotted its manufacture in the Third Reich. And, we will admit, in the long run, it would have been most difficult to dominate the Old World with the help of a racist ideology. This particular weakness of Nazism made itself felt even during the war.

Still, whereas we can insist that America’s entry in 1917 was a truly fateful decision which paved the way to World War II, a Nazi victory in Europe—for one or two generations—would have been an almost unmitigated disaster. Nearly as disastrous, however, was the political-psychological warfare waged by the Allies as well as the “order” which actually emerged from World War II. Taking into consideration the ignorance, the prejudices, and the ideological trends prevailing in the West and in the Soviet Union, not much else could be expected. This was also the reasoning of a few intelligent American isolationists.

Mr. Churchill, as we have pointed out, was not a genuine conservative, but a pragmatist and Deist of a certain aristocratic cast, of a terrifying cynicism and an astounding ignorance concerning most countries. Nevertheless, he was very gifted by nature in many ways but had a comparatively poor schooling: He never was a student of anything. His biographer, Mr. Robert Sencourt, said that to him “Christ was a socialist” and “men who had principles were ‘goody-goodies.’ With one grandfather a duke and the other an American impresario, he had grandeur in his zest for adventures and huge gambles. This enabled him to seize one of the greatest occasions in history and gradually to turn it into a calamity for Europe and a triumph for America.”24 The triumph, however, was only momentary.

His colleague, Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt, was less gifted and even less informed, was totally ignorant of the big wide world, perhaps had less oratorical proficiency than Mr. Churchill, but played on a far larger instrument. Let us here remember Kierkegaard’s remark that the preparation of a minister nowadays does not teach him how to be one, but how to become one.25 The manifold efforts, talks, intrigues, chats, and rubbing of shoulders in order to finally jockey oneself into a leading position in a democracy consume so much time and energy that the factual knowledge absolutely necessary for statesmanship (as opposed to the qualifications of a mere politician) is almost never acquired. Though more cautious in his public utterances, Mr. Roosevelt knew even less than Professor Wilson. There is little doubt that he could have read Mein Kampf—if ever!—only in 1941.26 (The Nazis to him, of course, were “medieval.”) His wife stood very far to the left: A study of her writings is most rewarding and we shall return to her later in this chapter. His Secretary of State, Mr. Cordell Hull, had received the intellectual preparation for his exalted role in the most amazing way.27 He owed his later career largely to his specialization in trade and tariff agreements which in the good old days used to be the crux of American foreign policy. His contribution to the profound, almost fatal crisis in which our world actually finds itself is a not inconsiderable one. His successor, Mr. Stettinius, an industrialist, was not much more qualified, and we owe thanks to Pan Jan Ciechanowski, the former Polish Ambassador to Washington, for a candid glimpse of Mr. Stettinius catapulted into the important position of an Undersecretary of State two years prior to his taking over the entire State Department. “I congratulated him on his appointment,” Ciechanowski wrote, “and asked him how he felt in his new surroundings. He replied that he felt ‘very bewildered.’ ”28

Barely a few days after taking over his duties he had become Acting Secretary of State in the absence of Mr. Hull. With boyish frankness he admitted that he not only felt ignorant of the affairs he had to deal with but, what made it even more difficult, he did not know most of the officials of the department who had suddenly become his subordinates and collaborators. Sheer amateurism characterized not only the Americans but also the British war effort, whereas the Russians and Germans were held in thralldom by ideologies untrue to life—a different handicap. Yet a very bad plan is sometimes superior to none at all. A human being will plan ahead and might err in his calculations. A beast does not really plan: Unerring instincts will induce it to build a nest or to collect food for the winter. But apart from such isolated activities conditioned by inherited instincts, the animal merely acts and reacts pragmatically, as the momentary circumstances demand. There exists in “Anglo-Saxonry,” as Keyserling stated, a strong anti-intellectual current29 which, by the way, harmonizes well with the democratic tradition.

Our “conservatives” have a tendency to compare the President with the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister comes out far better. To the historian and moralist this is by no means evident. Apart from the fact that Churchill was not a “conservative” (and, for this particular reason, there should be no parti pris!), we must remember the “mythomanic” tendency of the President, the promises he broke without the slightest reason or provocation, the statements he made without any backing of facts, the directions he gave on the spur of the moment and which had no realistic substance—all of these add up to the fact that he could not be held morally responsible for many of his utterances and actions. (Thus he sent the Polish Premier Mikolajczyk on a wild goose chase to Moscow and exhorted him to stand up to Stalin, to make no territorial concessions, insisting that the President and the people of the United States stood solidly behind him. Molotov told the surprised Premier in the presence of Eden and Harriman that at Teheran Roosevelt had solemnly promised Eastern Poland to the Soviet Union.30 Mikolajczyk was thunderstruck.) The President’s sense of responsibility was startling, his frivolity was of an extraordinary character.31 Mr. Henry Morgenthau, Jr. relates in his Diaries how every morning the price of gold was set by the President at breakfast. One day Mr. Roosevelt proposed a rise of 21 cents because “it is a lucky number, three times seven.” Finally, Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, protested. This outcry of indignation amused “Henry, the Morgue”: “I began to chuckle and the President roared with laughter.”32 Roosevelt had only hazy ideas on a future order for our planet, but they clearly bordered on the abnormal and were characterized by a strong leftist bias. (There was to be a plebiscite in Norway to see what sort of constitution the people really wanted to have, also in the Netherlands, in Belgium, in Italy and in Greece—but, of course, none in Czechoslovakia, a model democracy; and Russia, according to FDR had the noble calling to dominate Europe.)33 Yet apart from vague notions, there was no coherent vision. All a man like Roosevelt could do was to wage war, declare “Unconditional Surrender” a policy, thereby prolong the war beyond his own life span and play politics “by ear.” The Russians had a plan. The Americans had none.

Nor, indeed, had Mr. Churchill and the British. It is pure myth that Mr. Churchill insisted on his brilliant idea to invade Europe through the Balkans and to occupy Budapest, Vienna, and Prague before the Russians did. He yielded quickly and without much resistance to the “American” plan to attack Italy instead, and called Italy no less than the Balkans the “soft underbelly of Europe.” (How many Allied soldiers, especially Poles bound to lose their homeland, found their graves in this allegedly so soft highly mountainous underbelly?) And it is a mere saga that Churchill opposed the Unconditional Surrender formula. His reaction to this piece of psychological strategy was that “that poor Goebbels is going to howl.”34

General Albert C. Wedemeyer wrote quite adroitly about the war aims and the two key men in the Western camp of the Allies: “Without a clearly defined political objective, war is but aimless or senseless slaughter. This fact is understood by every military man with any pretensions to professional knowledge. Winston Churchill, correctly described by his own Chief of Staff as no strategist, but as acting on intuition and impulse without regard to the implications and consequences of the courses he favored, waged war more like an Indian chieftain from the Arizona Territory intent upon obtaining the largest possible number of enemy scalps. . . . In order to kill a maximum number of Germans, Winston Churchill dismissed politics or policy as a ‘secondary consideration,’ and on this and many other occasions said that there were ‘no lengths of violence to which we would not go’ in order to achieve his objective.”35

The Russian alliance was of great psychological importance for the entire left in Britain and in the United States. It cannot be denied that the German attack on the Soviet Union was a break for Britain engaged in bitter aerial warfare with the Reich. Contrary to a widespread opinion, though air warfare was not begun by the Nazis, in 1935 they had offered an air pact to the National Laborite Government, which would have limited the role of the air force to the support of operating ground forces. This was turned down by Air Secretary Thomson as a clever, but immoral ruse to humanize warfare: Frightfulness should terminate war, this blot on humanity! Yet Hitler originally acted as if it had been accepted and signed, and the first big German raids on England had the character of mere reprisals. (The attack on Rotterdam, with 945 people killed, had been erroneously unleashed after the armistice when the German troops were within nine miles of the city.)36

There exists a very large and conclusive documentation on this whole issue. Mr. Churchill speculated, quite rightly, that Britain eventually would win the air war because she could build up an air force in safely distant lands while Germany would always remain under her nose. This much we can gather partly from his notes written on July 8 and 11, 1940.37 The documentary proof that the RAF started a methodical bombing of Germany before the Germans opened their so-called Blitz38 on Britain can be gleaned from such authoritative books and articles as J. M. Spaight (Assistant Secretary, Air Ministry), The Battle of Britain39 and Bombing Vindicated,40 and Basil Liddell-Hart, “War Limited,” in Harper’s Magazine41 General J. C. F. Fuller in The Second World War, 1939-1945 says frankly, that “it was Mr. Churchill who lit the fuse which detonated a war of devastation and terrorization unrivaled since the invasion of the Seljuks.”42 Yet the suffering inflicted from the air took not only a huge toll among the Germans (without too seriously incapacitating their industry) but also among foreign laborers, concentration camp inmates, and Allied nationals.43

Even before Pearl Harbor American public opinion had to be prepared for an alliance in which not only Britain but also the Soviet Union had a leading part. The German attack on the USSR played a role similar to the abdication of Nicholas II in 1917. Now American public opinion could more easily be made to change its stand. In this connection Cannon Bernard Iddings Bell recorded a rather significant wartime experience: “At a dinner in New York at that time, I sat next to a high-up officer of one of the great news-collecting agencies. ‘I suppose,’ I ventured, ‘now that the Muscovites are on our side, the American people will have to be indoctrinated so as to stop thinking of them as devils and begin to regard them as noble fellows.’ ‘Of course,’ he replied, ‘we know what our job is in respect to that. We of the press will bring about a complete and most unanimous volte face in the belief of the Common Man about the Russians. We shall do it in three weeks.’ ”44

The major trouble about deceit and untruth is not that misinformation is imparted to certain persons but that the originators of the lies tend to consider them to be truths. Finally they are unable to distinguish between fact and fiction and act in accordance with their fabrications. In Britain the news of the first Soviet victories came as such a relief that even people of considerable integrity lost their balance.45 A feminine hysteria broke loose in the British Isles: Visions of sturdy Cossacks, nagaikas, vodka, the sweat of galloping horses, bearded muzhiks, progressive commissars, and heroic girls in boots and coy fur caps fired the imaginations. Many Britishers were ready to throw themselves into the arms of Unholy Mother Russia, absolutely forgetting that it was Stalin who, with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, had wilfully started World War II, later discarding all British warnings about an impending attack from the Germans as idle capitalist talk. A policeman who finds that the two gangs he is fighting have fallen out among themselves does not proclaim that the weaker of the two consists of cherubs and seraphs; he merely takes practical advantage of the “break.” And when the USSR demanded a much larger chunk of Poland than Hitler ever had—52 percent of Polish territory, to be precise—the British by and large failed to remember that it actually had been the Polish issue that had made them declare war on Hitler. What did Lord Halifax say in December 1939? “We have tried to improve relations with Russia, but in doing so we had always maintained the position that rights of third parties must remain intact and unaffected by our negotiations. . . . I have little doubt that the people of this country would prefer to face difficulties and embarrassments rather than feel that we had compromised the honor of this country and Commonwealth.”46 Yet the most curious part of the bill to be paid for that almost limitless libido serviendi as regards the Soviet Union was presented only in late spring 1945. Then the majority of the British People, expecting the left millennium, sided with Labor and voted the Conservatives out of power who, after all, had brought them military victory. If the Communist USSR was so marvelous the British people was drawn to the next-best thing: Socialism.47

In the United States the great enthusiasm for the Soviet Union came only after Pearl Harbor, the cleverly organized back door to get the United States into the war. We have no reliable demographic statistics, but it is my impression that the pro-Soviet fervor was less strong in the United States than in Britain if for no other reason (and there were others) than that America had too many citizens of East European and East Central European descent who could not so easily be hoodwinked. But they were rarely to be found in the higher and highest social layers, with the result that the Red Hysteria was much stronger in Boston or Philadelphia than in Pittsburgh or Johnstown, not to mention Sauk Center. I still remember a cocktail party in Manhattan in 1943 where a lady in mink, balancing her highball, screamed that it was America’s most urgent task to show herself “worthy of her gallant Soviet Allies.” “To think,” she sobbed later, after some more libations, “that I called them ‘Bolsheviks’!” I had to reassure the good woman that there was nothing pejorative in this appellation.

