The Opposition to War
I
WHAT may turn out to be the most important and characteristic trait of the times we live in is the existence of a universal and deeply rooted opposition to war.
This sentiment is so general and so new in some of its manifestations that it will take the perspective of history to analyze it fully and to appraise correctly its influence on the state of mind and on the behavior of the millions of men and women who are involved directly or indirectly in this war.
Though, as far back as one can trace the history of mankind, there have always been men to contrast the blessings of peace with the horrors of war, war in past ages was accepted as a necessity. The warrior was surrounded with an aura of respect. He was glorified by the poets, and the conqueror often received the tribute reserved to a god. Men recognized the horrors of war, but they also praised its glorious and heroic aspects. They also believed it was useful and profitable because, up to a fairly recent past, there was no better way for a people to enrich itself than to make war on others and plunder them.
The idea that war does not pay is a modern idea. It could not have been thought of before our time because it is only in our time that this may have become true. Wars of the past, implying the acquisition of new territory and the subjugation of new people, were undoubtedly profitable to the victor. Wealth was directly connected with the amount of land under the control of a ruler, because under the economics of scarcity which prevailed everywhere, and in the absence of transportation, more land meant more food, and the annexation of more people meant more labor to cultivate the land. In other words, the ratio between the cost of a successful war and the profits it brought in were not what they are today.
Our forefathers knew as much as we do about the horrors and devastation of war, but they seldom doubted that such sacrifices were worth while. Even when they fought for other motives than conquest, such as preserving their independence, there was a clear connection in their mind between obtaining victory and improving their condition. They preferred peace, no doubt, as we do ourselves, but when they plunged into war they seldom had the moral scruples or the misgivings that characterize the modern civilized man. They did not feel that war in itself was a regression or a denial of their purposes and ideals. Quite the contrary: war in most cases appeared as a means of achieving progress, or benefiting both the conqueror and the conquered (as, for example, the Roman conquests or the conquest of America by the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and other Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). In other cases, wars enabled a people to liberate itself from an oppressor, and that objective was usually considered sufficient in itself.
The contemporary man, however, has another conception of war. The ratio between the possible profits and the certain sacrifices has changed in his mind. The latter tends to overbalance the former. The industrial developments of the last hundred years, as well as the facilities of transportation, have destroyed the idea that more land means more wealth, more people more profitable work. The average man knows that he does not have actually to own a wheat field to eat bread or a vineyard to drink wine. He knows that the necessities of life can be produced in superabundant quantities and transported anywhere in the world. He knows that the fundamental problem of today is not one of production but of distribution. War obviously cannot solve that problem. It can only make it more insoluble, as proved by the terrible conditions now existing in Europe owing to the disorganization brought about by the war.
The contemporary man may not know how to improve his spiritual, economic, and social conditions in time of peace, but he realizes that peace is the prerequisite condition for any approach to the problems that confront him. He realizes, too, that the interdependence of nations and continents as it has developed in our time tends to make war not only increasingly more disruptive but obsolete as a method of settling the difficulties both of the individual and of the nation. The damages and the destruction caused by war under modern conditions are so vast, so far-reaching, and so obvious that it has become difficult, sometimes well-nigh impossible, to persuade the modern man that it is nevertheless necessary for him to fight, even when his very existence is at stake.
Believing that even the victor will come out of a war impoverished and generally worse off than before, he tends to obliterate in his own mind the very notion that the people who make war on him are his foes. He prefers to think they are temporarily misguided by their leaders, and that, were it possible to make them see the light, they would stop making war. The modern civilized man cannot understand why other men — presumably equally civilized — want to make war when he himself is so profoundly attached to peace. And, since he is unable to explain this paradox, his inclination is to deny that it exists. Thus, when war does come, he finds himself in the curious predicament of having to fight without even the primitive incentive of hatred or the desire for victory. Each argument for war turns into an argument against war. Even the supreme reason, which is the survival of the nation and of the individual, becomes a contradiction in itself. ‘Why should I go to war to save my country,’ asks the average man, ‘when I know that war in itself is an unmitigated evil that will probably debase and perhaps destroy both my enemy and myself?’
