What Is Britain Fighting?
What Is Britain Fighting? By THE NEW STATESMAN AND NATION (Editor's Note: Recently Sir Robert Vansittart, the brilliant, acid-tongued Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the British Government,...
...But we must reckon also with the fact-that, taken together, these have placed a severe strain on its limited resources...
...But it inherits an elaborate industrial mechanism that cannot be content with self-sufficiency...
...And this at a time I when Geneva was shelved by war...
...It was the period of Jameson Raid and the Boer War, and Germans often voiced their disapproval with gross discourtesy...
...They will never get it save in a society that dare plan for plenty and on an international scale...
...By THE NEW STATESMAN AND NATION (Editor's Note: Recently Sir Robert Vansittart, the brilliant, acid-tongued Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the British Government, attacked the German people as endless "butcher birds" in a radio address transmitted to America...
...Even if he could "convert" and change their barbarous hearts, the problem of order remains...
...British Must See Nazism Means New European Order THE REAL PROBLEM before us is to understand the significance of this revolt against Western civilization...
...Only eight countries—only two of them major ones—have ratified 40 or more...
...Because democracy permits the free play of the class struggle, it resorts to compulsion, suppression and "the leader-principle" in order to compel an entire nation to work and produce in accordance with its plan...
...The German masses struck too soon in the terrific Peasants' War of 1525, and they were crushed...
...History is a deep quarry from which any amateur can draw his indictment of any great nation at will...
...WHETHER THE PAN American system can or should evolve into a confederate structure which would restrict national sovereignties, is a delicate question...
...It starts by rejecting any conception of international good and by asserting national or racial egoism in the extremest form...
...Unfortunately, it is more than 4n autobiographical confession...
...Mussolini, before Hitler, and even more explicitly, threw over its values of humanity, emancipated himself from the restraint of law, identified democracy with decadence, repudiated economic welfare as an end to pursue, laughed at any international good, idealized war (Noted British Journal) and erected the lust for power and conquest as the only motive worthy of a virile nation...
...German historians* better equipped than Sir Robert Vansittart, have done it many times at our expense...
...What began, at a superficial glance, as a reversion to nationalism turns out to be a plan for securing a sort of interrational order, economic as well as political...
...Perhaps elasticity of status has certain advantages over constitutional rigidity...
...He will have it that Germans always were and still are savages, "butcherbirds" as he calls them, led by "envy, self-pity and cruelty," whose trade always was and always will be war—unless -4hey should undergo, as a race ,some magical process of "conversion...
...Members of the Union staff seldom have opportunity to travel south of Panama...
...But even here he is grossly inaccurate...
...On my recent tour of observation I was struck by a noticeable indifference toward the Union's work, an attitude which could be largely dissipated if it established branch offices in such capitals as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Lima, Bogota, and Mexico City...
...Here is a penetrating criticism by a distinguished English publication, The New Statesman and Nation,, of a fellow Englishman thai annihilates Vansittart's "evil propaganda" and argues that the real thing to remember is: Hitler, or fascism, is only the outgrowth of millions of unemployed in despair...
...Thirty years later, these headquarters that once seemed spacious, afford altogether inadequate room for the going work of the Union—much less for a program reinforced and expanded to meet the calls of a great crisis...
...We tried after 1918 to banish one kind of disorder, war, and because we conceived our problem too narrowly, our League failed to do even that...
...The soundest part of Sir Robert's case lies in the chapters that pillory the barbarous duelling code of the Junker and officer caste,, The real difference between Western Europe and Germany is that feudalism was never defeated there as it was in England and France...
...In contrast, the League of Nations sprang from the World War and its feverish aftermath...
...It may be as well to ask what in its saner moments Fasci sm does profess to do...
...It realizes that any workable economic plan must operate on an international scale...
...He quotes Tacitus, forgetting that the Germans he described (on the whole with admiration) were as much our ancestors as Hitler's...
...Versailles does not explain it, though it helped to give Nazism its peculiar note of anger and revenge...
...It means slavery and degradation...
...A dedication eame that same year in the presence 0* President Taft and the beauty and diplomacy of two continents gathered in at our own national capital...
...Most of us have the I vaguest notion about I the Pan American I movement...
...Of that civilization Germany was p member until this pariah party, aided by the folly of France and Britain, swarmed out of the brothels and the slums and trampled on Germany's heritage of moral and intellectual worth...
...Pausing for a moment in his absorbing tasks, Mr...