Joseph E. Davies’ Mission to Moscow contained propaganda sufficiently deceitful to make it a best-seller (which was even filmed.)48 It helped a great deal to give to the American public a revised picture of the “New Russia.”49 Miss Dorothy Thompson, during the war years perhaps America’s most outstanding columnist, wrote that one thing was certain about the Soviet Union: They never broke their word or reneged a treaty. Yet she was by no means the worst of the whole lot.

When one looked at the material which was published, read, and favorably commented, one had to despair about the sanity of a large sector of the American public. Take for instance the book of Mr. Quentin Reynolds, Only The Stars are Neutral,50 published in 1942. The best anecdote in the whole book can be found at the end when the author, on his way home from the USSR, describes himself talking to Sir Miles Lampson, British Ambassador in Egypt, in Cairo. Sir Miles plies him with questions about the USSR but repeatedly Mr. Reynolds has to reply that he does not know. “ ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘after I had been in Russia three weeks I knew everything about the place. I could have written a book about it. But I made the mistake of staying there three months. After three months I realized I didn’t know a damn thing about the country.’ ”51 The reader is probably moved by so much modesty. But what does he hold in his hands if not?

Well, for instance, Mr. Reynolds makes a few admissions about the 800 women (political prisoners) working hard near Kuybishev, the wash basin costing 15 dollars, the great risk which Soviet citizens run by associating with foreigners, and even the lack of freedom of speech “in spite of so much smartness,” but he expects that the youngsters will learn “soon from the older democracies.”52 Notice the little legerdemain: “from the older democracies.” In other words: the Soviet Union is a “younger democracy,” as of course it would be if it had the support of the majority of the people. The subtle lie is placed quite unobtrusively. Other lies are far less subtle and presuppose an immensely unintelligent, i.e., average reader. Here we want to go into a few details because the technique is typical for the propaganda poured out by the left during the war in America. Mr. Reynolds (who had the best preparation imaginable for his task because he had started as a sports reporter) wrote: “In the Czarist days the priests had a wonderful racket in Russia. They were paid by the State and collections taken up in churches went to the State. All Stalin did was to separate the church from the State. In short he did the same thing we did in our country back in 1776. . . . Their priests are no longer government officials who have almost the power of life and death over them. . . . Had any of us ever troubled to read the Soviet Constitution (as vigorously upheld as our own) we might have got the true picture of religion in the Soviet Union. I looked it up the day after the Kremlin dinner. I talked with Father Braun. I mentally apologized as a Catholic for the things I’ve thought about Russia’s attitude toward religion.”53

Now let us look into this interesting revelation. The priests, indeed, were paid by the State, as were all priests and ministers everywhere on the Continent, except in France, after 1905. Yet if the collections went back to the State, why then call it a racket? (Of course they did not “go back.”) Stalin did not separate the Church from the State, Lenin did it. Now Mr. Reynolds is entitled to his opinion that the Church should be separated from the State, but this just is not the European tradition, least of all in Switzerland, a freedom-loving, highly democratic state. Most free European countries cooperate with several churches. Nor did the separation in the United States take place in 1776; and the First Amendment, enacted in the years 1789 to 1791, merely prohibited an established church on a federal basis. Cooperation of state and church is not necessarily establishment. And establishment on a state basis in the United States continued well into the nineteenth century.54 It is of course totally untrue that Russian priests had “almost the power over life and death”: They had neither the power nor the prestige that either Catholic priests or Evangelical ministers traditionally enjoy in the West. In Russian folklore the priest (and his wife) always played the role of the fool.

The high praise given to the Soviet Constitution seems to be a real hoax. We have only estimates about the number of persons in concentration camps at the time of Stalin, but these estimates all run between eight and twenty million.55 Furthermore, separation between Church and State is one thing, persecution is something else. When Mr. Reynolds visited the Soviet Union, the second big wave of religious persecution (1934-1941) had just come to a close. (A third wave was to follow after 1958; it still lasts.) From 1917 until the outbreak of World War II more than 110 bishops of the Eastern Church alone were executed and more than a dozen had “disappeared.”56 Yet these data give only a weak idea of the real extent of the persecution and the savageries it involved. When Mr. Reynolds “mentally apologizes as a Catholic” one is even more puzzled. And before his mental apology he had talked with Father Braun, an American Assumptionist, who was then Chaplain to the foreign diplomatic service. He does not say what the priest told him, whether he confirmed or denied his views and experiences, but just mentions the fact. One has to assume that his mental apology was not only the result of his perusal of the Soviet Constitution but also of his talk with Father Braun. There is another choice bit: A captain of the Red army talks to our author referring to a British officer. “My friend Colonel Hill was here in Russia in Czarist days. He will tell you that only 10 percent of our citizens owned shoes then. He will tell you that only 1 percent of our people was literate. Now education—classical, scientific or industrial, is open to all. . . . Remember our world has only lasted twenty-four years. Yours in America has lasted since 1776. . . .”

And then comes the climax: “ ‘We haven’t had to chuck religion overboard,’ I suggested. ‘We have not chucked religion overboard,’ he smiled. ‘We’ve chucked overboard the religious abuses we suffered from. . . .’ ”57

This is really worth going into. Reynolds does not tell us anything. He makes no statements. He is merely a reporter. He was told all that by a Red army captain who refers him to a British colonel who in turn is not consulted and reaffirms nothing. Fine. But according to this conversation, only 10 percent of the people had shoes and only 1 percent was literate. As we know about 44 percent were literate in 1917, and if only 1 percent had been literate at the outbreak of the Revolution, how many were there let us say in 1882, the year Dostoyevski died: one in two hundred? One in five hundred or in a thousand? Just think, out of 110 million people perhaps only half a million people could read and write, and at the end of the nineteenth century such a country produced Europe’s then leading literature! Of course, this is utter nonsense, but the dear reader will gobble it up. He will also swallow the 10 percent shoes. Amusing to visualize Imperial Russia in the winter of 1910 with 90 percent of the people staying home between early October and late April—and then going barefoot. Yet the greater the nonsense, the greater also the idiotic public’s delight. The dear reader also will believe that American life before and after 1776 ran along different lines, that a big social and economic Revolution with a capital “R” had taken place. But in Russia nothing radical had happened as far as religion was concerned; only “abuses” were corrected. A civil servant who is fired because he is seen regularly in Church on Sunday has shown that he is a reactionary; a university professor getting married in church proves that he cannot be a real scientist; a wedding in the registry office is scientific and everything connected with religion is unscientific; and to teach children or adolescents religion is “intolerable” because it alienates them from Marxism-Leninism. The “abuse” of religion in old times consisted in the anarchic freedom that everybody could stay home or go to church without danger of reprisal—just as he wanted. Or does anyone believe that two gendarmes fetched Dr. Antoni Tshekhov every Sunday to drag him to “Holy Liturgy?” “In Russia, anyone who criticizes the government is an enemy of the State,” Quentin Reynolds admits. “Harsh as Stalin’s methods are, he has a complete answer, a complete justification for the ruthless quelling of opposition. Today there is not one Fifth Columnist, not one Quisling at liberty in Soviet Russia. . . . Stalin knew what he was doing back in 1938. Russia’s magnificent unity today and her completely unbroken spirit after the tragedy of that German advance, is proof of the fact that Russia accepted the purge and approved of Stalin’s policy.”58

This “magnificent unity” while almost half a million Russian Vlassovtsy fought under the German flag, needs no comment.

But then, what do we make of Mr. Reynolds’ message to the reader on the wrapper? He says that this “is a war to decide whether or not men can sit around the crackerbox in the general store and lift their voices in praise or criticism. It is a war to decide whether or not we can worship Christ or Mohammed or Buddha or a clay pigeon, or anything else which we, as individuals, decide to worship.” Yet, if some of us worship navel-gazing Buddhas and the others clay pigeons, while sitting around a crackerbox, where do we get that so necessary “magnificent unity” for which Stalin has a “complete justification”? Here we are certainly faced with complete schizophrenia.

In my novel Black Banners I have described this orgy of lies which took place in World War II and which engulfed the entire globe. The hero listened to the various short-wave broadcasts:

And all he heard were lies, small lies so small that they needed a magnifying glass, and lies so monumental that they literally darkened the mental horizon, slippery lies hiding in a mountain of truth designed to be swallowed with the most innocent-looking commonplaces, lies so cleverly camouflaged that it needed endless efforts to reach their poison after removing one protective layer after the other, and lies so gross, so stupid, so blunt that they could make a pasture of horses laugh and neigh themselves to death. There were bitter lies and sweet lies, lies which tried to gain the battle of persuasion by a straight assault, by surprise and a direct hit, and lies so circuitous and oblique that they needed gentle allusions to other lies, to other distortions, other misrepresentations. There were lies so new that they looked like silver coins just fresh from the mint, and lies so old that they had acquired friendly, familiar faces: they gloried in the patina of respectability and nobody even suspected that behind age-worn surface there lay enshrined untruth petrified and undisturbed already for centuries. And there were lies brazenly shouted over the ether and others muttered humbly, lies floating lonely and almost boredly carried by electric waves and others coming in packs like hungry wolves ready to attack, to bite, to kill: there were lies coming in erect and proud, pronounced in naive honesty, and lies whispered in all malevolence, bad conscience and malicious cunning, lies in drops, in whole oceans, in thin rivulets, lies in the form of powerful, foaming rivers, lies as a thin mist obscuring all views, lies, lies, lies. . . .59

There were, of course, notable exceptions in the chorus of ignorants, fakers, and liars receiving the favors of the government for their aid in “moral warfare”—under the circumstances quite a misnomer. In a “people’s war,” however, the frenzy of the masses has to be whipped up to a high degree of indignation, hatred, and fanaticism. Under such circumstances liberal democracies distinguish themselves very little from leftist dictatorships.60 Men and women such as Thomas F. Woodlock of the Wall Street Journal, Henry J. Taylor, W. H. Chamberlin, Joseph Harsch, Anne O’Hare McCormick of the New York Times, the Packards and others refused to play the evil game. In quite a different role were commentators such as Gabriel Heatter, Frederick L. Schumann, Raymond Gram Swing, Lisa Sergio.61 A hotbed of leftist, pro-Communist and Communist propaganda was the Office of War Information (OWI) which had its fill of leftist refugees from all over Continental Europe. Its German Department was one of the worst.62 Since so many of these refugees in the United States had been Marxists they started to indoctrinate the American public with a Marxist version of global events, and the Americans, unfortunately, were able to digest this fare because it was offered to them in terms they understood.

