Should Tigers Have Wings?

EARLY last fall I was talking with a number of Harvard students, trying to show the terrific changes the war might bring, the implicit danger to this country. After I had spoken, they put their heads together. Finally one of them came up to me. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘we think you are nuts.’

Then they offered me drinks. . . . That word roused an echo in my mind. I remembered. Another round of drinks, two years before, and the timehonored plush seats of the Café des Deux Magots in Paris. Opposite was a young Nazi chieftain, very much the snappy youth-leader type, but with gentle eyes, and a mellow South-German accent which linked him with the past for me. He was gripping the table with both hands in a last effort to persuade.

‘Look here — don’t be pigheaded. Try to understand. If you have the feel of history, you must understand. They haven’t got a chance. Way back in ‘36, I told you: “Give us five years, and Europe is ours without a struggle.” You see how fast events have been moving. It’s only ‘37 and they seem to be rushing into their coffins. Listen: I am not joking. Don’t go to America. The future is here.

‘Of course,’ he continued, ‘I don’t mean that France wouldn’t stand up to us, but these are not the days of Valmy. It takes time and method and a huge industrial setup. It takes a clear idea that war is worth waging, and the fire of creative imagination. You must believe in war to make it pay. Mark my words — that Maginot Line will be their undoing. It has drugged their imagination. . . .

‘The French are attached to a lot of things — so-called civilized life, power, enjoyment, economic exploitation — so their soul is divided, their feelings are contradictory. Look at the Front Populaire and the two-Sunday week. They can unite only in detesting us. That’s not enough. When they think, it’s in terms of possessions. When they doubt, they fall back on the power of Gold, on the Russian Steamroller. As to the English, it’s easier still. They don’t think at all. I tell you, that outfit is wide open to intelligent attack.

‘I knew, I know. Don’t tell me. I know — they could crush us by their sheer weight, if they only rolled over now. But they won’t. That’s safe. As for America, she is going to stay out this time.’

He took a drink. ‘Americans,’ he said, ‘are still waiting for their unpaid debts. They are wise. All they want is business. Why should they go in? I’ll tell you about America. I’ve been there. There is a clique who think in terms of manifest destiny and so on, and who wait for the time to pick up the reins of the British Empire. Did you see Hull, the old gentleman from Tennessee? I did — quite an impressive man. I suppose it must be the Bible Belt and so on — you feel a lot of tradition there. A quiet, ruthless imperialist. That kind of man is a world danger.’

‘Now look here, Werner,’ I said, ‘first you admit America is threatened, then you gripe about Hull. I’ve had enough of that stuff. Leave it to the Party.’

He laughed.

‘Right, I’m caught. It’s just the professional kink. I’ll try to think en déshabillé. . . . But damn your niceties. Who destroyed those words anyhow — we or they? People talked of justice, but all that came was unemployment and class warfare. They talked of Europe, but Versailles only bred more nations, with all their senseless privileges. They talked of federation, but all they could bring about was the League. Now we drive our wedges into every crack. We turn all of their weaknesses to our profit. We dissolve all that is inconsistent. There’s precious little of anything else in the world, you’ll admit.’

‘ I’ve known you boys for a long while,’ I said. ‘I guess you are the Antichrist, if you don’t mind my saying it.’

‘Or call it the Black Death. It’s all right with me. Do you think we could dissolve any kind of Christianity that was still whole? We, and we only, matured the crisis of Western conscience. We bore the cross of thought, we suffered all the evils of the world in our defeat, we went through the solutions from Christianity to rationalism. Now, we come as the judgment and the vengeance.’

‘What I’m troubled about most,’ I said, ‘is the children that are going to grow up under you.’

He looked disturbed.

‘You know,’ he said slowly, ‘I’ve wondered about it myself. . . . Caligula. . . . But anyhow,’ — he warmed up again, — ‘what are you trying to save? It’s all tied up in one. It’s bound for destruction. If we don’t do it, it’ll be Russia.

