SURRENDER TO BRUTE FORCE
Mayer, Milton
Surrender To Brute Force By MILTON MAYER MR. BARNES has produced, in his article on this page, one of the most cynical documents it has been my recent pain to read. He has produced a naked plea...
...And the kind of regionalism emerging—if it emerges at all—in San Francisco is based on Deacon Hitler's and Deacon Stalin's and Deacon Churchill's and Deacon Roosevelt's—vide the business about bases in the western Pacific—conviction that power, not need or liberty, is to be the foundation of the new world, as it was of the old...
...and Stalin was therefore our friend...
...THE most cynical single statement in Mr...
...In the midst of the worst moral crisis in history, here was the only moral document produced, and what it said was so pitifully weak and inadequate that it broke our hearts...
...he was also Stalin's...
...We suspected we might be betrayed when the Charter was presented as the glorious statement of the crusade against fascism...
...Barnes means people like you, me, and Editor Rubin...
...The evil balkanization of Europe will never be remedied by injustice...
...Like Mr...
...WHY is Mr...
...Calling the Stalin spade a damned bludgeon was disunity or worse, and asking for anything more than a rubber stamp on Stalin's seizure of half of Poland was "perfectionism...
...Barnes means the liberals, real or alleged, who wearied of the hard fight at home and advocated a world cruise of 12 million soldiers as the cure for all our afflictions...
...The next morning he is the same sober, industrious idealist he was before, and so he remains for several months...
...Entirely apart from the fact that in books and articles between the wars he claimed that the central factors producing the war he predicted were those of economic injustice, we may at once assert our agreement that balkanization, which is at once a creature and creator of intense nationalism, is an evil thing...
...Barnes, during his politically sober periods, knows that unity is good if its purpose is good, and more horrible than anarchy if its purpose is evil...
...Poland, Finland, Rumania remain sovereign nations, more balkanized than ever...
...Stalin, like Hitler, kills nations or merely cripples them, depending entirely on military or diplomatic circumstances...
...Barnes' quarrel is not with us but with them...
...Barnes is, for months at a time, a decent family man of sober habits...
...But Mr...
...But Mr...
...But we fought for those of its clauses which were anti-fascist, and if, though we declared our suspicions, we nevertheless supported some of the clauses, it was because the signers had at least committed themselves to some progressive purposes, and we were eager, by our support of the particular clauses, to fasten the signers to their professed purposes...
...His theme is that the Versailles system of balkanization produced the current war...
...Barnes amazed, disillusioned, and betrayed by our sense of being amazed, disillusioned, and betrayed...
...On the contrary, we who read The Progressive know him for a democrat and an idealist...
...This is tantamount—as we say of the Democratic primaries in Mississippi—to saying that if the world consisted entirely of half a dozen rapacious great powers, there would be no war...
...We are not amazed or disillusioned...
...We are indignant, and there is no reason why we should not be...
...By "the starry-eyed, Globaloney brethren," Mr...
...it is perpetuated by injustice...
...So it wasn't the "Globaloney brethren" who were shocked...
...We say, contrarily, that the forcible amalgamation of any people must be bad, and we refuse to accept it as the only alternative to something else which is also bad...
...This is tantamount, too, to saying that unity is good...
...Barnes' friend the Deacon —is what Hitler did in the Saar, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig, and tried to do, in cooperation with the Deacon, in Poland...
...I think I know the answer...
...He has produced a naked plea for the unjust use—he does not deny its injustice—of force on the ground that out of this injustice unity will be produced and another great war averted...
...Barnes, in his lost week-end, has fallen victim to the same conviction...
...Balkanization is bad...
...But Deacon Barnes says he has "no concern about the indignation heaped on Deacon Stalin, who is quite capable of taking care of himself...
...But these brethren—typified by the editors of The Nation and The New Republic—far from being shocked by Red fascism, have been its apologists...
...whereas Mr...
...Barnes, as he lunges down the street under the influence of ideological alky, develops a childish simplification of the problems of mankind...
...It would be the monkeys' gain, to be sure, but it would be progressivism's loss...
...Some of its pretensions, at least—such as that which repudiated territorial gain as an aspiration of the signatory governments— were worthy of earnest and ardent support, and we gave it...