Moreover, the whole logic of Western civilization cannot be justified if war is accepted as a method of settling human conflicts. The Western man believes that he is master of his own destiny, which means that he must reject the idea that war is unavoidable, for the simple reason that war — contrary to other calamities, such as plagues, diseases, earthquakes, floods, and so forth — is man-made. With the increased consciousness of this fundamental distinction between natural calamities and those which he brings upon himself, the modern man’s horror of war has increased, all the more so since his success in combating disease, famine, poverty, and in reducing the damages caused by the forces of nature, has been very remarkable.
II
War — man-made war — remains the one great scourge toward the elimination of which no progress has been made. After twenty centuries of gradual emancipation from primitive and irrational barbarism, the modern man is still periodically confronted with the greatest of all absurdities: the willful and organized destruction of human life and property, and all the self-inflicted suffering that war brings in its wake.
When war occurs, therefore, it must be justified by motives which, from the point of view of ’civilized’ thinking, are somewhat artificial, or at any rate regressive— such as the bare instinct of self-preservation, or the renovation of ancient myths, usually quite barbaric, like the whole set of nonsensical dogmas (the master race and the ‘blood and soil’ theories, the cult of the warrior, and so forth) that have enabled Hitler to rehabilitate war and even to sanctify it.
But neither the rationalization of selfdefense nor the rejuvenation of archaic myths offers any satisfactory answer to the average modern man, be he a German, a Frenchman, an American, or an Englishman. Whether he fights or refuses to fight, whether he shows bravery, resignation, or apathy, the fundamental and baffling questions remain ever present in his mind: ‘Why must I make war? Why must I destroy to avoid destruction? And if it is true that we as well as our opponents are our own masters, why do we make war when we obviously prefer peace?’
It may be that some men have always asked themselves such questions, even in the most savage periods of primitive history. But the important fact is that today practically all men ask them. The point of view of the few men of wisdom, which expressed itself rather exceptionally in past centuries, has now become the point of view of the man in the street. The Western man of the twentieth century has finally learned his lesson. He does not need any further demonstration that war is not only inhuman and evil, but also senseless and futile. And yet we live in a time when this lesson has to be unlearned, when we have to rehabilitate within our own selves instincts which our reason has condemned as barbaric, or create new reasons and new impulses to justify our plunging into what we want to avoid.
Sir Nevile Henderson records that Göring told him one day that the British had to be ‘brutalized’ in order to survive. There is no doubt that Göring himself has accomplished that feat with the help of his Luftwaffe, if what he meant was that the British should recover their fighting spirit, but both the advice and the consequent result throw a good deal of light on the fundamental dilemma of these times. The Nazis, having ‘brutalized’ the Germans, are now forcing their opponents to ‘brutalize’ themselves, — because there is no other choice, — but the accumulated teaching of twenty centuries of civilization cannot be forgotten in one day. In fact the whole conflict in which we are engaged revolves around this question: Is it possible for the Western civilized world to stop the barbaric assault launched upon it by Germany without itself reverting to a state of barbarism?
Or, to put the question in a more concrete form, can we demonstrate to the average man on our side of the fence: —
1. That, although everything he knows and feels about the evilness of war is true, he must nevertheless make war now?
2. That he must therefore either forget temporarily everything he has been told about the senselessness and uselessness of war, or find new reasons for having recourse to war?
3. That if he cannot do these things he must nevertheless agree to sacrifice many of the spiritual and material achievements of civilization on the mystic premise that the sacrifice in itself will ensure, somehow or other, the salvation of this civilization?
III
If the problem presented in this fashion approximates the reality of the situation, I believe one can say that it has not been solved as yet. Even if it be admitted that most of the people who oppose Germany are fighting for the defense of civilization, their behavior up to now has not demonstrated that they have overcome the formidable inhibition of the anti-war feeling. They are at war, no doubt; but no war, as far as history can record, has ever been fought with less enthusiasm, with less conviction of the necessity of waging it, and with less faith in the prospect that victory will bring about a better world. The complexity of the issues involved, and the recognition that the world is engaged in a dual conflict of rival imperialisms and revolutionary upheavals, have greatly contributed to the confusion of mind of the individuals and of the nations who are involved in this crisis. The aims are dim, and even certain oversimplifications, such as the denunciation of Hitler as a new Cæsar whose intention is to dominate the world, or the efforts to rally the free people for the defense of their liberties, have not been sufficient to overcome the inhibitions and the doubts of the leaders or the apathy of the common man.