‘The other boys just can’t get anywhere. They are inane. Their mind stops short all the time. They once used to say, “War doesn’t pay.” Now they trust the Force of Things or the Moral Law, or what not. When we get Central Europe, they’ll say that it’s all right — that we can’t hold it against its nationalities. See how it goes? They expect the Ideal of Liberty to deliver the goods.

‘What is the use of technology then? Do they think that man has harnessed the thunderbolt and the atom just to promote the sale of chewing gum? He who has enough imagination to organize those forces in a system of power and production to their own scale will be master of the globe for centuries to come. I think it’s only fair. England had the jump on us, for her financial empire: whichever way we tried to turn, we were held down by the strangle hold of usury. Now those idiots are thinking we want their bankbooks, so they try to settle on a fifty-fifty basis. But I tell you we have found our way to the monopoly of power, and, once the scales have tilted, woe to him who does not adjust. Peoples will forget the empty abstract words. The masses will turn back to bread and peace, the rulers go forward to actual freedom — creativeness and power. That’s the way to a great feudalism.’

‘If you were twenty million more, you might get away with it,’ I said.

‘But, we can do it! If we win the decisive battle — or if we corner them — there will be armies no more. France and Britain and Russia shall be thoroughly purged, their heavy industries scrapped, their economy reorganized. No man to carry a knife more than two inches long. Flying fields every hundred miles, held by mechanized German garrisons, and dive bombers to deal with the least spot of trouble. Two hundred thousand men could hold all Europe that way forever. There are peace and disarmament for you. Besides, we know how to think biologically. The subject nations shan’t be allowed to breed too much, or to develop unwelcome strains. Shift ‘em around. Don’t you think we can swing it?’

‘I am thinking,’ I said, ‘of a Chinese proverb: “If God had given wings to tigers, there would be no escape.”’

‘Hm — well, anyhow, you’ll admit that someone’s got to come up with faith enough to unify the opposition if we’re to be stopped!'

‘How about America?'

‘America? Well, I don’t know. Most of our boys aren’t interested. One mustn’t lay down a too definite course. It isn’t good historical thinking. The only thing is to stick to our logic of action and follow it wherever it leads. Some of the boys think of paralyzing America right away before she has time to make trouble. But I wouldn’t be for it. One thing is clear: that he who controls Europe controls the world; and we must draw the full implications. It’s an axiom that every source of power you neglect turns against you; remember that Home fell because she had omitted to subdue the powers of the North and Near East. Cmsar had seen it, when he wanted to draw the boundary at the Vistula.

‘ So you see, it’s quite obvious America must be integrated. But I say, take it easy. In a few years’ time we’ll still find the American business man about where Chamberlain is today. America is tied up in confusion. They talk the big words, but what they’re after is two cars in every garage. Their minds and souls are at odds — it’s like a supercharged airplane engine mounted on a buggy cart. Several million Nordics there, too. If we start driving wedges, it will go like ice under the pick. We have borrowed from them all that was useful, just as we borrowed from Russia the Marxist tactics and the contempt for money-power. We know how to use the assembly line, the advertising campaign, the Fuller Brush technique, but we also know what we want out of that and they don’t. Look — they are on the skids, and they know it. They vote themselves into Neutrality Acts like the booze fiend trying to lock up his gin. Call that a nation! Why, what they need is recolonizing. Actually the Middle West is ours already in structure; it needs only a soul. The Southerner has always been a Fascist to his Negroes. From Europe, once we have it, we can disorganize their system of prosperity, set racial and sectional interests against each other, and stampede them into the arms of adventurers. See how much antiSemitism there is there now. We’ll hit the farmers with our barriers, the industrials with our prices, shove their markets around, and have them by the cars. Then, also, there arc the pacifists, and the students, and the Rich, and all the Odd Groups. . . .

