Today Belongs to Hitler
by GEORGE DE SANTILLANA
1
THERE is no problem in a war except winning the war. Therefore I am going to assume that when we speak of total war we actually mean what we say, just as Hitler has shown he does. And an essential component of total warfare is political warfare. In fact, as Hitler has demonstrated, the main part of grand strategy today is political strategy.
When Hitler invaded France, we all remember how the commentators tried to figure out his campaign and to articulate it into separate battles — Battle of Flanders, of the Somme, of the Loire; whereas it became rapidly evident that it was all one tactical episode, the Battle of France; and that the last strategic phase proper had taken place during the faceless months of the Sitzkrieg. This last phase included the well-prepared confusion in French political circles, defeatism above and below, the propaganda by radio and loud speakers — in a word, the mental picture induced in Allied countries.
Thus was climaxed a complex strategic campaign that had begun three years before in the Rhineland; in which Hitler had integrated all the modern means of action, peace talk and panzers, press and radio, fears and grudges and hatreds, soulless organization and sullen indifference, into one master plan, waging war as he talked peace, waging peace on those who tried to make war, feeling his way along the cracks and
fissures of the European structure until all his wedges were in place.
Then, at the tap of the hammer, it fell apart.
On onr side, the effort for victory will require no less imagination. Total warfare carries with it, of necessity, nothing less than total victory for either side; which does not imply only a maximum military effort.
The traditional simple-minded idea of the infuriated giant cudgeling his enemy into submission is bound to cost us uncounted lives in action and more heartbreak in peace. And the problem is immediate. Take the case of a second front. If we have to land tomorrow in Spain, in Italy, or in North Africa, the political preparation will determine the price we have to pay and possibly the outcome of the operation.
This, of course, is well understood by all qualified experts. They have long been rehearsing moves of political warfare, and speculating on some way to “detach” one or the other member of the Axis. A favorite idea is the one which has been endorsed recently by one of our most able and farseeing political commentators, Mr. Walter Lippmann: —
The fact that Italy may not now be ready or able to enter into peace negotiations with us should not, I believe, deter us from proposing peace seriously, concretely, and sincerely to Italy. The fact that Mussolini will reject it should mean nothing to us since we should make it plain that of course we are not offering peace to Mussolini and never shall. The fact is, however, that Mussolini is not Italy. There remain in Italy the King and the dynasty. There remains an army which is not blackshirt. . . .
Unlike Germany, where all the ancient institutions of the state are badly ruined, the essential institutions of Italy have survived. A peace can therefore be negotiated, and eventually it will be.
Mr. Lippmann then proceeds to offer the Italian nation, thus rescued, a reasonable place in the European concert, and a leading influence in the Mediterranean. Italian patriots in the traditional line ought to find the offer extremely fair. And yet I am sure that all and any Italians with an experience of Fascism and a responsible idea of our times would refuse to give it a thought. If pro-Fascist (and it is to Fascists that it is addressed) they would give it the horselaugh as wholly futile and a further proof of the incapacity of the Allies to understand this war. If pro-Allied, they would consider it extremely dangerous.
First, the offer seems to take for granted that nothing has happened to Italy.
Second, who is delegated to lead that nation in treason (since that is what we limit ourselves to suggesting) and who is to be entrusted with its future? Why, obviously, the “institutions,” the legitimate powers which are qualified to do it in the eyes of all the right-thinking people. They are going to take care of the situation, like Weygand, who was going to do the same for us in North Africa, if untoward and wholly unforeseen circumstances — No use going on.
2
Let us face the problem analytically. No amount of political pressure can bring the Italian rulers to sell out. They are bound by chains of adamant: the presence of the Germans, their own past, their discredit, the inexorable vengeance that would come from their people (or would we promise to provide them with a bigger police guard than the one they have now?). So it must be military pressure. And no amount of that pressure would pry them loose. For a very simple reason. By the time we land we must count on local disaffection. What kind of allies shall we find? Not the Right People, the top gentlemen whose ideas and inclinations are interminably discussed in our columns. It will have to be the People tout court, the submerged and exploited, revolting troops and insurgent workmen with their leaders, the men of the underground organizations who know where to strike. In order to penetrate, we shall have first to break through the shell of Fascist “order.”
And when we break open the concentration camps, when we bring back from the living death of years and decades the men who tried to save us while we were minding our business or elaborately arranging nonintervention; when we reach those who are now in solitary confinement, or breaking stones in chain gangs, or heaving rails on the Trans-Saharian; when we free those who paid the full price for all and to whom belongs the acclaim of rightful leadership — do we expect them to file out with a sheepish grin, touching their forelock and apologizing for the trouble they gave to their legitimate masters? It would be an interesting sight.