The most interesting aspect of this universal lack of enthusiasm for war is that it is but slightly affected by the varying conditions of the war itself. Neither victory nor defeat seems to influence perceptibly what might be called the potential of combativity of the modern man. There have been great feats of heroism in this war, prodigious battles, and demonstrations of courage and of the spirit of sacrifice which prove that man, in his nature, remains unchanged. But the important fact is that the reaction of world consciousness to such deeds has been dulled as by some tremendous repressive force which tends to prevent the average man from being stimulated or inspired by these examples. His opposition to war remains the same, as if he had developed some sort of immunity to all the emotions which inspired his forefathers to take up arms through an instinctive impulse to fight and obtain victory.
Certain people, and first of all the British, have shown a courage and a fighting spirit which cannot be questioned. In fact the British, and they alone among the highly civilized nations of the West, have been able to re-create within themselves the spirit of unity and resolution which has allowed them up to now to withstand, in the face of practically hopeless odds, the forces of destruction launched against them. They alone today have what is called a good morale, which means that the individual citizen has sufficiently identified his own particular interests and his ideals with those of the community, so that he has, in advance, made the sacrifice of everything he owns, including his life. Harmony has been established between the individual Britisher and the community to which he belongs. In the midst of danger, suffering, and death, many say that they have, for the first time, found a certain peace — the kind of peace which comes from the knowledge that one’s existence is truly coordinated with other existences, that the individual is part of a whole, and that the nation has a common aim.
But if the English have a good morale one must not forget what price they have had to pay — what price they are paying daily — to obtain it. Up to the capitulation of France, the English morale was no better than that of the other nations involved in this war. The unity they have now found, their dogged resolution to resist destruction, is born of a certain intensity of despair. In this sense they are singular and great, but in this sense too they show how deeply affected they are by the universal opposition to war: it is because they have no choice but war that they are now fighting with such heroism and with such peace among themselves.
The Germans too are fighting with courage, it will be said. And this is true of their troops, or at least of that spearhead of fanatical young men Hitler has specially trained, both technically and psychologically, to carry on the blitzkrieg. Among this corps, who form an élite, the concept of man as a warrior has been developed to a supreme degree. The German aviators, the parachutists, the crews of motorized divisions, and in general all the specialized parts of the German army that have actually done the fighting and assured the long list of Nazi victories, are undoubtedly imbued with a combativity and a spirit of sacrifice that cannot be questioned. But all observers agree that this high quality of morale is not universal in the German army. It is said that France was actually conquered by 200,000 men, the élite specially trained and mentally conditioned by intensive Nazi education. But there are innumerable stories concerning the fairly low morale of the German army of occupation now quartered in conquered countries — ordinary German soldiers whose main preoccupation does not seem to be new conquests and more battles, but the desire for peace and the wish to go home.
As for the morale of the German civilian population, as good an observer as Mr. Joseph Harsch, of the Christian Science Monitor, writing in March 1941 at the height of Germany’s triumphs, had this to say about it: —
There is almost no public or private enthusiasm for the war [in Germany].
There is widespread cynicism about Dr. Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda.
There is no deep faith in the Nazi war cause.
There is no general enthusiasm for the Nazi Party, or confidence in its integrity or the loftiness of its aims.
There is intense weariness over protracted privation, rationing, and strain after living in what has amounted to a state of war for eight years. . . .
But when all this is said the plain fact remains that civilian morale is entirely adequate for Hitler’s purposes, and there is not the slightest prospect of these moods being translated into any action against the régime or against the war effort in the measurable future. It is bad morale according to democratic standards of civilian morale. It is just as bad as the morale of the armed forces is good. But under dictatorship such as that in Germany today, such deficiencies become almost meaningless.
