Proclaim Liberty!

by Gilbert Seldes

Our First Effective Front

We have a job with Germans and Italians, too. Not with Germany and Italy, which must be defeated; not with their rulers who must be annihilated; but with the people, the simple, ignorant masses of people, the day laborers and the housewives; and with the intelligent section of the middle class which resisted fascism too little and too late, but never accepted it. We have to revive the spirit of moderate liberation which fell so ignominiously between Communism and fascism; and we have to restore communication with the Socialists in Dachau, the Communist cells in Italy and Germany.

I am not trying to predict the form of our propaganda. We shall probably try to scare our enemies and to cajole them; to prove them misled; to promise them security if they revolt. None of these things will be of much use if we forget to tell the people that their brothers are here with us—and that we are not enemies. It has seemed to us in the past year that we have a quarrel with more of the German people than we had in 1918; we are contemptuous of the Italians; but it is still our business to distinguish between the Storm Troopers and their unfortunate victims, between the lackeys of fascism and the easy-going Italian peasant who never knew what had hit him. There are millions of Germans and Italians in America, who were once exactly like the Germans and Italians in Europe; they have undergone the experience of liberty while their brothers have been enslaved; but we must be hard-headed enough to know that our greatest potential allies, next to the embittered captives of the Nazi regime, are the Italians and Germans who could not come to America in the past twenty years.

The golden opportunity of talking to the people of Europe before we went to war has been missed. Now it is harder for us, but it is not impossible. We have to counter the despair of Europe with the hope of America. The desperation of the occupied territories rises from the belief that the Germans are invincible and that they themselves are doomed to servility; to that we reply with the argument of war—but in the first part of our war, the argument will be hard to follow; we shall be pushed back, as the British were, because we are not yet ready for the offensive; so for a year perhaps our very entrance into the war will tend to increase the prestige of our enemies. Therefore, in this time, we must use other powers, our other front, to touch sources of despair: our counter-propaganda must rebuild the self-respect of the Europeans, of those who resisted and were conquered and even of those who failed to resist. We can send them the record of heroism of their fellow-countrymen in our armies; if we can reach them, we should smuggle a sack of flour for every act of sabotage they commit; and we should send them at once a rough sketch, if not a blueprint, of a post-war world in which they will have a part—with our plans for recovering what was stolen from them, rebuilding what was destroyed, and restoring the liberty which in their hearts they never surrendered.

And there is a special reason why we must speak promptly. We have to declare our unity to Europe in order to destroy the antagonisms which our enemies will incite at home. It will be good fascist propaganda to lead us to attack Americans of German and Italian birth or parentage; our enemies will say that the unity of America is a fraud, that we have only welcomed Italians and Germans to make them support the Anglo-Saxon upper classes—and that "good Europeans" can never become good Americans. The moment we give any pretext for this propaganda, our communication with all of Europe is lost.

Short Wave to Ourselves

We cannot afford to lose our only immediate weapon. We have to anticipate the Italo-German blow at our national unity by our own attack, led by Italians and Germans who are Americans. We have to remain united so that we can deal effectively with Europe and every time we speak to Europe, we can reinforce the foundations of unity at home. We have not achieved a perfect balance of national elements, and in the past few years we have tolerated fascist enemies, we have seen good Americans being turned into fascists and bundists while our leaders made loans to Mussolini or dined with Goering and came back to talk of peace. It is possible that a true fifth column exists and, more serious, that a deep disaffection has touched many Americans of European birth. We have to watch the dangerous ones; the others have to be re-absorbed into our common society—and we can best take them in by the honesty and the friendliness of our relation with their fellowmen abroad. We have to tell the Italians here what we are saying to the Umbrian peasant and the factory worker in Milan and the clerk in a Roman bank whose movements are watched by a German soldier; the Germans, too. And what we say has to be confident and clear and consistent. For months the quarrel about short wave has continued and Americans returning from Europe have wept at the frivolity and changeableness and lack of imagination in our communications to men who risk their lives to hear what we have to say; it was incredible to them that this vital arm of our attack on Hitler should have been left so long unused, that anyone who could pay could say something to someone in Europe, within the limits of safety, to be sure, but not within the limits of a coordinated policy. One could advise the Swedes to declare war or assure them that we understood why they did not; one could do almost as much for France.

Short wave to Europe is a mystery to the average citizen; he does not pick it up, and would be only mildly interested if he did. In his mind, that sort of propaganda should be left to the experts; as it is in other lands. But in our case, there are re-echoes at home. Not a "government in exile" speaks from America, but we have here part of many nations, emigrated and transformed, but still with understanding of all that was left behind. We have to think of the Norwegians in Minnesota when we speak to the Norwegians in the Lofotens; the Germans in Yorkville and the Poles in Pittsburgh should know what we say to Berlin and to Warsaw. Our words have to help win the war, and to begin the reconciliation of Europe without which we are not safe. That reconciliation we have turned into a positive thing, a cooperative life which has made us strong; we have to tell Europe what we have done, how Europe has lived in us. We may have to promise and to threaten, too; but mostly we will want to destroy the myth of America-Against-Europe by showing the reality of Europe-in-America; we will want to destroy the lie of an Anglo-Saxon America by letting all the voices be heard of an American America; we will want to destroy the rumor of a disunited America by uniting all the voices in one declaration of ultimate freedom—for Europe and for ourselves.

Europe will ask, if it can reach us, what freedom will mean, how we will organize it, how far we mean to go. If we want to answer honestly, we will have to take stock quickly of what we have—and can offer.