...MOREOVER, THERE is a heavy concentration of North Americans at headquarters—which is resented in such important countries as Brazil and Argentina...
...His opinions have been placed before American citizens with the hall-mark of the British Broadcasting Company, and in due course they will reach the enemy, whose propagandists could desire no material better suited to their purpose...
...He dwells on 12th-century iniquities as still significant...
...It was this flexibility that permitted the recent general conferences, by simple resolution, to entrust the governing board and staff of the Pan American Union with a multitude of opportune tasks...
...Like Woodrow Wilson, the Great Liberator died without realizing his dream as he saw it...
...Fortunately, his efforts to practice this barbaric code were less formidable than Hitler's, but through two decades he distorted Italian civilization in the same sense...
...For nearly ten of those years, plans have been authorized for erecting a second building...
...Germany had, after all, been over-run first by Louis XIV's '-enerals and then by Napoleon, before in her turn she over-ran France...
...It offers a planned economy and dismisses the laissez-faire of capitalist liberalism as a form of anarchy...
...Bismarck did not "forge" the Ems despatch: what he did was to publish a summary of it, which made an unconciliatory document seem appreciably more offensive than in fact it was...
...The christening as such came only 20 years later at a fourth conference at Buenos Aires in 1910...
...We are compelled by every instinct of self-preservation to fight against this evil doctrine and aims...
...rONETHELESS, SET up in Washington in 1890—right A-^l there you had the Pan American Union in embryo...
...LAST APRIL, THE Pan American Union celebrated its 50th birthday, not merely at its Washington headquarters but at a score of other capitals...
...It manages to deceive the enslaved workers because it offers them security from unemployment...
...Taking info account a 25 percent increase voted last year, its total annual budget is but a trifle over $400,000—hardly enough to build one latest-type bombing plane...
...But such recrimination is as childish as it is mischievous...
...On this score the record to date is not too impressive...
...PAN AMERICANISM IS a going concern...
...It is, on the contrary, a conscious revolt against all the values of the rationalist civilization ' of the West...
...Research programs comparable, for example, to those of the International Labour Office are crowded out...
...The cooperative support of the Union is based on quotas fixed in proportion to population...
...The question became urgent since Sir Robert Vansittart published as a pamphlet his broadcast talks addressed to Americans...
...In contrast to the League of Nations, the machinery of inter-American cooperation lacks a treaty "constitution...
...To mankind as a whole Germans have brought nothing but misery in all its worst forms...
...Lebensmaum is a German word, but can the owners of a quarter of the earth treat the passion for expansion as an exclusively German vice...
...Our forefathers rooted out the Irish language and swept such Jews as survived out of this island...
...Six Million Unemployed Brought Nazism To Power THE ANSWER TO Fascism must be wider than any policy towards Germans...
...The staff in Washington is woefully overworked and underpaid...
...Hitler won power because the world slump had driven six million unemployed German workers to despair...
...The system now rests wholly upon voluntary cooperation and works through the channels of diplomacy, conference, publicity, and persuasion...
...Is the 'enemy the German race or is it Fascism...
...But the enemy for us is Fascism, and it can be vanquished only when we offer Europe a plan of co-operative work that reconciles order with freedom...
...He has, moreover, his diagnosis of what has been wrong with Europe for a couple of generations—not the anarchy of rival national States, Fascism, but merely the congenital barbarism of the German race...
...Perhaps that is not surprising when | we consider how mod-| estly and undramatical-ly it has matured since 1890, when it was introduced as the handmaiden of commerce...
...Its fabric has many loosely fitting parts, and much could be done to coordinate and consolidate operations...
...Certainly the Teittonic knights suppressed a Slav language when they could, and ill-used the Jews...
...Nor will he allow any qualification: for him Bach and Beethoven, Kant and Goethe lived in vain...
...Mount guard over them for ever...
...But he does try to deflect into the channel of racial hatred the emotions that should inspire us in this struggle...
...Nazism, as we read its foul record, is pot the fulfilment of this German past...
...Should the Axis win control of the European and Asiatic world, Pan Americanism will require consummate wisdom, courage, and self-restraint to survive the ideological, economic, and perhaps military offensives that will beat upon it from without...
...Vansittart Cited Emotional, Unscientific History In Talk SIR ROBERT TELLS us, rather naively, that his repugnance towards everything German dates from his own experiences as a schoolboy in Prussia at "the end of the last century...
