Is Tomorrow Hitler's? 200 Questions on the Battle of Mankind

by H. R. Knickerbocker

As someone expressed it, Hitler has never kept a promise but never failed to carry out, or at least try to carry out, a threat. His threat to destroy us has been documented scores of times. Hermann Rauschning quotes Hitler as declaring privately to friends that he would conquer the United States first from within, with his Fifth Column, and Walther Darre, his Minister of Agriculture, has developed the topic thus: “I have been asked about my opinion of America, especially the United States, and the danger of this pseudo-democratic Republic’s possible attempts to hinder us in our historical development. There is no fear that this demoralized country will mix in this German war. In the first place, as in France and other countries, also in the United States, we have many of our compatriots and even more friends among the citizens of the United States. Many of the latter hold the most important positions in political and economic life and will not permit public opinion to allow something so senseless and insane as war against Germany.... The United States is at present so demoralized and so corrupted that, like England and France, it need not be taken into consideration as a military adversary.... The United States will also be forced by Germany to complete and final capitulation.”

Finally, as we discussed before, Hitler as every conqueror, cannot stop trying to conquer, and after he had finished with the Old World, his momentum would force him to attack the New.

Q. Haven’t we plenty to do at home, without getting into a foreign war? Why don’t we try to make a real democracy in America before we go out to try to improve the rest of the world?

A. This argument that we should pay no attention to the fire in the house next door because we are busy cleaning the windows of our house, polishing the floor, and cleaning up the kitchen has the same amount of logic and common sense as the doctrine that we ought not to fight on our enemy’s territory but only on our own. President Hutchins of the University of Chicago has put this argument of perfectionism in scholarly form. He maintains that we are going to war to establish throughout the world the Four Freedoms—of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear—but he says we have no right to crusade for them until we have established them at home. But we are not going to war to crusade for the Four Freedoms; as we have pointed out before, we are going to war to make the world safe for the United States, and at the same time or thereafter do what we can to establish the Four Freedoms elsewhere as well as in America. If we do not go to war, we risk losing even what we have of the Four Freedoms, even the small quantities of them measured by Dr. Hutchins.

Something of what he says about the failure of the Four Freedoms in this country to reach perfection is true; not all of it. He says we have freedom of speech to say only what everybody else is saying, but Dr. Hutchins will admit we have more of this kind of freedom than any other country at this moment. He will also admit that everyone else is not saying the things Dr. Hutchins is saying and yet he may say them without let or hindrance. He says we have “freedom of worship if we don’t take our religion too seriously,” but one must ask oneself what examples of religious intolerance have given rise to such a statement? Where are the persecuted religionists and to what country would they flee to escape from the alleged deficiency of freedom of worship in America?

Dr. Hutchins says that as for freedom from want and freedom from fear, so long as one-third of the nation is ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed, as Roosevelt says it is, we have no right to try to establish these freedoms in other countries. Again, we can admit that the matter is precisely as President Roosevelt has stated it, and yet assert that the people of the United States have as a whole better food, clothing, and living conditions than those of any other country with comparable climatic conditions. He says that as for democracy, “we know that millions of men and women are disfranchised in this country because of their race, color, or condition of economic servitude.” But if by reason of the passive attitude toward the war advocated by Dr. Hutchins, this country should fall under Hitler’s power, whether directly, with der Fuehrer in Washington, or indirectly with der Fuehrer’s Gauleiter, chosen from the America First Committee as our President, all of America’s 133,000,000 men and women would be wholly disfranchised.

Dr. Hutchins says that we must abandon the Four Freedoms if we go to war, and that “We cannot suppose, because civil liberties were restricted in the last war and expanded after it, that we can rely on their revival after the next one.” Why not? If we cannot rely on experience, what can we rely on? In every war the United States has ever fought we have delegated to the executive the powers necessary to win victory and afterward we have always taken them back, but without even an argument, much less any forcible attempt to prevent such action. Dr. Hutchins says, “If we go to war we cast away our opportunity and cancel our gains. For a generation, perhaps for hundreds of years, we shall not be able to struggle back to where we were. In fact, the changes that total war will bring may mean that we shall never be able to struggle back. Education will cease. Its place will be taken by vocational and military training. The effort to establish a democratic community will stop. We shall think no more of justice, of the moral order and the supremacy of human rights. We shall have hope no longer.”

Why should these things happen to us if they have never happened in past wars? Because, says Dr. Hutchins, “this war, if we enter it, will make the last one look like a stroll in the park.” But has the war done any of these things to Britain? On the contrary it is the unanimous judgment of observers of Britain in wartime that the British are more just, humane, democratic, and obedient to a higher moral regime than ever before in their history. The British are nearer their enemy and more deeply immersed in total war than we can ever be. Why should we be expected to fare worse than the British?

Dr. Hutchins expresses concern for “suffering humanity” and declares we could best serve it by staying out of war, and extending aid to Britain and China “on the basis most likely to keep us at peace and least likely to involve us in war.” Is it really helpful to suffering humanity in Britain, China, France, Russia, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Holland, Belgium, Austria, yes and in Italy and Germany itself, to practice a policy directed solely to avoiding conflict with the author of the misery of half the world?

Aside from that, there is only one choice before America now and the choice is not between going to war or not going to war. The choice today is between going to war in time to win it, and going to war too late to win it. We can best serve “suffering humanity” by attempting with all the strength of our bodies and souls to destroy the prime, immediate mundane cause of humanity’s suffering. Finally, Dr. Hutchins declares that the argument that we should go to war now when we have Britain to help us, to avoid having to go to war later, when we should have to face the whole world alone, rests on the improvable assumptions that Britain must fall and that the totalitarian powers will wish to, and be able to, and will attack us. We could debate on these grounds and make a strong case for even this simplest, most direct form of possible events. But the argument for war now does not rest alone on this succession of possible events.