Arch Aggressor

...His vision of a successful counter-attack, however suggestive, is far from conclusive...

...If these two major conditions are not met effectively by the West, Toynbee suspects that the present English-trained rulers of India, who constitute but a small minority of the population, may not be able to overcome the final swing of India into the communist orbit of Russia and China...

...Russia managed to hold her own against the West by the adoption of Western weapons...

...As for Islam, he shows that the West placed a noose of sea power around her neck and was on the point of drawing it close to the point of strangulation...

...Toynbee indicates that the West cannot endure its present defensive position in relation to Communism, but that the counter movement can be successful only if it is more adequately spiritual...

...A decisive element in its conquest of China was that over against the secularized effort of the Kuomintang to proceed along the lines of Western technology...

...but in order for these to succeed at all, she was obliged very early to submit to an internal centrality of autocratic power which, against her inclinations, has followed her ever since...

...While he does not delineate the form which the attack may take, he suggests that it may not be unakin to what the Jesuits did with Christianity in their early approach in China and India: they stripped Christianity of all of its external Western clothing and presented it to India and China as a world religion in language understandable to these basically religious civilizations...

...He points out several psychological features that appear to be characteristic, not only of the contemporary world's encounters with the West, but of all such collisions between one civilization and another...

...In his opinion "the world's judgment on the West does seem to be justified over a period of about four and one half centuries ending in 1945...

...To the rest of the world it offers an effective example of successful revolution against the aggressive domination of the West, a one-sided but plausible program for overcoming the poverty so widespread in the world, and a basis for unity, in a world which must have unity in some, form or perish...

...Toynbee sees that the Russian use of Communism as a spiritual counter-offensive has already achieved a major victory in separating the Chinese—a fourth of the human race -—from the West...

...Communism offered to the people a form of spiritual bread—a gritty black bread, to be true, but nevertheless "still an edible substance that contains in it some grain of nutriment for the spiritual Hfe without which Man cannot live.' In his examination of the response of the world to the attack of Graeco-Roman civilization, Toynbee sees the possibility of the emergence in the West of an effective religious counter-attack...

...II While Toynbee agrees with the Western estimate of the extreme danger of the centralized autocracy of Communism and of its one-sided inadequacy to meet the needs of the world resulting from the disorganization which has grown out of the hard-hitting West, he nevertheless •appraises it as having much to offer the world: First of all it has profound appeal to the uneasy conscience of the West's own people, many of whom are so deeply disappointed with the failure of the West to live up to its Christian professions that the Communist offensive may have the effect of disorganizing Western civilization on its own grounds...

...It needs that further and more comprehensive development which he promises in Volume VIII of A Study of History, soon to be available...

...In the Far East there has been a rapid adoption of the technology of the West, just in time to save her from conquest...

...In truth, he says, the Western civilization which has so rapidly and successfully attacked the world in recent years has been primarily technological, and this technology has been associated with a relegation of the original Christianity so far into the background as to be all but wholly secular in its impact upon the rest of the world...

...Reviewed by Mordecai W. Johnson IN THIS first entire new book in over a decade, Arnold Toynbee, distinguished historian, brings to bear his great knowledge and grasp of the historic process upon the relation of The World and the West, and particularly upon the current tense relation of Russia to the ^Vest...

...In China and Japan, the vigorous attack of the West was thrown off at the last minute only by drastic internal changes in the indigenous civilization...

...He points to India as perhaps the decisive area of the struggle, because India constitutes the second Asiatic fourth of the human race and, while temporarily inclined toward the West by reason of the Westernized training of its present rulers, it still has two major factors favorable to Communism which Western leaders may not be able to overcome: the widespread poverty of the vast masses of the Indian people and the uncertainty of Indian leaders as to whether the West intends to continue its attitude of invidious discrimination on the basis of race and color...

...He shows that however surprised and shocked and grieved we may be to discover the fact, it is nevertheless true that all non-Western peoples are united in the conviction that the West has been the arch aggressor of modern times...

...In every case the attack of the West was met by a vigorous response for self-preservation, and this response succeeded in drawing the defended civilization out of its normal course...

...He suggests that our pose of being a religious society as over against a non-religious atheistic heresy is not the way that the rest of the world sees this conflict...

...He has set that conflict in the illuminating perspective of history, and he has weighed the powers and possibilities of Communism with a candor which cannot fail to be helpful and challenging...

...In India the West overran, conquered, dominated, and humiliated her for as much as 200 years...

...Concerning Russia, he shows that Western armies have invaded her overland five times within as many centuries...

...Then he seeks to discover from the earlier historical encounter between the world and the Graeco-Roman civilization at least one suggestion of a constructive counter-attack other than Communism...

...He concentrates upon the theme that for from four to five centuries the world has been hit—and hit hard by the West...

...Toynbee examines four areas of the West's aggression against the world: against Russia, against Islam, against India, and against the Far East, including China and Japan...

...While in the technological sphere it is not the equal of the West, and may not be so at any early date, Russia has adopted a spiritual heresy from the West— Communism—which is a weapon of great and possibly decisive danger...

...and, along with these has gone into the Islamic world the dangerous poison of "Western nationalism...

...In Islam, Turkey, for instance, a thorough-going adoption of Western scientific, technological, and political methods became necessary in order to survive...

...that already it has taken from the West the spiritual initiative...

...Communism, on the other hand, does carry a crude but powerful spiritual value...

...In this brief book Toynbee has thrown the light of his vast historical learning upon the current tension between Russia and the West...

...Whether he focuses attention upon Russia, Islam, India, or the Far East, Toynbee shows that the attack by the West upon the rest of the world has been vigorous and serious...

...Toynbee looks upon the Russian response as the most dangerous of all the world's responses to the West...

...and that it can possibly go on to sweeping victory, if the West does not take into account the predisposing conditions favorable to the further advance of Communism...