...Nor did Bismarck ever say that "all problems" must be solved by "blood and iron...
...Liaisons that are now sadly lacking might aid also in securing more prompt ratification of important treaties and conventions...
...Concrete projects, with this end in view, are to be considered at the next International Conference of American States to be held in Bogota in 1943...
...Without going back two thousand years, there are wars enough in our record...
...History, temperament, social structure and even geography may give to Fascism a somewhat different colour in each land it afflicts, but it is a European phenomenon and we must seek its explanation in widely prevalent conditions...
...A more whole-hearted hymn of hate has seldom been written in better English...
...On that mystery Sir Robert sheds no light...
...But we shall go astray unless we recognize that in its own intolerable way fascism does profess to create a stifling kind of world order...
...Tt was once fashionable to indict the French love of war and glory in much the same style...
...Bismarck's three wars are a proper subject for reproach, if anything is to be gained by a retrospective wrangle...
...The author was the permanent head of the Foreign Office, and he is still "Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the British Government...
...This dedication was of a new home to go with the new name, a marble structure made possible by a handsome gift from Andrew Carnegie, contributions from the member governments, and grounds donated by the U. S. Congress...
...But those jTinkers whom Sir Robert detested are in the saddle no longer...
...Bevin reminds us that the workers ask for security...
...If Bismarck waged three wars, did not Louis Napoleon wage four...
...True the half-century had been punctuated at times by bitter controversy between their countries, sometimes with bloodshed...
...Sir Robert Vansittart does not say what he would do with them...
...It would be advantageous, also, if there could be frequent interchange of .administrative personnel with appropriate national agencies In Latin American states...
...Their masters are the social outcasts who made the Nazi Party and overthrew not merely the democratic republic but all the traditions of science, morals and law that had their roots in the nobler past of the German nation...
...Has he ever studied Cromwell's contemporary record in Ireland...
...This led him to a highly selective study of German history over a period of two thousand years...
...IN THIS WAR against what are we fighting...
...This it proposes to achieve by conquest under the specious name of the New European Order...
...Down to the present, 72 such instruments have issued from the inter-American conferences...
...Yet to go back a century, Simon Bolivar attempted to establish a "Union, League and Confederation" shortly after Spanish America had won its struggle for independence from Old World control...
...Fascism won its successes because the rest of us, socialists no less than capitalistic liberals, had failed to solve it...
...Nazism Is Conscious Revolt Against Western Civilization THE EXTRAVAGANCE of this tirade should be its own antidote...
...He dwells on von Trotha's brutal slaughter of the Herreros: has he ever read the record of the total extermination of the Tasmanian natives ? He reminds us of Tilly's massacre at Magdeburg...
...Even reliance on improvisation may have its compensations...
...The naive explanation that Germans are congenial savages will not cover the facts, and after a glance at Italy we might invite experts of the Vansittart school to contemplate Vichy, Madrid, and the Austria of Dollfus and Schuschnigg...
...That was his prescription for Germany's unification...
...If the democracies triumph, Pan America may well exhibit what can be accomplished through international good will and intelligent action—an example to the other hemisphere...
...His Panama Congress of 1826 was premature...
...By this emotional and unscientific treatment of history Sir Robert leads us to the conclusion that the Nazis are the authentic heirs of the German tradition "Nazism is not an aberration but an outcome...
...Sir Robert Vansittart forgets all that happened first in Latin Italy...
...Our first war aim is to survive, and that we can do only by destroying, not the Germans, but the Nazi power-machine...
...From a settlement based in this mood on that diagnosis may our good genius guard us...
...Thus, for a dozen years, sufficient member governments have failed to ratify a codifying convention drawn up in Havana in 1928...
...Exterminate them ? Enslave them...
...The Pan American Hub By WALTER R. SHARP (Formerly of the University of Wisconsin, now Chairman of the Department of Government, College of City of New York, in Survey Graphic...
...In the meanwhile, with all the rest of the world, we are left to conjecture with what aims in view our Government is fighting this war...
...All too frequently this means the loss of abb and experienced members...
...A site across the street was offered by the U. S. Government, but thus far the project has been stalled _by one of its high officials for reasons far from convincing...
...But with the New World at peace with itself, the golden anniversary registered undeniable progress toward a workable system of procedures, organized agencies and inter-governmental coop-I eration among the AmI erican family of repub-I lies...
Vol. 5 • March 1941 • No. 10