This diagnosis of Germany’s state of mind contains many lessons. It shows that the successes of Hitler have been possible not on account of any real fighting spirit among the German population as a whole, but in spite of the absence of it. Hitler has concentrated his effort on developing a high morale and a spirit of total sacrifice in the army, and he has succeeded (so far, at least, as the actual combatant units are concerned). But all his attempts to overcome the apathetic condition of the masses of the population, their fundamental anti-war attitude, have been fruitless. The fact that the German temperament is inclined to passivity and blind acceptance of discipline has helped him to carry on the most aggressive form of war against a deep current of opposition to any form of war. It has not reversed that current.
Mr. Joseph Harsch says that the German civilian morale is bad, ‘according to democratic standards.’ It might be more correct to say that morale in Germany is as bad as it is in the democracies. And there is no better indication of the universality and the intensity of this curious opposition to war in the midst of war itself, regardless of victory or defeat.
IV
With necessary allowances for each particular situation, the same attitude towards war has existed in all the countries opposing Hitler, but, symptomatically enough, it has been much more marked in those which can be considered highly civilized (from the point of view of Western standards) than in the more primitive.
A good morale, both among the civilians and in the army, — that is, a unification of national consciousness in the presence of war and a merging of individual interests into that of national consciousness, — was evident in Poland when that country was invaded by Germany. It was present in Finland when Russia attacked her. The Greeks showed similar heroism, and the Serbians actually overthrew their government because it had made what they considered a humiliating treaty with Hitler. In all these cases the morale of the people and of their soldiers was what one might have called ‘normal.’ Their fighting spirit was brought up to a pitch and stayed there. There was practically no dissension among them, no hesitation as to what they should do. Even against the greatest possible odds, with practically no other prospect except defeat, they fought to the end.
The same can be said of the Russians, who have astounded the world not only by their unsuspected skill in meeting Hitler’s war technique but by their courage and patriotism. This has been explained, in the complacent democracies, by saying that the Russians were fighting with so much heroism not because they were defending Communism, but because they were defending their land, Mother Russia. Be that as it may, it is interesting to note that the Western highly civilized people have been actually surprised to find that the ‘godless,’ ‘barbaric,’ or, let us say, backward Russians could fight so well. But the explanation may merely be that the Russians, like the Poles, the Finns, the Greeks, and other less highly ‘civilized’ people, have retained towards war an attitude which I would call more ‘normal’ than the western Europeans and the Americans. This does not mean that they enjoy war, but merely that they are less confused than the Western people when the brutal choice between war and destruction is presented to them.
No such unity of purpose, no such acceptance of total sacrifice, no such morale existed among the people whose civilization was more complex, who had grown to depend more on the intricate mechanism of Western industrialism, and whose political life also had, during the last twenty years of the post-war period, been more directly subject to the dissolving forces of Western anti-war education.
Without minimizing the heroism and suffering of hundreds of thousands of men and women of the Western democracies, there is no doubt that the Scandinavians, the Dutch, the Belgians, and the French did not enter this war or fight it with the same disregard of individual sacrifice and of future consequences as did the less complex people of Poland, Finland, Greece, or Russia.
In all cases, and regardless of whether the war was really on or in its ‘phony’ stage, there was the same tendency to evade it by all possible subterfuges, including some that were not particularly honorable, the same persistency of doubts of the advisability of fighting, the same division of counsel when it came to weighing the advantages of pursuing the fight to the limit or saving something through compromise or surrender.
Underlying such events as the surrender of the Belgian King and his army or the French capitulation in Bordeaux, one senses the profound lack of faith of millions of civilized men of the Western world in the necessity of defending not only their independence but even their soil by waging war. The horror of war remains stronger than war itself, even in the midst of war, and when it was proved that the whole psychological approach to war — based on defense — was a fallacy, whatever morale there was disappeared. Those who had placed their faith in ‘neutrality,’ which is a form of legal defense, succumbed when that talisman proved futile. The French, having relied on the Maginot Line, had no time to re-create for themselves a new strategy and a new morale when the Maginot system failed. All these nations had hoped that the full impact of total war upon them could be either kept away or avoided altogether by a limited effort on their part. In the same manner as Léon Blum used to say that he wanted to introduce as much socialism into the capitalist system as that system could bear without destroying it, the Western people opposed to Hitler tried to preserve as much peace in a state of war as the phenomenon of war could stand.