Man is emphatically not a homo oeconomicus pure and simple, but the explanation of political events in terms of material interest, cash, financial ambition, production, etc., is the simplest and even a dimwitted person can understand it. To make matters worse, the United States (just like Britain) has an emphatically commercial civilization and thus the Marxist argumentation could be followed. In terms of Marxist doctrine “fascism” could not be anything but a last-ditch stand of “dying capitalism.” Nazism, therefore, had to be explained as the desperate defense of German industry (“monopoly capitalism”) and high finance, and Hitler, naturally, was a mere “stooge,” a “puppet” of money-crazed monsters who had hired the “Bohemian Private First Class” to club the trade unions into submission. Under the circumstances one could not expect a nobler ally in such a final battle for progress, liberty, and equality than the Soviet Union which knew how to deal with the evils of capitalism. Gustav Stolper, also an exile, had well seen this danger in America.63

This exegesis of Nazism, playing into the hands of a blind and irresponsible pro-Soviet attitude, could be linked with a piece of American folklore, with the notion that “rotten backwardness” was reigning supreme in Europe,64 that misery and poverty there were caused by big landowners who miraculously transformed themselves into monocled, saber-rattling, heel-clicking officers allied with slick bankers and fat bishops. The clichés of World War I, when the United States had been at war with the Hohenzollerns, were revived, and the demoniacal shadows of aristocratic arrogance magically projected onto the Nazis, of all people. During my wartime years in the United States I could never find a single “morale-building” story about Central Europe in which a Nazi nobleman was not involved. Unfortunately they did exist—just as there were Jews who paid conscience money to the Nazis, as there were Catholic priests with “Brown” sympathies. Exceptions confirm the rule. Nazism, however, was a plebeian movement, and it is significant that at the big Nuremberg Trial there was not a single nobleman among those condemned to death.65 In the abovementioned type of literature (some of it transformed into movies) the “carryover” of World War I clichés is remarkable. As a result, slowly but surely, a fairly general feeling arose in the United States that this war, like its lamentable predecessor, was fought to aid the Common Man. He was the victim of noble and arrogant Nazi-Fascists; organized as well as spontaneous leftism in the United States was to turn the emancipation of the Common Man into some sort of war aim. A century of the Common Man had to be ushered in. This idealism worked in synchromesh with “anticolonialism” and while America and Britain fought shoulder to shoulder, the President of the United States dreamed not only of a Red overlordship over Continental Western Europe,66 but also of a total destruction of the “British Empire,” the “Commonwealth of Nations.” This is a fact not sufficiently realized by many Americans and much of the resentment of certain European circles against America (de Gaulle!) has to be explained by this still unforgotten phase of American foreign policy.

The Common Man hysteria was amazing because actually the real source of evil in Europe was the precipitated and unwarranted rise of the Common Man into positions where he could not possibly use his own training, his knowledge, his experience but was asked to carry out tasks way beyond his capacity. Stalin’s preparation consisted of a little theology, some highway robbery, and an artificial, very limited study of political science; Hitler had sold hand-colored postcards in Viennese cafés; Mussolini had been a mason in Switzerland; Daladier was the son of a baker. Still we do not want to insist on a purely sociological concept of the Common Man: The truly Uncommon, the Superior Man obviously can be born in a log cabin. In Austrian history, for instance, we find men such as Joseph von Sonnenfels, son of a little rabbinical scholar, and Baron Thugut, son of a little army paymaster, pillars of Maria Theresa’s reign, Dr. Karl Lueger, son of a school janitor, founder of the Christian Social Party, and famous Mayor of Vienna, Monsignor Ignaz Seipel, University professor and Chancellor of Austria, son of a cabby, and Dr. Engelbert Dollfuss, illegitimate son of a peasant girl. Yet these Uncommon Men were men who had studied, were trained. The leftist-inspired and leftist-directed American wartime hysteria wanted to impress the broad public with the existence of a situation which was completely imaginary and the coming of a New Age which was totally unreal. “Dawnism” is always the great psychological approach of the left which is eager to paint a possible paradisiacal future.67 The wartime utopia contained not only social and political promises, but also plastic cars, new gadgets of all sorts, nylon hose for all pretty girls, education through tape recorders under the pillow during sleep, twenty-five-dollar trips by air across the United States, and boundless liberty and equality amidst plenty all over the globe. This promising future had a few melancholy aspects because Mr. Sumner Welles in a memorable book68 advocated a total partition of Germany, Mr. Henry J. Morgenthau, Jr. had the plan to transform Germany into a goat pasture,69 and Mr. Theodore N. Kaufman in his essay Germany Must Perish!70 showed even greater imagination. He proposed to sterilize all Germans and to distribute Germany and Austria among their neighbors. A map in his work showed the interesting changes: Holland and Poland had a common boundary; France, Czechoslovakia, and Holland met in Thuringia. Yet it ought to be mentioned for the sake of the record that the genuinely Socialist camp did not participate in this orgy of Soviet adulation mixed with outbreaks of sadistic hatred for the partly guilty and partly innocent German people. A Socialist weekly such as The New Leader was absolutely honest and fair:71 Some of its editors had been born in East Europe, most of them were Jewish, but they knew precisely who was who and what was what, which was not the case with the semiliterate and far more affluent mob which gladly danced the new Carmagnole.

This euphoria was hardly troubled by the Soviet Union’s announcement that demanded permanent possession of the three Baltic Republics as well as of the largest part of Poland. This did not even come as a shock. Americans of nearly all political persuasions supported the shameless demands of the USSR which quickly also claimed further pieces of Finland (which they had wantonly attacked for the second time in less than two years),72 Germany, and Czechoslovakia. The area “requested” by the Soviet Union was precisely thirty-four times that of Alsace-Lorraine; it comprised 482,000 square kilometers—more than Germany in 1937—and over twenty-two-million inhabitants, as many as the United States had in 1850. The Soviets knew that they could get what they wanted because Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt were opportunists without a real sense of honor or obligation. As long as they won the war, who cared what the peace would be like? The New Republic, one of the mouthpieces of the uncommitted left, declared on February 20, 1943 in an editorial about the Russian demands that “however forceful or dubious Russian legal claims, the crux of the problem must not be sought in legal genealogies but in the need of an enduring friendship between Russia and America.” These words remind one of the famous discussions between Fitzroy MacLean and Winston Churchill recorded in Eastern Approaches: Brigadier MacLean, who had been staying with Tito’s partisans, informed the Prime Minister that unlike Draža Mihajlović, the wily Croat was a true Communist, Churchill asked him bluntly: “Do you intend to make Yugoslavia your home after the war?” “No, sir!” “Neither do I,” Churchill replied, “and that being so, the less you and I worry about the form of government they set up, the better. . . . What interests us is, which of them is doing most harm to the Germans.”73

Cynicism, however, is luckily not a main characteristic of the American people and thus reasons had to be found for supporting the Soviet demands. The Soviets’ insistence on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line in Poland was suddenly bolstered with the silliest, flimsiest, and most infamous arguments. The left immediately stamped prewar Poland as a den of iniquity and the men who valiantly fought the Germans as “Fascists.”74 The Molotov-Ribbentrop Line was identified with the Curzon Line, but the public was not told that this line was never even by the congenitally anti-Polish British considered as a border but merely as a demarcation line of Poland’s minimum demands.75 It extended from Central Lithuania to the Galician border only and never to the Carpathians. In Time for Decision, a manual for “peace planning,” Mr. Sumner Welles, former Undersecretary of State, berated Catherine the Great of Russia for having been “primarily responsible for one of the greatest international crimes in history,” the first three partitions of Poland. Yet then Mr. Welles goes on defending Stalin’s demands not only for the Russian share of all the first three partitions, but even for half of the Austrian share of the first partition.76 I am sure that Mr. Welles (or his ghost writer) could not read maps.

The Soviets founded their claim against Poland neither on an ideological nor on an historical but on a national, i.e., ethnological basis. Although the Soviet Union is basically a Great Russian State shrewdly and methodically Russianizing the rest of the USSR77 with the help of schools or planned migrations, it has given a minor ethnical autonomy to “member states” such as Byelo-Russia (“White Ruthenia”) and the Ukraine. White Ruthenians and Ukrainians thus are minorities in the USSR. The same ethnic bodies are represented in Eastern Poland. There the Poles mostly formed the middle and upper class, as well as the largest ethnical group,78 followed by the Ukrainians, the White Ruthenians, the Jews, the Lithuanians, and the Germans. Only a nationalist, however, will insist on ethnic borders; and one of the main accusations against Hitler was always that he wanted all those who were ethnically German to live in the Third Reich, a tendency which goes rightly under the name of Pan-Germanism. His demand for the Anschluss, his peremptory request for the border districts of Bohemia-Moravia-Silesia (inhabited by the so-called Sudeten Germans), his insistence on the return of certain areas of Poland (which brought about World War II), his incorporation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1940, all this was based on a racialist-nationalist attitude, condemned, decried, execrated, and vilified by the more international-minded left.79 Now Stalin did the same, and in the United States (or in England) hardly anybody asked whether the people living in Eastern Poland really wanted to join the Soviet Union. (Just imagine the indignation if Hitler had declared that all of German-speaking Switzerland had to join the Reich!) I had an exchange of letters with a leading American journalist who defended the Soviet stand on ethnic grounds. The idea never came to his mind that a Ukrainian of Volhynia, in spite of his dislike for the Poles, might prefer to live as member of a minority in “bourgeois” Poland rather than as a member of another minority in the Great Russian USSR.80 It probably never occurred to him because he could not imagine that free Poland and Red Russia were worlds apart. In the United States one frequently heard that the wily Poles, with French aid, had defeated the Red army in a moment of weakness and thus brutally wrested lands from a helpless Soviet Russia.81 This also is nonsense. In 1920 Lenin offered to the Poles peace and a boundary a great deal farther east than the one violated by Stalin in 1939.82 The Poles did not accept because Pilsudski felt that he was morally bound to come to the aid of Petlyura,83 the Ukrainian Nationalist leader, then engaged in a life and death struggle with the Russian Reds. Yet Petlyura was defeated, the Red army advanced deep into Poland and arrived at the very gates of Warsaw (which filled Lloyd George with glee,84 enthused the British Labour Party, and made Thomas G. Masaryk very happy.)85 But at the very gates of Warsaw Pilsudski (without French aid)86 defeated the Red army—the “Miracle of the Vistula.” The Red army retired and in the compromise peace of Riga the Poles achieved a boundary which returned to them the Russian share of the Third Partition and a few tiny fragments of the Second Partition—none from the First Partition, and this in spite of the fact that the partitions of Poland had been solemnly abrogated as a piece of Russian imperialism at the beginning of the Soviet régime, (August 29, 1919). In the previous offer of the Soviets, cities such as Polock, Minsk and Kamieniec-Podolski had been promised to the Poles. Now they received less and, as a result, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia considers that that war had been won by the USSR.87 And indeed in the following years a stream of refugees came at great danger from the Soviet Union over to Poland—Ukrainians, White Ruthenians, Jews, and naturally Poles.88

Little it mattered that on July 30, 1941, the Soviets had even solemnly abrogated all treaties they had made with the Nazis on the subject of Poland’s territory.89 The pro-Soviet hysteria,90 coupled with a mounting defamation of Poland, swept the press. Czechoslovakia was strongly played up with the horror of Lidice, but the fact that the Poles had an endless number of Lidices hardly mattered.91 Their perhaps ungenerous treatment of the Ukrainians and Jews was constantly held against them, although there was no doubt which side92 these minorities would have taken if given the choice. A Ukrainian (or Jewish) lawyer, doctor, priest, monk or nun, peasant, teacher in the humanities, labor leader, artist, banker, or shopkeeper could not possibly prefer the Soviet regime which was sure to annihilate his way of life and deprive him of his property if he had any.93