...Before we get down to the business at hand—our friend Barnes' recommendation of the unjust use of force for a beautiful purpose—let us dispose of a few of his inaccuracies on the strictly reportorial level...
...In his current bender, he is doing just that himself and is recommending the same course to the rest of us...
...It is fortunate that he does it in The Progressive, where he is among friends, who will pick him up, dust him off, and deliver him home...
...Any other peace will be that peace of which Tacitus spoke: "They make a desert and they call it peace...
...Though we thought we might be betrayed, we are now indignant that we have been...
...We may now proceed to his theme...
...Barnes, loaded to the gills with political vodka, swings wildly on the "hitherto realistic progressives and liberals," who, he says, were shocked when the plug was "pulled on the Atlantic Charter and who shouldn't have been because, after all, they greeted its original appearance with "derision...
...Well, Deacon Barnes, we have a great deal of concern about the indignation heaped on Deacon Stalin, and we are doing some of the heaping, and we are not afraid of Stalin's inability to take care of himself...
...But you and I are hale and hearty, and we deny that we greeted the Atlantic Charter with derision...
...therefore balkanization causes war...
...The last time this unfortunate appetite for intellectual hooch overcame him was more than a year ago, when he wrote a piece comparing man with the monkeys and concluding that the former should emulate the latter...
...ON the other hand...
...The Germans of Silesia and East Prussia will be causal factors in the next world war, because they will decline, in spite of Deacon Stalin's pious hopes, to be balkanized into being Poles...
...Their theme song was, like that of so many Germans whom we now denounce for failing to resist Hitler, "This is better than nothing, this is the best we can get...
...We greeted it, rather, with despair, and there is a difference between derision and despair...
...Barnes, we suspected the earnestness of the signers, but if Roosevelt and Churchill were only kidding, Mr...
...The unity of mankind will be achieved when free men and nations are willing to unite...
...The deplorable balkanization of Europe is not impeded or reversed by the Soviet rape of Poland, (or Finland, or pre-war Rumania...
...What Stalin is doing—Mr...
...Still—and here we were the compromisers—we said that it was better than nothing...
...Stalin's deed, like Hitler's, challenged one evil with another, the unworkable nationalism of every few square miles of Europe with a devastating crusade of fascist conquest...
...Editor Rubin is unable to defend himself, as he is busy unsnarling the last backlash of last season in anticipation of another bout with the midget minnows in Little Mud Lake...
...They didn't dare be...
...The peace of mankind will be achieved when free men and nations are willing to pay the price of it...
...By the "hitherto realistic progressives and liberals," Mr...
...So much—too much—for Mr...
...This pernicious doc-trine of you-can't-make - an - omelette-without - breaking -eggs was the late Hitler's favorite and has always been the plea in extenuation of all political injustice, including that of American imperialism...
...Barnes is no fascist or imperialist...
...Barnes' piece, and the one which betrays the fact that the precipitating cause of all this was vodka, rather than scotch, or bourbon, is the one that Stalin "challenged the Atlantic Charter with deed rather than pungent rhetoric...
...we are afraid of his ability to take care of, via the Kremlin basement, millions of people who are helpless to resist his embraces...
...It will be remedied by a progressive regionalism based on economic need and personal liberty, with the retention, for as many centuries as are required before the melting-pot principle operates, of cultural autonomy...
...Unless he is picked up, dusted off, and delivered home—and I hope that I have at least succeeded in dusting him off—he will wind up with his friends the monkeys...
...In the first place he describes "the starry-eyed, Globaloney brethren shocked by Stalin's designs on the Baltic States," etc...
...But once every several months he goes off on an intellectual jag, bat, or toot...
...Barnes says that "the forcible amalgamation of any people may be bad, but it is better than the Versailles system...
...That he killed the Baltic states is no testimony to his anti-balkanization...
...itsy bitsy tribal sovereignties are tinder-boxes, which may be used as pretexts for war...
...What can have happened to him...
...At every point—and most notably after Yalta—their position was that Hitler was our enemy...
...Barnes' bad reporting...
...Any other unity will be that caricature of unity which is tyranny...
Vol. 9 • June 1945 • No. 24