The theories of Liddell Hart that defense is preferable to offense and that it assures victory were nonsensical, as amply proved in this war. But they were accepted and applied by the military leaders of the democracies because they corresponded so well to the psychology of the people. Defense and offense are two aspects of war which cannot possibly be separated if one understands war to be a conflict of forces the purpose of which is to destroy the opponent. The use of one form of tactic or the other is determined by the changing aspect of a war. But the democracies were psychologically committed to defense because the word seemed to imply a limited effort, a sort of state of lesser war. A country that proclaims that it is compelled to defend itself feels itself less warlike than the country that takes the initiative of attacking. To take up arms to protect oneself appears less immoral than to invade another country. But, whether true or not, it does not change the fact that as soon as war exists the choice between defense and offense becomes merely a military problem.
Hitler, in spite of the reluctance of his people to go to war (which was slightly less than that of the democratic people), in spite of the bad German morale, has never been encumbered by such fine distinctions in planning his strategy. He or his generals have clearly understood that the conduct of a war cannot be determined by peacetime inhibitions.
But the fact that the Western democracies and the neutrals were bound to the theory of defense, both psychologically and strategically, cannot be understood fully without an analysis of the causes that made them adopt this attitude. The defensive attitude was predetermined, so to speak. Given the mentality of the Western people, their ideas of war, and the education they had received during the twenty years that separated World War I and World War II, there was no possibility for them to accomplish overnight the fundamental transformation from pacifism to full war-mindedness that was necessary to meet the crisis. Still clinging to peace, they slipped into war. They behaved like a man who has fallen in the water and who struggles desperately to reach the shore, but whose frantic efforts will not prevent him from drowning if he does not know how to swim.
The Maginot Line mentality, the pitiful faith of the European neutrals in the magic of neutrality, as well as other manifestations of the purely defensive attitude of the Western people, are expressions of a state of mind that exists also in America. Such formulas as the Monroe Doctrine, hemispheric defense, national defense, and so forth, whether used by the isolationists or by their opponents, reveal the universality of the anti-war sentiment, the reluctance to face reality as it is, and the fatal tendency to approach it step by step.
But this confinement to pure defense is only one of the manifold aspects the anti-war feeling has assumed. Other manifestations are to be found in all fields of thought.
Leaving aside pure pacifism and various doctrines of non-resistance to force, we find that in recent years certain schools of thought of a semiphilosophical or mystical nature have grown in influence and greatly contributed to the demoralization of the Western people and of their leaders. Among them can be noted the Buchmanites, the partisans of the Oxford Group, or the queer and equivocal fraternity of so-called Men of Good Will. In these groups — or traveling with them — we find the strangest assortment of people: political appeasers, such as Chamberlain in England and the Socialist leader, Paul Faure, in France; humanitarians like Herbert Hoover or the King of Belgium; befuddled or suspect fanatics like Rudolph Hess, and confused poets like Anne Lindbergh.
All of them are the products of this great movement of non-acceptance of war that has developed in our world in the last twenty years. Many are sincere idealists and express some of the noblest aspirations of mankind. Others are fools, or cowards, or Quislings on the make. They are all united by one characteristic, however, which is that — willingly or not — they help to divide and demoralize. In many instances they are the apostles of sheer defeatism, which, under the conditions of this war, can only mean surrender to force and ultimate annihilation.
The anti-war sentiment finds another form of expression in what is called ‘realism.’ The realist is the man who, having weighed all the visible factors in a given situation and having found that the odds are against him, decides that fighting is useless. He will not engage in a war if he cannot have the assurance of victory. And, as this assurance can never be given to him, he will always oppose war because it is always, to him, synonymous with defeat.
Georges Bonnet, in France, was a typical ‘realist.’ He felt that France, with its low birth rate, its bad morale, and its attachment to peace, was no match for the dynamism of Nazi Germany. France, in his eyes, was a sick old woman that any violent shock would kill. He saw with a realistic eye all the poisons that made France weak and vulnerable, but his ‘realism’ was not an antidote — it was merely more poison.