Then came the news of the Katyn Massacre, swiftly followed by two Soviet blows: Moscow’s rupture with the Polish government in exile because it had dared to demand an impartial investigation of the Nazi charges, and the Soviet allegation that the crime had been committed by the Germans after their advance into West Russia in the fall of 1941—whereas the horror had been perpetrated in spring 1940, almost a year-and-a-half earlier. The American and British governments assumed a “neutral” position, but this was an occasion for the vast majority of American newspapers to feel ill at ease.94 Today hardly anybody left of center would dare to maintain that this crime belongs to the Nazi register of sins, but the Soviets still tried to ascribe it to the Germans as late as 1946 at the Nuremberg Trial. This, however, embarrassed their noble Western Allies so much that they quietly dropped the accusation.95 They probably felt that before such a mixed body of judges the Russians could not repeat their delightful techniques used at the stage trials under Andrzey Wyszyński96 in the late 1930s. Katyn should have been a signal, as should the establishment of the Communist Polish Committee in the Soviet Union, which was later transferred to Lublin, or the fatal halting of the Red army before Warsaw while the heroic Armya Krojowa, under the leadership of Count Komorowski (“General Bor”), bled to death; or the murder of the two Jewish labor leaders Alter and Ehrlich;97 or the deportation of thousands upon thousands of Poles to the Arctic and to Siberia;98 or the distrust and contempt displayed toward Allied missions. Yet all these signs which, one would have thought, could not be overlooked, did not shake leftist admiration for the Soviets—neither their admiration nor their inferiority complex. Their earlier American Messianism was now transferred to the USSR.99 Did Mr. Roosevelt wake up to the danger? According to legend, the last months of his life were darkened by the increasing realization that another totalitarian power was menacing the world’s freedom, but we find no documentary evidence to prove that this was the case. It seems rather as if his conviction that he could “charm” the sinister Georgian never left him. (How can a man “charm” another if he cannot even converse with him?) Churchill never really liked bolsheviks and his attitude towards Stalin will remain forever a riddle.100 On the other hand he disliked Poles and entertained no hope that he could ever understand anything about Russia. Before he came to Yalta he arranged for the ghastliest single massacre in modern history, the annihilation of Dresden, in order to impress Stalin with the might of the Western Allies. But the weather permitted the holocaust to take place only on the day Churchill left Yalta, having committed the “Crime of the Crimea” by arranging for the West’s suicide before sealing its fate at Potsdam. So the ghastly mass murder was completely in vain: The number of victims in this unfortified and nonindustrial city, crammed with refugees, is estimated to have been between 135,000 and 170,000—all noncombatants, mostly women, children, and old men, but including foreign slave laborers (a few thousand “only”). Hiroshima or Nagasaki were child’s play compared with this and at least two-thirds of the victims were burned alive.101 The Inquisitors at least were after people they thought to be individually guilty. The number of those killed in the name of progress, democracy, freedom, enlightenment, and brotherhood, on one nice afternoon is a multiple of the Inquisitors’ victims during centuries. (And how it boomeranged: Every year three minutes of silence are observed on the Day of Infamy in Communist-dominated Dresden for the victims of “Western Monopoly Capitalism”—as if the shareholders of DuPont or Courtauld’s had instigated the crime.) When the American Mustangs appeared over the smoking ruins, all they could do was to machine-gun fire-scarred refugees running for their lives. This war, as senseless as its predecessor, could have been considerably shortened.

In 1943 German army leaders desperately tried to obtain the collaboration of the Western Allies but failed completely. They made efforts to establish contacts through the German Embassy in Ankara and through George H. Earle, former Governor of Pennsylvania and U.S. Naval Attaché in Turkey during the war. Earle flew to Washington in May 1944 and vainly tried to make the President see the light,102 i.e., the Russian menace. Other truly unceasing efforts were made by the German opposition in Sweden, Switzerland, and Spain.103 The Western Allies, however, were adamant in not giving any hint as to the meaning or content of the Unconditional Surrender Formula.104 Thus they paralyzed not only the activities of the opposition groups but also gave to Goebbels and to the Russians an undreamed-of propaganda advantage. The Soviets wanted to fight to the bitter end (while getting assurances from the West that it would leave them half of defeated Germany) and so did the Nazis because it was the only way to prolong their lives (or, at least, their liberty). Never in history has there been a more suicidal collaboration between a power at war, its political opponents in the enemy nation, and its allies preparing to be its enemies of tomorrow.105 We should not fool ourselves into believing that the British, even ignoring the wishes of Washington, would have pursued a very different policy. Mr. Churchill in the House of Commons vilified and ridiculed the conspirators106 and Mr. Anthony Eden was as adamant in rejecting the advances of the conspirators (high officers, labor leaders, professors, administrators, writers) as were his American counterparts deeply influenced by real traitors who had a leftist victory far more at heart than peace or their country’s welfare. Thousands of Americans were sacrificed to a mixture of vanity, treason and stupidity, to a buildup for World War III. These Americans were expendable; they were plowed under.

When, finally, on July 20, 1944, assassination of Hitler was attempted by the desperate German Resistance, American public opinion was fed more nonsense of the lowest moral order. What editorial do we find in the New York Times? On August 9, 1944, when much information was available, they wrote: “The underworld mentality and methods which the Nazis brought from their gutters and enthroned on the highest levels of German life, have begun to pervade the officers’ corps as well.” The New York Herald Tribune on August 9 of the same year wrote: “Americans as a whole will not feel sorry that the bomb spared Hitler for the liquidation of his generals. They hold no briefs for aristocrats as such, especially those given to the goosestep. . . . Let the generals kill the corporal, or vice versa, preferably both.” The ensuing massacre in which not only “generals” and “goose-stepping aristocrats” were killed—Moltke! Goerdeler! Leber! Bonhoeffer! Dalp! Stauffenberg!—deprived Germany of such an important segment of its moral and intellectual elite that it has not recovered from this loss to this very day.107

The possibility of an earlier peace was not realized by America’s or Britain’s man in the street because he was never given the necessary information. The information, we must admit, could not have been given to him. The men he had directly or indirectly elected to office failed, nay, refused to act on their information—out of stupidity, vanity, ideological prejudice, and their subservience to the USSR (which by the way had taken up secret contacts with the Nazis in Stockholm). In this connection one has to ask oneself whether the Western “statesmen” did not know about the extermination camps since they disposed, after all, of an elaborate system of espionage all over Nazi-occupied Europe. The Germans in their overwhelming majority, though fairly well acquainted with the horrors of the concentration camps, knew nothing about the swift mass murders. I conducted private investigations in 1947, interviewed Church leaders, etc.108 Léon Blum, who was in Buchenwald for a long time, ignored the tortures and murders committed there until the bombing of the camp by the Allies and accidental contacts with men from other sectors made him realize the terrible truth.109 For many years we had nothing but the Gerstein Report110 as the only coherent eyewitness testimony of the horrors of the extermination camps in the East. The Vatican, famous for its lack of reliable information, had no concrete information either—just hearsay.111 Yet what about the Allied sources of information? By early 1943, American Jewry had reports about the extermination camps.112 Did Washington and London not know anything about this?113 There are, as we said, indications that they did after all. The Western Allies had air superiority by late 1942; they could have menaced Hitler with specific retaliatory measures; they could have enlightened the German people (which listened to Allied broadcasts)—but nothing of the sort was done. Stubbornly, doggedly they continued the war under the motto of Unconditional Surrender. Perhaps certain people wanted to put all trump cards into Soviet hands.

The confusion in America was enormous and the circulating legends numerous. People desperately clung to the belief that in the Allied camp “at least Churchill knew better,” which was not the case. The responsibility for the switch from Draža Mihajlović to Tito was also due to Churchill, not to Roosevelt, but few people realized that Mihajlović’s Cetnici was purely Serb and that an anti-Nazi Croat (who opposed the Ustaša) therefore had no other choice but to join the Partizani, which he did without qualms last but not least because the BBC told him that Tito’s outfit was “really democratic.” (Mihajlović had murdered Croats on a large scale, and the Ustaši had murdered Serbs en masse—the dragon seed of 1918-1919 produced its evil harvest114—and the Partizani murdered in every direction.)

To be quite frank, a government consisting of rank amateurs could hardly cope with an immensely complex situation that required at the helm of the state men with moral115 and intellectual qualities such as any form of government rarely, but democracies almost never supply. (The man in the street, no doubt, has neither the time nor the preparation nor perhaps even any interest to grapple with monumental issues.) The answer to the alternatives—Mihajlović or Tito—was naturally that Mihajlović represented by far the lesser evil. The real key to the whole problem is the fact that Yugoslavia should never have been created. It had been largely created by refugees in 1917-1919, and other refugees were active in the United States during World War II. As we have pointed out, the majority belonged to the leftist camp, they cooperated intimately with the American left and, more often than not, they were the men who had helped in the past to undermine the fabric of traditional Christian Europe, thus creating that frightful void which communism, socialism, and later on National Socialism were to fill. “Deserted altars are inhabited by demons.” (Ernst Jünger). Of course Jews and persons married to Jews often had no other choice but to emigrate. Had they stayed on, they would have faced certain death. The same was more or less true of those who had been in important positions and who were on the list of the brown headhunters. But it can be said without much danger of refutation that the Marxists and the representatives of the “left center” were the more “mobile” people, the rootless element which made its way to the American fleshpots and then wrote “courageous” anti-Nazi pamphlets or novels, safely sheltered beyond an ocean.116 The most courageous people stayed on and “faced the music.”117 Hermann Borchardt, a conservative Christian writer of Jewish extraction, beaten to pulp in a Nazi concentration camp, was invited for a lecture by a group of moderate leftists, Marxists, and Progressives in New York. Eyeing his audience he started his speech with the remark: “Seeing you, gentlemen, sitting here, you the gravediggers of Germany, I regret that Hitler permitted you to escape. . . .” He did not hear the indignant outcries because the beatings in Oranienbaum had almost completely deprived him of his acoustical faculties. Indeed, truth alone offends.

America’s leftists had been strongly reinforced by those newcomers, the émigraille, and the more extreme among them fostered the cause of the Soviet Union. Such an attitude, even more so for those born in the country and those who had solemnly sworn allegiance, was criminal. It was downright treason, whatever the government’s own attitude, and when it became apparent that treason actually had been committed and that the culprits had to be found out, great excitement broke loose among the leftists, native or foreign born. These supporters of an alien totalitarian government suddenly invoked for their treatment all the sacred principles of classic liberal tolerance.

The betrayal itself cannot be doubted: its documentary evidence is unimpeachable. I personally am viewing these activities with the eyes of a non-American, of a person dead-set against the whole development of identitarian and egalitarian frenzy to which Jefferson was not alien and which has affected American popular concepts and American political folklore. (Which does not mean that the evil seed is not also sprouting in other parts of the globe—and more powerfully so than in the United States.) The question I want to raise is this: Where are we going to draw the line? The line between objective treason and loyalty is very clear. A man who puts the interest of a foreign country above that of his own is not acting patriotically—provided no moral issues are involved. (Obviously “My Country Right or Wrong” is an immoral, an un-Christian device. It is Churchillism pure and simple.) A man who secretly, illegally hands over vital information to a country which is a potential or an actual enemy of his country is legally a traitor.