‘Our best asset,’ he went on, ‘is, of course, the army of the unemployed everywhere — they can’t help being our allies. But in America we have also the smart-aleck intellectuals; we need only humor them along with their talk on “confused issues.” We can comfort the old ladies into believing that only the Church can help, and business men into thinking that sound business is the key to the future. We just prod them in the right spot, and pop they go. I guarantee you, they’ll rush for our persuasion like mad sheep. Reason always comes around to us — in the end. Come on, this is the Civil War of the West that begins. We arc specialists. Look at Spain.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just look at it.’

‘We laid the foundations long ago. You can’t teach the average American to love us, but you can persuade him that Europe is a dirty mess. Hands off — that’s the first step. Besides, it’s an idea that appeals to the plebeian mind, always in search of something it can despise with profit. — By the way,’ he added irrelevantly, ‘you know, if there is a war, I go as a pilot. Sturzkampf. ‘

‘Here’s to you,’ I said.

‘Deception should be used sparingly, like salt, and only when they themselves beg you to. You see that we have been announcing our program quite openly. It’s the best way not to be believed, even if things happen. It always works with the people. That’s why I say we are Fate. You try to tell them: they’ll call you nuts. Or worse. Somehow, we keep the plebeians on the run after Marxist theories or Legion parades, we seem to convey reason to the practical, skepticism to the flat-footed, Monroe Doctrines all around. Whoever thinks in terms of limited interests will be our stooge. Whoever believes in profits will be our slave. Just naturally.

‘And when it comes to action, you know our technique: the other fellow tries to outsmart us on his own with inadequate means; he manŌuvres himself into a false position; then comes surrender with dishonor. Down go the pillars of the temple. We worked that on our industrialists, the Thyssens and Hugenbergs. Then on the Gentlemen. Watch for old Neville next. It’s a natural, like the perfect rhyme at the end of the perfect sonnet. In the end, Americans will go berserk on spy scares and witch hunts. Jump at the sound of their own voices. We only work from a distance, by prestige and fear: everyone becomes cagey; words all mixed up — no hold, no front anywhere, our surprises coming on tempo rubato. Talk of Europe. Europe is grand. Oh, boy!’ He grinned.

‘You’re getting balled up,’ I said. ‘It’s not that we are better, but that America is in a more tragic situation. I should say Americans try to keep their faith in abstract principle while they are snowed under by things — just loose things. Even the average feel by now some evil magic in their economic paradoxes. And they try desperately to remain individuals in a world of mass production, where the very meaning of personality becomes more and more vague, and one might say that’s why they talk about it all the time — to keep it alive. To be really an individual in America, you’ve got, by now, to be either a hero or a wonder. How can you blame them? They try to cling to high ideals and at the same time to think things through, but men’s minds don’t hold out against crazy problems on the modern scale. The poor mind gives way.’

‘That’s what I say. It gave way with us. Do you think I don’t realize what we have become? Do you think when I read Mein Kampf ... I do sometimes wonder whether we are not one vast hoax — but then I suppose it is the squeeze of modern times. Masses. We have to go through that barbarism to come out on the other side. . . . Americans are just up against Fate. Or maybe Change, if they can master it. Now, if they were a nation of Jeffersons and Ethan Allens, we couldn’t do much. I guess they’d have come over before now and beat the hell out of us in Spain. Didn’t they do something like that in Tripoli? That’s how it goes.

‘By now, France is the tougher problem. First, because it is a real democracy, and a damn individualistic one — and then because, as an empire, it is a federation of peoples. In a way. — No. The more I think of it, America is an easy job.’

He became thoughtful. ‘It’s their very capacity for trusting and admiring — why, they worship even their business men! Now there are so many people in a country who are really ours before knowing it. It’s as if the future had a way of hatching in men without their guessing it. Then things suddenly start going, like a sand castle in the rising tide. Wait until they realize they’ve missed the boat for good. And when they see some of them, “the loveliest and the best,” a man here and a man there, unexpectedly giving way — why, then they’ll be very bewildered. — But what’s on your mind again?’

‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘that by the time you people are through you’ll be the nearest thing to Satan I can think of.’

He mused a bit.

‘Maybe so. Maybe you’re right. But isn’t it a risk worth taking, for the sake of Germany? . . .’