There are many Georges Bonnets in America, too, ‘realists’ who, although they cannot argue that America is weak and sick, nevertheless fear that it could not survive the test of war. Democracy would perish, they say. America is not prepared to fight. Let us wait for the enemy. Let us die on our shores.
V
When the last war ended in 1918, the power of the victorious democracies was so great and so obvious that it did not seem possible it could ever be challenged again. The belief in peace in those days was apparently justified, because it was supported by the overwhelming superiority of the victors. And these victors wanted peace. In spite of their disunity, their inability to organize the peace they had won, there was no prospect that the world would be at war again. War was absurd and criminal. No one in his right mind wanted war. War had been eliminated.
And yet, in less than twenty years, this immense will to preserve peace deteriorated in such a way that war once more became a possibility — a probability, and very soon a fact. Frightened and powerless, the ‘ peace-loving ‘ people clung to their illusions. As they were shattered, one by one, they felt that their own power was dwindling. They could not organize resistance. They could not unite. They had nothing to stop Hitler with except their own hatred of war, their own unwillingness to fight, and their bad morale.
And so, one by one, they entered the war — or rather were forced into it — reluctantly, without songs and without heart. They were not prepared for it, either materially or mentally. One by one they waited for the onslaught, always hoping to the last that, by some miracle, it would not come, that they might be spared. Whether weak or strong, they considered themselves victims, and their preoccupation was always to prove their innocence rather than to help one another. They glorified in selfishness. ‘Our national interest,’ they said, ‘commands us to defend ourselves and ourselves alone. Why fight for Czechoslovakia? Why fight for Danzig? Why fight for England?’ And when, one after the other, they fell, those who had lost all would say, ‘We were wrong to fight at all. Why did we help the Czechs, and the Poles, and the English, and the Greeks? . . . They have dragged us into defeat.’
Every time a new disaster took place those who were still out of immediate danger said, ‘Let this be a lesson to us.’ Hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written describing what happened to those who thought themselves secure, and how it happened. The technique of Hitlerian aggression is, in fact, so well known by now that a precise vocabulary — brand-new — has been invented to describe it, a vocabulary which every man, everywhere in the world, understands. ‘War of nerves,’ ‘fifth columnists,’ ‘Quislings,’ ‘peace offensive,’ ‘infiltration,’‘tourists,’ ‘strategy of terror,’ and so forth, are words we read or hear several times a day. We know what they mean. We know that they are the weapons which Hitler has created and which he himself has defined as intended to produce ‘mental confusion, contradiction of feeling, indecisiveness, panic.’
But although we know how these weapons work, although we understand the mechanism of this war thoroughly by now, we are still incapable of opposing any real defense to them. Each country, whether already conquered or threatened by Hitler, remains vulnerable to his methods of internal dislocation. The example of Austria did not help to save the Czechs. The invasion of Denmark and Norway did not convince the Belgians and the Dutch that their own neutrality was no protection.
The reason for this is not to be found in the superiority of German arms alone, nor even in the perfection of German propaganda. In fact, the ‘mental confusion, contradiction of feeling, indecisiveness, and panic’ which Hitler refers to as his best weapons have not been forged by him. His success in this line is due to his ability to exploit a state of mind which already existed when he came to power, but which he alone understood and appraised correctly. The confusion was there, the disunity was there, the uneasiness was there, the blindness was there. They were the conditions under which the Western world lived, and wanted to live, ever since the end of the First World War. They were — and they are still — our inheritance. And until we succeed in repudiating this inheritance, and in replacing it by something that will protect us against confusion, division of counsel, and chronic lethargy, there is little chance that Hitler will be stopped except by the exhaustion of his own moment um.
What this ‘something’ will be, I do not know. It may eventually spring out of this very anti-war force, out of this unwillingness of men to fight other men which seems so universal and so little affected by the evolution of the war itself. This Second World War may be only a sort of relapse, and it may be that when it is ended the reconstruction of peace that started in 1918 will be taken up again and carried on more successfully.
This may be so. But in the meanwhile the world is facing one of the greatest attempts at universal disintegration ever undertaken. It is at war, and the question is whether this war will be won in spite of the reluctance of the Western peoples to overcome the long spell of anti-war sentiment which for twenty years has been their main conviction, and to which even today they still cling.