Now, a man might commit treason from a legal point of view while he actually follows his conscience. “Legally” Admiral Canaris was a traitor because he collaborated with Franco in keeping Spain out of the war on Germany’s side. For this and many other actions he was executed in Flossenbürg concentration camp. Yet while legally a traitor, he fought courageously for all the values our Western World stands for. Count Klaus Schenk von Stauffenberg, a Catholic, tried to assassinate Hitler. Iustum est necare reges impios118 is a concept in the best medieval Catholic tradition. In an ideological war mere nationality becomes a secondary consideration. “Citizenship,” from the point of view of the higher loyalties, is only a relatively valid concept. The Vlassovtsy, i.e., the Russians and Cossacks who fought under General Vlassov against the Red army, were patriots in a deeper sense. The American with Communist convictions whose first loyalty is to the Communist idea and thus to the men in the Kremlin, is in similar position. We said “similar,” not identical. Admiral Canaris did not want to make an American (or a British) crown colony out of Germany. An American Communist to whom Sovietism is the highest ideal works quite naturally for the transformation of the United States into a member-state of the USSR (such as the Ukraine) or into a “satellite” such as Rumania or Bulgaria. On the other hand, the American Communist (or fellow traveler) working in the interest of the USSR is acting like Canaris inasmuch as he puts his political faith, his convictions higher than a loyalty due to the accident of birth. In the conflict of loyalties, those to one’s convictions always should take precedence. This, however, is the reason why a political community, a state, has to eliminate persons from positions of importance if they hold convictions which sooner or later will conflict with the real interests of the polity. And there can be cases when an individual, without adhering to a systematized ideology, simply finds himself unable to carry out an order given by the state. I do not think that a hangman can put to death a person of whose innocence he is absolutely convinced. Yet these are “unforeseen cases.” It is certainly not an act of unjust discrimination if a restaurant refuses to employ a convinced vegetarian as a meat cook or a devout Moslem as a wine taster or if a board of education does not appoint a declared misogynist as principal of a girls’ school.

The trouble about the so-called witch-hunt in the United States was the question where to draw the line. To me it is evident that the revival of ancient democracy in the French Revolution spawned a whole interconnected and coherent series of leftist ideologies visibly filiated, and that it is not easy to separate them neatly from each other. They are all identitarian, they are all statist, they are all egalitarian and more or less materialistic, they have affinities with atheism and, even more so, with agnosticism. Mr. Robert Green Ingersoll119 was not a Communist, but he was an ardent and devoted propagandist of atheism. Lenin’s views about God were roughly the same; Stalin (and later Khrushchev) shared Hitler’s views about modern art, Jewish influence, the Catholic Church, and the “practical solution” for ethnic minorities. The Second, Third, Fourth and even the Fifth French Republic worship the memories of the French Revolution and celebrate an event as nauseating as the Storming of the Bastille. (Remember the young cook qui savait faire les viandes.) Pathological butchers such as Danton and Robespierre were again honored on French stamps fifteen years ago: Mr. Harry S. Truman, who with Mr. Attlee and Stalin had voted the starvation program for the Spanish people (perhaps not really destined to starve the Spaniards but to achieve the victory of bolshevism in Spain so that the Soviets could have the base in Rota), is still considered a respected elder statesman. In the United States it is not always easy to draw the line between a “liberal” and a “conservative” republican, between a “liberal” Republican and a middle-of-the-road Democrat, between such a Democrat and a highly liberal Democrat of the ADA type. Let us imagine a typical pragmatist, product of Teachers College of Columbia University, formerly an avid reader of P.M., devotee of The Progressive, financial supporter of a Committee for Decolonization which supports the sacred cause of the Liberation of the Peoples of Angola. No doubt, one can subscribe to Soviet Russia Today, clamor for the admission of Red China to the United Nations, regard the late Mrs. Roosevelt as the brightest woman that ever trod the earth—and still not be a Communist. But under such circumstances one gets nearer and nearer to the Communist position.120 Mrs. Roosevelt’s contribution to the cause of world communism has been sufficiently substantial for the “New Hungary” to commemorate her with a stamp. Whether “New Czechoslovakia” or “New Rumania” did the same, I do not know.

I think that the case of Mrs. Roosevelt is typical. I am sure, however, that she was never singled out by Senator McCarthy as an object of his methodical investigations since, apart from her status as the wife and, later, widow of a President, she was probably never in the civil service of the United States.121 It is well known that she was connected with many organizations which, to put it mildly, were left of center. She had a considerable prestige among common people and her column My Day as well as her articles and her question-and-answer column in a ladies’ monthly were read by millions. It is fairly common knowledge that she stood further to the left than her husband and her public remarks on the actions and institutions of the Soviet Union were always on the whole favorable or only mildly critical.

In order not to rely on mere hearsay I once studied her column My Day in the years 1948–1949—a time when the vast majority of Americans were waking up from the stupor into which they had been cast by their own government’s pro-Communist propaganda. That the waking-up process had taken such a long time is amazing, because there was every indication that Sovietism represented unmitigated horror: displaced persons fleeing Communism were moving all over Europe,122 the promises given by the USSR were broken right and left, a regular war had been fought in Greece, but only now the euphoria came to an end.

Of Mrs. Roosevelt’s dicta I would like to take only a few samples which I consider characteristic. Let us look at My Day in the Chicago Sun-Times of July 7, 1948. There she says:

One wishes very much that the USSR could be brought to see the light and to give those countries on her borders which have genuine Communist governments sufficient latitude to let them feel they are acting as free and independent people. There is no question [!] but that the Yugoslavs have a great admiration for Soviet communism.123 They feel that, from the economic standpoint, the Russians have the only solution, both industrially and agriculturally. They are not opposed to Soviet political theories, and are even willing to follow along. They have an efficient [!] secret police and all [!] they ask is that the secret police be their own and that they be allowed to enjoy their own brand of nationalism. I happen to think that their desires could be achieved quite as well [!] under democracy as under communism, but they will have to find this out as time goes on.

There is more in this column than immediately meets the eye. One has to read it two or three times and then draw one’s own conclusions.

Here is another piece. (January 19, 1949):

I am in receipt of two interesting communications relative to a column I wrote about the imprisonment of Cardinal Mindszenty. What I was trying to say, of course [!], was not that the cardinal was an altogether admirable character, but that it is stupid [!] of the Communists to imprison people where it can be said that they have been imprisoned because of their religion. Our correspondent—a man who edits a publication which claims to be completely factual—writes that the arrest is not a matter of religious persecution, but of opposition to progress. He claims that the cardinal is a reactionary, if not a fascist and a notorious anti-Semite.

He also says that every fairminded correspondent in Hungary would bear him out in this assertion that the cardinal was the main opponent to the general welfare of the Hungarian people. Cardinal Mindszenty controlled a million acres of land, says my correspondent, for the Roman Catholic Church was the largest landowner of Hungary, therefore the cardinal opposed all agrarian reform and opposed the separation of state and church.124

So far, so good. Mrs. Roosevelt obviously said nothing. She merely related what one of her correspondents told her. She is perfectly innocent of all pro-Communist propaganda.

Naturally, in her column, she sided with Alger Hiss against Whittaker Chambers on whose word “nobody could rely.” She opposed Cardinal Preysing’s visit to the United States. She thought that Franco’s Secret Police were just as bad as the Gestapo and that the only persons who should teach German youths are those who “have proved their democracy,” a phrase which undoubtedly would surprise a student of the English language. Was Mrs. Roosevelt deeply imbued with pro-Communist ideas or merely naive? Probably both. Witness an article she published in McCall’s (February 1952) about the President’s unease with Stalin at the Teheran Conference. “My husband was determined to bend every effort to breaking those suspicions down, and decided the way to do it was to live up to every promise made by both the United States and Great Britain, which both of us were able to do before the Yalta meeting. At Yalta my husband felt the atmosphere had somewhat cleared, and he did say he was able to get a smile from Stalin.” Indeed, how many people would not sell millions into slavery to get a smile from that dear old man!

Mrs. Roosevelt obviously was not alone in kowtowing before the Soviets. Mr. Wendell Willkie, presidential candidate for the Republican Party in 1940, went on a goodwill tour around the globe during the war. His impressions were published in a book priced at one dollar and entitled One World, a cliché which either he or his ghost writer invented and which became exceedingly popular in leftist circles.125 Here we can read that “there is hardly a resident of Russia today whose lot is not as good or better than his parents’ lot was prior to the revolution.”126

Thus we come back to our original question: Where would one draw the line? We have no reason to assume that Mr. Alger Hiss (or even Mr. Harry Dexter White) took money from the Soviets, not even the men involved in the Amerasia Case, or the Rosenbergs, but their loyalty belonged to the Communist Utopia and not to the American reality. It is even possible that Mr. Alger Hiss was not a convinced “Sovietist,” but that he saw in the Muscovite faith the shape of things to come, while he considered the order prevailing in his own country as “obsolete.” He was not even condemned as a traitor (which in a legal sense he fully was) but as a perjuror, and no doubt he had committed perjury.127 However, the attitude an impartial committee of investigation should theoretically have taken was simply this: “Ever since the days of the Founding of our Nation we have gradually drifted away from the original spirit of the Constitution and have let ourselves be influenced by trends and ideas which found in communism a perhaps not unavoidable but logical conclusion. Such a development we might deplore; we might even decide to alter or reverse it; but it has been a reality in the past. To make matters worse, we have found ourselves in a military alliance with the leading Communist power and to cement it, our own government, by distorting facts and offering to our population a false picture of that state, has strongly contributed to Communist propaganda. Let us review the damage done; let those who have been deluded make a clean breast of their deeds; let us measure the whole extent of that criminal folly which found its consummation in the last decade but which has been going on for some time.” Such a stand, I readily admit, could not be expected because it implies a denial of too much of what had happened in the past. And yet, if in our peregrinations we have taken a wrong turn, we have to go back to the point where we took the wrong turn—or at least reconstruct, recalculate this point.

If I have not made myself sufficiently clear, I would like to point out that, just to quote one instance, a typical burgher of the city of Pamplona in Navarra in the seventeenth century confronted with the Marxist-Leninist message would have shrugged it off as a piece of egregious nonsense. Accepting none of its premises, he would have listened to none of its conclusions. The average American with a degree from his progressive college is much nearer to the Red message; the devoted uncommitted leftist even more so. There comes the moment when the non-Marxist leftist inadvertently steps into the magnetic field of the Red Doctrine and then his guardian angel or his last residues of rationality will prevent the worst. Just a few more symbolic reminders mentioned occasionally much earlier: Columbia on the old half-dollar with the Jacobin cap; the fasces on the dime piece which reappear on the French Republican and in the Fascist coat of arms; the first battleships of the Soviet Union named Danton and Marat; the studied utopianism in terms such as “the American experiment”; the replacement of the Calvinist outlook (which, after all, is still a Christian one!) with Roussellianism which lies at the bottom of all Utopian leftist heresies. (Herein lies the root of the entire internal moral and political crisis of the United States.) In other words, an American conservatism, any movement on the true right (which of course could not in any way be totalitarian) has to return to far distant historical sources—not to stay there but to get the right start. Back to the imaginary burgher of Pamplona in the seventeenth century? Though he hails from another part of this world (and therefore is not a fitting reference), he certainly had a grasp of basic truths. It is the Great Western, the Great Christian tradition which has to be reconstituted, and this is a gigantic task requiring radical thinkers and far-going measures.

