Alternative to Prosperity
The greatest invention of democracy is the wealth of the people. We discovered that wealth rested more firmly on prosperity than on poverty and the genius of our nation has gone into creating a well-to-do mass of citizens. Unfinished as the job is, we can start to demonstrate its principles to others. In return they may refrain from teaching us the principles of revolution.
Recovery and freedom are our concrete actual offer to the nations of Europe, counter to the offer of Hitler. Without this literal, concrete offer, we shall have to fight longer to defeat Hitler—and every added day costs us lives and money and strength inside ourselves which we need to create the new world; if we can defeat Hitler without the aim of liberty, our victory will be incomplete; we will not automatically emancipate France or Jugo-Slavia, or draw Rumania back into the orbit of free nations. Within each nation a powerful group profits by the Nazi-system; within each a vast population, battered, disheartened, diseased, wants only the meanest security, one meal a day, shelter only from the bitter days, something more than a rag for clothing—and an end to the struggle; these are not heroes, they are old people, men and women struck down and beaten and starved so that they cannot rise, but can drag down those who attempt to rise. These we may save only by giving them food and forgetfulness. On the other side there are the young—carefully indoctrinated, worked over to believe that the offer of fascism is hard, but practical; it is an offer of slavery and security; whereas they are told the offer of the democratic countries is an hypocrisy and—worse still—cannot be made good. We have to face the disagreeable fact that the Balkan peasant in 1900 heard of universal suffrage and high wages in America, and his grandchildren know more about our sharecroppers and race riots and strike breakers than we do—because the Goebbels machine has played the dark side of our record a million times. The first year of the war was bound to show the "superiority" of the German production technique over ours, since Europe will not know that we are still at the beginning of actual production. The mind of Europe knows little good of us; we have not yet begun to undermine the fascist influence by words, and our acts are not yet planned. Even after Hitler is destroyed, we will have to act to overcome impotence in political action which years of Nazi "conditioning" induces, and to compensate for the destruction of technical skill in the occupied areas. To us the end of the war is a wild moving picture of gay processions, swastikas demolished, prisons opened, and the governments-in-exile hailed at the frontiers; all of these things may happen, but the reality, after the parade, will be a grim business of re-making the flesh and the spirit of peoples. The children of Israel rejoiced and sang as they crossed the Red Sea; but they had been slaves. So Moses led them forty years in the wilderness, when he could have gone directly to the Promised Land in forty months, because he wanted a generation of slaves to die, and a generation of hardy freemen to be in full mature power.[A] The generation we will raise to power in the occupied countries will have great experience of tyranny, none of freedom; it will know all about our shortcomings and nothing of our triumphs; it will distrust our motives and methods; it will have seen the Nazis at work and know nothing of new techniques of production; we will have to teach them to be free and to work.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] I have not traveled the route; but General Sir Francis Younghusband who had, gave me the figures—and the motive.