When once Germany begins to crumble, it is the conviction of all who know that brittle country that she will fall apart at once. It will be a miracle, indeed, if she finds a Hindenburg to lead her armies home and demobilize them in orderly fashion. It will be more of a miracle if a Prince Max of Baden can be found in Germany to apply for an armistice or negotiated peace.
The German Army will have been defeated, disrupted, demoralized. For a time there will be anarchy. Then all will depend upon which forces reach German territory and the German capital first, the Red Army or the armies of the West. If we have stayed out of the war, or have participated only as a naval and air power; if the Western Allies have conquered Germany on the sea and in the air, but have left the land to be conquered by the Red Army; then if the Red Army pushes into Germany before our forces can arrive, it will mean Communist revolution throughout Europe.
Why has the world not gone Communist long ago? It is because Communism, or its Soviet version, in the only country it was ever tried, had been a peacetime failure. Let us not argue the definition of Communism and whether we ought to call it State Capitalism. The world had made up its mind that the collectivist system as practiced by the Russians could not produce enough to make its population as well off as the people were even under old-fashioned, broken-down, rickety capitalism. Now, victory by the Red Army would be evidence that Russian Communism could do what Western capitalism could not do—defeat Hitler. The populations of Europe would count that power victorious whose land armies were on the spot to occupy the territory of the defeated. If the Red Army were to get there first, it would prove to millions of uncritical observers that the Soviet system had won, that it was a success to be emulated, and in the circumstances of disorder and unemployment which would prevail at the conclusion of the war, such a judgment could lead to continental upheaval.
Q. How can we prevent this and at the same time see that Nazi Germany is defeated?
A. Only by going to war against Germany now. Never since the war began have we had any stronger reasons for entering the war than now. We cannot afford to stay out and allow Hitler the possibility of winning the war by getting Russia. We cannot afford to stay out and allow the Bolshevik regime the possibility of winning the continent of Europe to Communism.
Q. But can Stalin be trusted?
A. Certainly not. His agreement with Churchill not to conclude a separate peace is worth even less than the solemn promise the French government made on March 28, 1940 to make no separate peace, just three months before it made a separate peace over the protest of its Ally, Britain.
Q. Why do you say Stalin’s promise is worth even less than that?
A. Because Bolsheviks, from whom the Nazis have copied their ethics, do not believe in keeping their word. I do not mean this frivolously or cynically. On page 323 of volume XVII of the collected works of Lenin, the father of Bolshevism wrote: “Morality is that which serves the destruction of the old exploiter’s society ... which creates a new society of communists. Communist morality is that which serves this struggle.... We do not believe in eternal morality and we expose the deceit of all legends about morality.” As the end justifies the means and the end is the State, so treaty breaking is justified when it serves the State. For a Bolshevik or a Nazi, one of the most absurd phrases in the Bible is the reference to the obviously bourgeois simpleton who sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not. For both Bolshevik and Nazi the theory is that individual honor must always be sacrificed if necessary to the State, and the State itself has no obligation of honor to any other State, or individual.
You may say that the only difference between a Bolshevik’s or Nazi’s breaking his word and a bourgeois’ doing the same is that the Bolshevik or Nazi would be proud of it and the bourgeois would not. True enough, and that makes all the difference between a moral world and an amoral world. It is the difference between the recognition of morality and the defiance of it—the difference between civilization and the jungle. This jungle attitude we hope to eliminate by defeating Hitler.