Toward the end of the war the leftist follies increased. Mr. Hull, who went to Moscow to proclaim a resolution in favor of Austrian independence, was neatly tricked into signing also a declaration of Austrian war guilt. One is aghast at the stupidity of the formula which said that “Austria was reminded, however, that she had a responsibility which she could not evade for participation in the war on the side of Hitlerite Germany, and that in the final settlement account would inevitably be taken of her own contribution to liberation.”128 Anthony Eden apparently first sponsored the declaration and there can be no doubt that Molotov added the above quoted paragraph, because with this injunction the Soviets had a “legal title” to stay in Austria and confiscate property right and left.129 Yet neither the forger of the Axis nor the former student of the National Normal University of Lebanon, Ohio, seemed to have been aware of this clever snare which had an adverse effect on the Austrian Resistance. No doubt there were many Nazis in Austria, but there also were not so few in Norway, in the Netherlands, in Belgium, and quite some eager collaborators in France.130 To say, however, that these occupied and incorporated countries helped the German war effort willingly and spontaneously is a gross and unjust exaggeration. The Soviets knew only too well what to do in this situation and the two fall-guys from the West walked straight into the trap.131 So did an American delegate in Potsdam when the Soviets demanded the “German assets” in their occupation zone of Austria.132 This had been rejected by the American delegation, last but not least because the Soviets demanded German real estate—oil-fields, barracks, training fields. The debate over the German assets in the satellite world lasted until the small hours of the morning when, finally, the agreement was put down in writing. Mr. Pauley, head of the delegation, could hardly keep his eyes open. Then, in enumerating the countries to which this treaty would apply, the Russians quickly inserted Austria. When he signed, Mr. Pauley was too exhausted to be aware of the change. This thirty-eighth parallel in Korea was similarly accepted as a demarcation line in a state of ignorance, torpor, and confusion.

The Potsdam meeting was a worthy culmination of its predecessors, the Teheran and the Yalta conferences. The only “survivor” of the previous encounters was the Georgian highwayman who had committed his crimes in the service of the Social Democratic Party of Russia. Mr. Roosevelt was dead and had been replaced by a man who got his education at no college and his political training from Tom Pendergast133 and his associates in Kansas City, Missouri. Mr. Churchill was present at the first sessions, but the grateful British had voted him out of power and in his stead a man attended who had greeted Spanish loyalists with the clenched fist: Mr., later Lord Attlee, the new Prime Minister. The outcome of the meeting was not at all surprising. Most of the great evils had already been settled in previous conferences, so for instance, the Oder-Neisse Line. This demarcation line, which artificially attaches Poland to the Soviet Union (because the Poles must be permanently afraid of the inevitable German revindications) continues to represent the worst and largest wound in the fabric of Europe. The brilliant idea to move the entire Polish nation westward had been originated by Churchill and he even boasts of it in his memoirs.134 Warsaw (under whatever government) was placed only 115 miles from the Soviet border, but that did not bother him. Non-Britishers did not matter to Mr. Churchill, who sacrificed human beings, their lives, their welfare, their liberty with the same elegant disdain as his colleague in the White House. Lwów? What did Lwów mean to him? A city whose name was difficult to pronounce, inhabited by unknown East Europeans whom he had never met: Poles, Jews, Ukrainians who hardly belonged to the Nordic race. Let’s give it to Stalin, the “great father of his country.” Mr. Churchill in his own words was “not prepared to make a great squawk about Lwów.”135 And as the Polish Premier Mikolajczyk refused to sign away half his country, Churchill menaced him with its total annihilation.136 The man who had said “there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go”137 had become a terror to his allies. The Anglo-Polish Treaty of Mutual Assistance, concluded on August 25, 1939, which made the Poles decide to fight and not to “play dead” like the clever Czechs, contained eight articles: Six of these were openly broken by Britain.

When the three men sat down in Potsdam and when, later, Mr. Truman played the piano with Lauren Bacall lolling on it, the fate of Poland was already completely sealed. Other fresh acts of folly were still to come. One of them consisted in soliciting Stalin’s aid in the war against Japan. This gave “Uncle Joe” a splendid opportunity to capture the entire Japanese industry in Manchuria, to acquire territories (Sakhalin, Kurile Islands), to occupy North Korea and, later, indirectly, help to communize China. This invitation to our own disaster will always be a great puzzle to historians. Just prior to the meeting the first atomic bomb had been brought to a successful explosion at White Sands, New Mexico, and while Stalin was implored to aid the Western Allies, the American general staff already knew that this hellish invention worked. Of course, men like General Henry Arnold of the AAF saw no difference between Stalin’s and Roosevelt’s ideologies—a delightful reflection on the New Deal—and thought that it was a mistake to think that Stalin was a Communist.138 Yet in spite of this enormous advantage, this certainty of a speedy and easy victory, the grizzly tyrant was asked to come in on the deal—with tragic results for America. (Just close your eyes and think how many Americans have paid with their lives for this folly!)

Excuses are frequently offered for this piece of maddening stupidity, one of them being that one did not realize whether the atomic bomb could actually be “delivered”—dropped and exploded upon contact. This excuse is patently nonsensical and even if the argument had substance, it does not really hold water because the Japanese had already made two peace efforts: one via Moscow and the other one through the Vatican. However, we have to ask ourselves whether leftist circles in Washington had not worked feverishly for the continuation of the murderous and costly war. Men such as Mr. Owen Lattimore protested in 1941 against any modus vivendi with Japan.139 Apparently they wanted Japan’s total defeat and we probably owe it primarily to Mr. Joseph C. Grew, former American Ambassador to Tokyo, that Japan was not transformed into a “democratic republic” (like Bulgaria or Hungary). The dropping of “the Bomb” on a populated center was another totally superfluous crime. Even if one is callous enough to make an argument for the annihilation of Hiroshima, one fails to understand the necessity for the slaughter in Nagasaki, cradle of Japanese Christianity. Within a split second the bomb wiped out one-eighth of Japan’s Catholic Christians. Here again we hear the argument that Mr. Truman wanted to impress the Russians, just as Mr. Churchill had wanted to impress them with the Dresden massacre.140 Yet what butcher could really impress the arch-butcher from the Caucasus? Not even the late Adolf Hitler could!

And here we come to another point. I am dead certain that at the turn of the century, historians will try to find out the answer to two crucial historic questions:

1. What caused the United States to withdraw its armies immediately after the armistice from all parts of the world? Was the clamor “Let’s Send the Boys Home” somewhat “organized?”

2. What prevented the United States—as sole atomic power between the years 1945 and 1948—from using its deadly monopoly to “ease” the Soviets out of their ill-gotten gains? A war never would have been necessary. The mere threat would have been sufficient. Panic on an unprecedented scale would have been the immediate result. Of course the answer is tragically simple: A “democracy” rests on the “fermentation” of the people. It merely hits back if attacked and is more perplexed by victory than by the task of defending itself (which belongs to the military hierarchy and not to amateurish politicians).

The Armistice141 was not only conditioned by the preliminary arrangements and agreements concluded at Teheran and Yalta but also by military moves determined by these talks. It is perhaps true that Vienna could not have been occupied by the Western Allies in the last stages of the war, but why, then, had it been savagely bombed on the anniversary of the Anschluss—an act of revenge facilitating the Russian conquest?142 Neither Prague nor Berlin, two European key cities, need have been left to the Red army. They were given to the Soviets, staunch Nazi collaborators between 1939 and 1941, on a platter. The Americans and the British stopped at the Elbe143 and later even surrendered all of Thuringia to the Soviets while Berlin could easily have fallen into American hands.144 The same is true of Prague: The Americans under General Patton had advanced as far as Pilsen when they were ordered back.145 Clearly, all important places in Eastern and Central Europe according to leftist ideas were to be handed over to the Soviets leaving to the Western World a mere toehold on the Continent. The craziest arrangements were those concerning Berlin and Vienna. In these two cities the Western Powers were to control mere sectors and no stipulations were made as to the accesses leading to them.146 Mr. Roosevelt is said to have been opposed to discussing these details because he thought that only a complete show of confidence and trust would soften the Soviet regime and would create an atmosphere of “fellowship” and “goodwill.” Soon the Americans were “undeceived” and the airlift had to be organized at great cost in money and even in human lives.

The worst result of the Potsdam meeting were the stipulations concerning the mass transfer of the German population from east of the Oder-Neisse Line,147 from Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. No less than 13 to 14 million people had to be removed under enormous hardships and this created tensions, hatreds, demands, and counterdemands from which even a de-Sovietized Europe could hardly recover. These brutal transfers, accompanied by atrocities and spoliations continued all through the winter of 1945-1946 and ended only in 1947. Poles from Eastern Poland were dumped into East Germany, a process by which people from underpopulated areas were “massaged” into overpopulated ones—the height of perversity. Yet no legal title over Eastern Germany was given to the Poles.148 Vast tracts of land remained uncultivated (as in Bohemia-Moravia) and on the trek from East to West millions of people perished.149 What were the Western Allies to do with the part of Germany they were given for occupation? It is interesting to note that the Western army leaders went into a huddle to discuss what they should do if there should be any resistance or sabotage. They decided that they would take hostages and shoot them—perhaps the only thing they could “reasonably” do, but the Germans had been vilified for having acted the same way in the same predicament.150 As to the political order and cultural institution, the American left (thanks to its preoccupation with foreign affairs) had a field day in West Germany. Professor Wilhelm Röpke, an outstanding German neoliberal, exiled in Constantinople and later in Geneva, had written a memorandum about the necessity of a monarchical restoration which, by the way, we find in the program of practically all the heroes of the Twentieth of July. Nobody in his right mind and with any sense of history planned to revise parliamentary democracy, already obsolete by 1919 and tragically terminated by 1933. Yet the American left naturally thought about a Constitutional development which would give the forces of the left a frame for a free development. Had not Engels demanded the democratic republic as the ideal form of government, conducive to the victory of Marxism?151 Above all, the Soviet Union had a true “vested interest” in the establishment of democracy in preference to forms of government in which parties could not develop freely, gain victories, and take over the government.152

What the leftist establishment did in Germany is most notable. In many parts of the country, in Bavaria, for instance, it put into power Social Democrat (i.e., Socialist) governments which had by no means the backing of the majority of the population. The prevailing idea in the civilian sector of the occupation authorities was that “Clericals” were reactionary, backward, and “Fascist,” but that Marxians were “progressive.” Dorothy Thompson had already told us that what Germany needed was not less, but “more socialism” (though not exactly “national socialism”).153 Now the Germans got it at the expense of the American capitalist system duly milked to provide for socialism and socialization all over Europe from Land’s End to the Iron Curtain. There was a special bias against the German nobility, many of whose members had courageously opposed Hitler, but here folklore and leftism again combined against genuine American interests.154 The famous Fragebogen, the questionnaire prescribed by the American authorities, that had to be filled out by all those Germans who wanted to do anything more than just work in a factory or in the fields, contained questions which in their content or their wording revealed the whole leftist bias and betrayed the sure little hand of Marx. (One of the questions aped the Nuremberg Racial Purity Laws: “Did any of your or your wife’s four grandparents have a title of nobility?”)155 For a time the American leftists in the military administration could work hand in glove with the British occupation, directed by the Labour government in London which was also determined to create a leftist Germany—a “national socialist” Germany under the rather demagogical Social Democrat Schumacher, but minus racism. One of the early victims of this combine was Dr. Konrad Adenauer, who immediately after liberation had become Lord Mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Cologne. One nice day he was ejected by the British from his office under the (written) pretext “that he lacked the qualifications to run a city as large as Cologne.” This egregious piece of nonsense der Alte kept as his most cherished souvenir.156

“Reeducation” also ran into a few snares. Luckily the leftist plans never came to fruition but what they would have been like one can guess from the “Zook Report,” published in parts by the New York Times (October 16, 1946). Dr. George F. Zook, head of a mission of nine men and women (among them a Catholic priest!) sent to Germany by the State and War Departments, declared that the goal of democracy is “democratic man.” This commission found the main ills of Germany to be “discipline in the family” and the high school-college, which begins at the age of ten. “The survival of democracy would warrant an invasion of the German home,” the report suggested. It referred to the “stern German parental authority” that produced Freudian ambivalence, or a clash of tenderness and hostility in children, undermining individual self-reliance, if not also self-respect, while women were confined to cooking, children, and churchgoing, thus converting “worthy enough functions into antidemocratic sterilities.” The report went on to say that to “shun the majority rule principle was to play into the hands of a Hitlerian ‘superman.’ ” Ninety percent of the Germans went to vocational schools and “this separation of children at an early age was an important factor in developing the superiority complex of the privileged class and the subservience of the trade class which had led Germany to totalitarianism and war.”

