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

by H. R. Knickerbocker

A. Let us not be sentimental about the British in spite of our partnership and friendship with them. The British would like nothing on earth so much as to be able to win this war without the United States’ help. They would dearly love to win alone and enjoy the fruits of victory alone. But they know now they cannot win alone. They know they cannot beat the Germans without our full, shooting participation in the war. And so they are resigned to accepting our companionship in battle.

Q. “Resigned to accepting our companionship in battle”? Is that the way the British feel? Well, then, I for my part....

A. Yes, I know what you are going to say: that you for your part would just as soon not help the British if that’s the way they feel about it. How many Americans there are left who still think in terms of “helping the British”! Cannot we finally understand that we are helping first of all ourselves, and that it would make no difference to us if the British were not human beings at all, but a race of perspicacious, pugnacious penguins?

So long as these penguins are fighting off our common enemy who would attack us if the penguins fell, is it not just good sense to throw our whole combat aid to the penguins, no matter what the penguins may think of us? If the British were to have a mental breakdown and declare they disliked us so thoroughly that they would accept no more help from us of any kind and would rather be beaten by the Nazis than win with American help, we should be compelled from our own vital self-interest to beg to be allowed to help them and then we should have to urge and even threaten until reluctantly the British made room for us in the battle line. It is good luck that the British are people who would be worth saving even if thereby we were not going to save ourselves.

Q. Will you recapitulate how you visualize the organization of peace?

A. First, a Pax Anglo-Americana, based on our naval control of the world. This may take one of several forms, including Union Now, Clarence Streit’s thoughtful plan for amalgamating the democracies. Its immediate purpose would be to unite the coercive power of the nations of good will to restrain those of ill will until time and repentance had made it possible to bring them into our second organization. This World Federation of some kind might be a resuscitated League of Nations, or it might have another name or form. All we know positively is that unless we organize for peace, we shall have war again; and we know now that the nations of good will on earth are not strong enough without the United States to impose peace on the world. We know that if we stay out of the peace we shall surely be drawn into the succeeding war. Perhaps by the end of this present struggle we shall have learned our lesson and will never again attempt to withdraw into an illusory isolation which must always bring us into the very war it tried to avoid. Perhaps for the first time in our history we will with open eyes and clear plan enter the strength of the United States into the organization of peace with the same zeal we use to make war. If we do, who knows but that the peace established after this war could endure for longer than we even dare to guess at this melancholy moment.

Q. Is it a fact that because of the war England is becoming Socialist and will come out of the war with a government and social system just as repugnant to us as the Nazis’?

A. It is true that the government and social system of England have become Socialist but in the Christian and democratic sense of the word. British society has become a Christian collective. If they could maintain after the war as ideal a spirit of cooperation and love of their neighbors as they have today under fire, we might call it the first step toward the millennium. Far from being a government and social system we disapproved, they would be worthy of our emulation. To compare such a system of voluntary, democratic, unselfish devotion to the common good as exists today in wartime England with the Nazi regime is to compare good with evil. Beaten by the blows of war the British people have attained in a period of months a degree of social progress they would not have reached in decades otherwise.

Britain was forced to adopt a system of wartime socialism, if you want to call it that, because that form of socialism under the inspiration of life-and-death battle can produce so much more than uncontrolled capitalism. Production is the materialist index of the value of any economic system. Under British wartime socialism, capitalists and workers genuinely pool their interests and restrict their demands to the minimum, while men and women of all classes risk and give their lives in battle for the community. Until we adopt such a system and are inspired by the same dire necessity which animates the British, our system of production, man for man, and unit for unit, will not equal British production. As for the Nazis, their system of Socialism, based on Terror and megalomania, aims to enslave the world; the British system of Socialism, based on free choice and democracy, aims to liberate the world. No, there is no possibility that any form of government should emerge in England after the war which would be “as repugnant to us as the Nazis’,” unless Britain is conquered and becomes a satrapy of Hitler.

Q. Is this British wartime Socialism not really equivalent to Communism? How does it differ from capitalism?