A most amusing light is thrown on this report by the fact that the Nazi movement had been basically a youth movement against the older generation, that the Nazis wanted to radically revamp the educational system to eliminate the classically educated elites, that they had tried with all means at their disposal to undermine parental authority. In other words, most of the propositions of the Zook Report were entirely in keeping with Nazi ideas, and Nazism was represented in retrospect as a conservative and patriarchal movement: Hitler appeared to the signatories as some sort of Patriarcha and not at all as Big Brother whom he actually represented.157

The Zook Report and the various efforts to “democratize” German education in an intellectual sense were partly of a temporary nature.158 As soon as West Germany recovered some sovereignty, most of the various leftist experiments were given up. As we all know, a “reinfection” took place in the mid-1960s when the New Left, the student revolt and hippieism invaded Germany via the Free University of West Berlin and the University of Frankfurt where the various aspects of this particular disease were abetted by part of the German press and a number of intellectuals with distinctly American background.159 No wonder, because there was a field in which the American occupation authorities were able to achieve a permanent victory for leftism: in the “Fifth Estate.” After 1945 the license for the publication of a newspaper and books had to be obtained from the occupying powers and here was an opening wedge for the leftist returnees and for their friends. Later it became extremely costly to start a new paper. The conservative forces, viewed with great suspicion by the leftist establishment, thus were the Johnnies-come-lately and to this day from a journalistic point of view, they have not overcome this handicap. It is important, however, to remember that the left in Europe was soon to turn anti-American and that the anti-American propaganda profited from the support it had been given earlier by the very country it was later to attack.

It is difficult to enumerate the calamities enacted in the years immediately following the Armistice. There were serious diplomatic mistakes such as the pressure exercised upon Switzerland to surrender the German assets to the Allies (whereas the Swiss had not even been approached by the Nazis to surrender emigrant savings and investments.) There were the Nuremberg Trials which definitely ought to have been handled by the Germans themselves160 and which was totally mismanaged. The notion of “legal precedent” is Anglo-Saxon:161 Even American generals were horrified by the trial (thinking of their possible difficulties in World War III): and the very idea that the assassins of Katyn sat in judgment over the assassins of Auschwitz is tragicomic. Points of accusation like the wanton attack on Norway, an accusation per se justified, make no sense if one remembers that Mr. Churchill admittedly prepared an attack on Norway himself.162 The thing to do would have been to have the Nazis tried by German courts simply for common crimes according to the Code of Penal Law. The principle Nullum crimen sine lege was as much ignored as that of the impartiality of the judges—for instance, when the Russians condemned the German attack against Poland in which they themselves had participated. Even worse were the following minor Nuremberg Trials, almost completely based on Marxist principles: An effort was made to implicate German industry and high finance.163 No less infamous was the Krupp Trial in which Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach164 was placed on the bench of the accused instead of his gravely ill father.165 Here again Marxism, financed by American taxpayers’ money, was celebrating orgies. In the writ of accusation against Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and his ten codefendants of the same firm we find the words: “The origin, the development, and the background of the crimes committed by the defendants, and the criminal plans, in which they participated, can be traced back to 100 years of German militarism and 133 years—four generations—of the manufacturing of arms.”166 Apart from the fact that the Krupp works normally produced arms on the average of only one-fifth of their total output, one recognizes in this sentence and, even more clearly in other passages of the accusation, the Marxian verbiage. The accusation was presented by General Taylor, U.S.A., formerly of the Federal Communications Commission, then 40 years old. His aides were Mr. Joseph Kaufmann from New York and later Mr. Raggland from Texas. The director of the Chief Trial Team was Mr. H. Russell Thayer who had been Assistant Secretary of the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy during the Spanish Civil War. The basic notion of the trial was to prove in the best Leninist fashion that “big business” (especially in the form of “monopoly capitalism”) creates and fosters wars.167 All of the accused were condemned and later released and the confiscations annulled. In retrospect the trial appears too preposterous. On the other side of the ocean we had the Yamashita Trial, a travesty of justice.168 When Yamashita’s lawyer, Frank A. Reel169 published a book about his tragically innocent defendant, the rather conservative director of the publishing company, the Chicago University Press, lost his position.

Leftist forces mismanaged the world situation practically everywhere. Working through the occupation authorities, where the much saner military were unable to interfere with the civilians, they set up a witchhunt against monarchists in Austria (thus continuing Nazi policies!) and they also prevented the return of the South Tyrol to Austria: For this the British Labour government was mainly responsible. Self-determination was obviously only desirable if it benefited leftist issues, but the South Tyrolians, being mostly conservative agrarians would, once returned to Austria, have prevented a full Socialist victory.170 The damage done by the dinamitardi, the tortures committed by the carabinieri, the wall of hatred between Austrians and Italians—this only “bleeding border” left in Free Europe we owe first to Mr. Wilson, then to Mr. Bevin171—and to the Soviets who supported Mr. Bevin, and thus incidentally ratified the Hitler-Mussolini Agreement of 1939 pertaining to the iniquitous Brenner Border. It seems that Nazi decisions, Nazi thought, Nazi mentality, and Nazi institutions in many ways are here to stay.172

True, other people, other groups, fared much worse than the Austrians. The 150,000 cases of rape perpetrated by the Red army in Eastern Austria was perhaps only a practical demonstration of “sexual democracy.”173 (Let us remember Mr. Henry Wallace’s charming formula: “We have political democracy, they have economic democracy.”) Many Austrians were deported, some returned, others disappeared forever. Still, it was on Austrian soil, in the East Tyrol, that large numbers of Russians and Cossacks who had fought against Communism were clubbed half dead, packed into box cars and sent back as “unpatriotic traitors.” A British major (Davis) had given his word of honor that England did not think to surrender the Cossacks and Russians to the Soviets. When the truth leaked through, the disarmed anti-Communists resisted His Majesty’s soldiers in the services of bolshevism: Many Russians were killed on the spot,174 fifteen more were killed during the transport while trying to escape, six committed suicide, seventeen succeeded in disappearing during the transport to the Russian occupation zone. There were twelve generals in the group handed over to the USSR by that great conservative, Mr. Winston Churchill to placate, to mollify, to befriend his Communist comrade-in-arms. But even this act of prostitution did not buy their friendship and less than a year later this Epimetheus of European politics uttered the Great Warning in his famous Fulton speech.

An Austrian eyewitness has described the scenes in Lienz, worthy of Breughel’s brush. (He estimates at about three hundred the number of Cossacks who hanged themselves in the Lienz woods after being surrounded by the 8th Brigade.) With bayonets and clubs these men and many women were subdued. A Russian who had escaped to tell the tale, S. G. Korolkov, now living in the United States, has painted the memorable scene of the “Hell of Lienz.”175 And while Mr. Churchill perpetrated such wonderful deeds, the Americans, apparently, could not stay behind. The New York Times reported the ghastly scenes that took place in Dachau when the Russians who had fought against Communism were made “ready” to be “shipped” eastward. The long somber report ended with the description of the evacuation of the second Russian barrack. “The inmates . . . barricaded themselves inside and set the building afire. Then all tore off their clothing, apparently in a vain effort to frustrate the guards and, linking arms, resisted the pushing and shoving of the Americans and Poles trying to empty the place. The soldiers then tossed in tear bombs and rushed the building. Some prisoners, they discovered, were already dead, having cut their own throats, while others had used pieces of cloth to hang themselves.”176 One can easily imagine what confidence in the United States and Britain these actions engendered inside the USSR, but hatred and suspicion against the West were precisely the feelings which not only the Soviets but also their faithful collaborators in the American leftist establishment wanted to create. And it ought to be remembered that the American heirs of the Nazis in Dachau (of all places!) perpetrated these horrors three-quarters of a year after the end of the war—and this in accordance with the agreements made at Yalta, at least half of which Soviets had already broken. Remembering the American tradition in regard to political refugees through the ages, one cannot but be aghast at the betrayal of such trust, such a noble tradition.

The so frequently followed British example, too, was at times exceptionally evil. The Austrians have seen not only the “Hell of Lienz” but also the bestial surrender of the Domobranci, the Catholic Slovene Home Guard, which had protected Slovenes against the depredations of Tito’s partizani. Thousands of them were rounded up, shipped over the Karavanken Mountains, to be mowed down in masses and their corpses used as natural fertilizer for the fields. One should never forget: Sadism is the outstanding characteristic of the entire left.

Errors were ubiquitous.177 Italy in 1946 was helped back to the republican form of government it had under Mussolini as Repúbblica Sociale Italiana. A plebiscite in which the vast majority of the non-Communist vote was cast for the monarchy, gave Italy the ideal form of government to be captured some day by communism the legal way, a danger still with us. Obviously the Communist vote was totally in favor of the Republic, remindful of Engels’ aforementioned formulation (confirmed by Dallin) that the democratic republic is the ideal frame for a Red conquest of the State. In Greece, luckily, a referendum—itself an impossible procedure—produced a sound majority for the monarchy. The principle of monarchy cannot be subordinated to the principle of majority decisions. Its very essence is independence from the vagaries of the voting process.

Yugoslavia, another miscreation of World War I, was restored and even territorially enlarged. (Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were the only countries, apart from the Soviet Union, emerging from the war with a bigger territory.)178 Yugoslavia, however, can only exist and survive as a harsh dictatorship, if not as a tyranny. Since its constituent nations do not want to form a whole, they can be held together by coercive measures: either the sway of one nationality over the rest, or the rule of an oppressive ideology through a party over all.

It would be an error, however, to believe that the horrors of leftist oppression and revenge were merely confined to Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe. In France a large sector of the collaborators were recruited from the left, embracing ideologies which were “nationalleftist” in character. Neither Laval nor Darnand, Déat or Doriot belonged to the “right.” The Germans suspended Le Figaro, the conservative daily, and supported the leftist paper L’Oeuvre. The French Communists fully collaborated with the Nazis between 1939 and 1941. De Gaulle, who went into opposition, had belonged to the Action Française. Other French rightists and conservatives fled France (Henri de Kérillis was one of them), but there were also men of the French right who stayed without collaborating and others again who (rightly or mistakenly) considered it their duty to protect whatever remained of France as well as they could. Among them was Marshal Pétain whose patriotism should no more be questioned than General Weygand’s. Pétain had negotiated with Churchill an agreement which (in order not to irritate de Gaulle) Downing Street tried to deny, but we have documentary evidence of its existence.179

After the German attack on the Soviet Union, the French Communists, whose real patrie had always been the USSR, went into opposition and, having more practice in clandestine political and military activities than the other parties, they soon assumed some sort of leadership in the resistance.180 After the collapse of the German occupation in 1944 the Communists started to wage a terror warfare of their own against all the people they disliked politically, socially, or just personally. An American observer who arrived in Southern France with the army of General Patch estimated the number of people assassinated by the Résistance in that region was around 50,000.181 French estimates speak of about 120,000 all told. To this number must be added all those who were “legally” condemned, more often than not by courts staffed with Communist jurors. Now, it is quite true that many of the bona fide collaborators literally sacrificed French citizens in order to get a breathing spell for France. It can well be argued that the ends do not justify the means. But then what about the Résistance men who, with false information, were played by Allied authorities into the hands of the Nazis who finished them off?182 Were they expendable? And were the Allied air massacres, butchering not only Germans,183 but Frenchmen, Dutch, Belgian, Serbs, and foreign laborers,184 morally justified?185 Much of de Gaulle’s ressentiment186 has to be explained by the gratuitous massacre of Frenchmen and women who,187 it seems, were at times even wantonly killed by Allied ground forces.188

Leftist control of foreign relations was equally apparent in all imaginable domains. UNRRA, an American organization designed to aid “displaced” persons in distress, repeatedly assumed a pro-Communist character. The Mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, who directed its activities and who had once been U.S. Consul in Fiume, had a strongly leftist bent. In a Yugoslav camp in Egypt he insulted the inmates, berating them for not returning to their homeland.189 The problem of the “displaced persons” (read: desperate refugees)190 was one of the most baffling to all moderate leftists: the “Fascists” had been defeated. Now whom did they flee? Why did they not return to the places they had left?191

The left, from the more moderate groups to the Communists, now turned their eyes toward Spain. There still was a “Fascist dictatorship” to be liquidated: It created a welcome “problem” which diverted public interest from the annexationist activities of the Soviets. At the time of the landing of the Allied troops in North Africa in November 1942, President Roosevelt had written a letter to Franco addressing him as “My dear friend.” A “distinguished Roman Catholic layman,” Professor Carlton J. H. Hayes acted as American Ambassador in Madrid and tried (successfully) to keep Spain out of the war. This was not too difficult because Franco had met Hitler and, as we said before, immediately a cordial antipathy sprang up between the two.192 Spain, we have to bear in mind, made extraordinary efforts to protect the Jews, although predominantly those of Sephardic origin.193

More than 200 years after the Jews had been collectively expelled from Britain194 in 1290 the Spaniards placed before their Jews and Moslems the alternative either to embrace Christianity or to leave the country. Most of them left (1492), a certain number became sincerely Christians, others again only seemingly changed their faith. The Jewish refugees went partly to Morocco and Algiers, partly to Turkey, a few of them to Italy and to South America. This harsh measure was a great loss to Spain: It had a purely religious and not a racist character. In the nineteenth century a trickle of Jews returned. King Alfonso XIII was known for his friendly feelings toward the Jews. When the Republic was established in 1931 the Jews in Spain already numbered more than 2,000.195 In 1924, under the rule of King Alfonso (and the military dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, father of José-Antonio, the founder of the Falange), a law had been issued which invited the descendants of the expelled Sephardic (i.e., Spanish) Jews196 to return to Spain and offered them immediate citizenship. A few followed the call. When the civil war broke out the Spanish Jews, above all those living in Northern Morocco, a Spanish Protectorate, sided with the right. And when in World War II many Jews fled to the West, passing through Spain, not one of them was surrendered to the Germans.197

As a matter of fact, the Spanish consulates and embassies all over Europe started to issue passports for Jews of Spanish descent on the basis of the law of 1924. An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 passports were granted, which makes “Franco Spain” the greatest protector of Jews at the time of the last war. The Spanish government, through economic pressure, succeeded in having the French Jews of Sephardic origin exempted from wearing the Star of David. The Spanish consular agents sealed the apartments and houses of Sephardic French Jews. And more: The Spanish government forced the Nazis to disgorge Jewish inmates from concentration camps who actually came by whole trainloads to Spain. Mr. Maurice L. Perlzweig in a resolution adopted at the Jewish Congress in Atlantic City (November 1944) thanked the Spanish Ambassador in Washington for his government’s efforts to aid and protect Jews. “The Jews are a race of long memory; they will not easily forget the chance given to thousands of their brothers to save their lives.”198 (Similar messages were sent to the Swiss Government, the King of Sweden and Pope Pius XII—all not exactly representatives of leftism.)199

Now that the Allies were safely entrenched all over Western Europe and still had not waked up to the danger from the East, Franco no longer was “My dear friend.” Stalin, who butchered more Jews than Franco could ever have saved, suggested to the Right Honourable Clement Attlee of clenched fist memory and to Mr. Truman to blockade Spain, so that the Spaniards might rise and overthrow their “Fascist” government. The result was not a reduced breakfast table for Generalissimo Franco, but years of misery and starvation for the Spaniards who, whatever their opinion about Franco, now really rallied to him in a feeling of national indignation and collective pride. The Potsdam plan luckily miscarried and here one can say with a sigh of relief that God at least sometimes takes care of children, drunkards, fools, and the foreign policy of the United States of America.200 Today Spain, undergoing a gradual process of liberalization, is a military pillar of the Free World.

Luckily Japan preserved the office of Emperor,201 yet one wonders what would happen to its Parliament at a time of grave economic adversity and its “demilitarization” is a tremendous burden on the shoulders of the victorious United States. Japan and Germany, for better or worse, played important parts in keeping the equilibrium of Eurasia. America now has to fill this military void. “Moderate leftist” foresight was even less successful on the Asian mainland. The “agrarian reformers” of China transformed themselves into a roaring tiger, “anticolonialist” American hostility toward France in Indochina resulted in another American liability and responsibility: the joint British-American intervention in favor of Sukarno, a collaborator of the Japanese, and against the Dutch, their wartime ally, was another case in point. What characterizes the leftist mind, however, is a would-be pragmatism combining two things which normally tend to be opposites: an impractical utopian idealism coupled with the lack of a sense of honor. Usually idealism goes together with a sense of honor and loyalty. Don Quixote is not practical but he is a man of honor: Sancho Panza ignores honor, but he is a realist. The typical leftist is a dreamer without honor and that is a pretty bad combination.

Inevitably one remembers the letters of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Pius XII in which the President tried to convince the Pope that he ought to come down to earth and realize that his picture of the Soviet Union was obsolete and no longer conforming to truth—an interesting change after Woodrow Wilson’s reply to Benedict XV’s peace effort, reminding the Pope that the war was a moral issue which practical considerations could never eliminate. Granted that the Vatican is neither a powerhouse202 nor even a prime center of information, but there is perennial value to sound Christian reasoning and to a profound knowledge of man in all his glory and misery, which leftist emotionalism and ratiocination cannot replace.

More blunders were made in the years after 1945: the failure of nerves in the Hungarian Revolution; the failure at Suez; the failure in the Bay of Pigs; the horrible blunder in Vietnam in 1963, when a deceitful leftist propaganda portrayed the rule of Ngo Dinh Diem as a “Roman Catholic dictatorship” oppressing kind Buddhist monks,203 with the resulting speculation on a possible All-Buddhist Crusade against communism with American support, some sort of Buddhification of the war in Vietnam. (One could as well imagine an American Army led by Quakers, devout Mennonites, and conscientious objectors.)204

Needless to say that the blunders of American leftists have their analogies in other parts of the world. French, Spanish, Italian, German, Austrian, and British “moderate leftists” are no less silly and supercilious; however, their influence, their weight, their historic importance is now a great deal less than that of their American confrères who have an establishment with which the others cannot vie, because it is in a key nation deciding the fate of the world. One can listen to certain Spanish (or Peruvian) students—who are filled to the gills with most incredible nineteenth-century nonsense—be informed by sophisticated Frenchmen how the Texan oil millionaires murdered President Kennedy, or be instructed by Italian Repubblicani about Italy’s economic exploitation by the Vatican. The stupidities uttered by Greek intellectuals, soft-headed German literati or sixth-rate English university professors are just as bad, except that they matter less. From the masses no intelligent man expects a superior knowledge anyhow: they can only throw back what has been fed to them by the information manufacturers or by the opinion makers. Common sense is valuable, no doubt, but not without knowledge, just as knowledge is worthless without common sense. The masses cannot really be blamed.

Naturally the picture of what happened since 1945 is not completely black. There has been resistance in the case of Korea, though a resistance which was never fully developed. Nationalist China has not been thrown to the dogs, as so many leftists wanted. In Formosa as intelligent agrarian reform has taken place and that island is a real showcase in Asia—now economically on its own feet.205 The Marshall Plan in free Europe was a success, and the more private initiative was given a scope, the greater the success.206 Support for the sadists in Angola and Mozambique has abated.

The negative, the blinding effects of leftism even in its moderate form, derive mostly from envy and jealousy, the main dynamic forces of the left. It is this driving element which links up the whole sequence of revolutions from 1789 to 1917 and 1933. Envy and jealousy are capable of dominating not only internal politics but, even more so, foreign policy where they support the sadistic drives which so strongly color international relations in our progressive, democratic century. No wonder, since today the ultimate means of foreign policy is not only total war but also the fomenting of revolutions and rebellions in foreign countries, which was taboo in an earlier age. When Sir Roger Casement, in World War I, tried to get the aid of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Aussenamt, his plea for active support against British rule in Ireland was rejected for the reason that this meant meddling in inner British affairs. It was the German army which cooperated first with Casement and later with the Communist exiles in Switzerland who were shipped to Russia: it was a non-Junker, Erich Ludendorff, who utilized revolutionary disloyalty, imitating the Allies who partly won the war through these tactics (as young Captain de Gaulle insisted).207

The Soviets needed the democratic restoration of 1945 very much indeed. We know about a leading American general who, after World War II, met a Soviet leader. We quote: “Circumstances had brought the two together on a number of occasions and the American had noticed an attitude of considerable friendliness on the part of the Russian. One day he commented on his attitude.

“The Soviet leader made no reply for the moment, then he drew his chair closer to the table and from a matchbox he took four matches which he placed methodically on the table, each match about an inch from the next and parallel to it. Then he said, ‘Now this first match is what you call “Capitalism”; the second is what you call “Democracy”; the third is what you call “Socialism”; and the fourth is what you call “Communism”.’

“He paused a moment, and then, looking up at the American, said, ‘Now, I like your country because it is moving straight down the line from capitalism through the others to communism.’ ”208 The distinguished American, according to our information, was nobody else but General MacArthur.

Today, world conflicts move on several levels. The time of the old-fashioned cabinet wars is over, war has become total, partly because technology gave us staggering means of destruction, partly because, due to the withering away of religion, totalitarian ideologies capable of mobilizing the masses and fanaticizing pragmatists, have filled this void. Hot wars destroy bodies, cold wars are waged for immortal souls. Still, what strikes one today, more than ever, are the words of Rivarol,209 one of the most brilliant spirits of old France: “Politics is like the Sphinx: It devours all those who cannot solve its riddles.”