Today, let us be clear, the listeners doubt the purity of our intentions, and this talk (that we are not even keeping to ourselves but zealously plugging on the short wave) is not likely to reassure them. It is clear that we do not dare to set certain balls rolling; even as Weygand preferred to hand over Paris to the enemy rather than risk “disturbance of order”; even as the British kept the Chinese waiting in Lashio after Rangoon had fallen. We had rather half lose the war than touch the sacred cows of the local “orders.” We exhort people to dissociate themselves from their leaders, but without losing the proper respect; we beg them to revolt, but — please — for nonspecific ends, and especially against nobody that is on top, for that would be most unfortunate. We are aware of the contradictions, we make half-hearted moves as in a dream to escape it. Yet we are caught in the paralysis of chill fear. We are still waging a mental Sitzkrieg.
Let us remember that each mistake, fumbling, or omission on that score is bound to be paid off on the spot in American lives. Our aim will not be won through such demoralizing suggestions, or through moral generalities, or through the colorless news bulletins that go over the short wave; it will be won by an organized penetration along the line of the understanding and the needs of our actual allies, by bringing the hammer to strike expertly at the links of their chain.
Terrorism and sabotage are in Europe everywhere. We think that’s fine. But what kind of solidarity are we bringing to it? Dare we presume that these men consider themselves the advance guard of the United Nations? How is it that the only purposeful group among them are the Communists? Would we ever stop to consider that only the Axis has been able to organize and direct a fifth column, in the proper sense of the term? Have we ever troubled to localize the concrete nature and the motives of action of those on our side? To give in our turn a clear mental picture of the United Nations? Have we ever troubled, we the great factfinders, to get clear in our minds what kind of people are actually listening to our broadcasts at their personal risk, what they need and what they expect to hear? Have we ever troubled to reach out to them, in our sudden sympathy, with anything more than a pat on the back and the breezy exhortation to go and shoot some more Germans? All these questions had better be answered, and concretely too, or we run the risk of Europe’s going deaf on us.
And if our aims are supposed to be the Four Freedoms, what will the Common People feel when they hear they are to be handed back to their old masters, whose only act that they can remember was that of selling them out to the present outfit? True, it may be said, such a restoration is only an idea conned by studious experts, perpending deep thoughts on Stability and Continuity. But if the people over there stop to consider that their only experience of Anglo-Saxon foreign policy lies in the repeated interventions of the Western powers to save Fascist dictatorship and consolidate its hold over unwilling nations (all in the name of Stability), they may get slightly leery of Allied intentions. Most of the facts, most of the ideas which reach them from the Allied camp, will lead them to think that their hope in America was another of those daydreams, and that there is something after all in the slogan which stares at them in bold black letters from walls and posters: “Mussolini is always right.”
The brave new world of magnesium and glass and high octane numbers, of high-powered experts and global planning, has begun, even before it starts, to be the incubator of a new conflagration. “The waste remains; the waste remains and kills.”
The problem, then, is: How can we help the experts to form a more correct idea of the strategic situation?
3
American experts are like experts everywhere, and probably better. They rank high, morally and professionally. But they have often puzzled Europeans by their studious and elaborate regard for a past somewhat frigidly conceived. Maybe it was not their fault. Except for an occasional contact with his greengrocer and garageman, an expert simply had to keep close to the “effective” sources which centralized both influence and information; he was bound to derive his facts and his views from a specific set made up of diplomats, society, finance, and officialdom — in short, from those entities closed by definition, the “circles” or “spheres,” “authoritative,” “well-informed,” or otherwise. The “spheres,” of course, had in their turn a host of informers: economists, consuls, attachés, bankers, chambers of commerce — bul the information was sifted and organized according to unshakable preconceptions and subtle rationales.
It would be caricature to call them only the Right People: they really were, purely and simply and totally, the World, as it had been going on forever, sure of its ascendant and rich in all the talent at its disposal: what to Proust and Henry James and Galsworthy had been the universe. The “spheres” it was which informed, set wise, and gave the background to the visiting journalists and university presidents, to the bankers who came back praising order and firm labor policies, even to unorthodox and irreverent inquirers; which kept a gentle but inexorable grip on American correspondents, impressed by their responsibilities and the hallowed intricacies of diplomatic history, who were slowly taught to make theirs the bleak wisdom of the late Lord Dufferin: “When all is considered, there is little room in the world for good intentions.”
Should we insist on the obvious, by adding that the prime mover of the “spheres” had been for years the Red Menace? After 1919 all pretenses were forgotten, all other problems were shelved in the agonized waiting for a Russian Restoration that should have come according to precedent but never came; the vested interests were by now ready to extend a welcome to any expedient, any Man on Horseback that promised to set things right.
And so, when a new gang got into the saddle of power, hardened, reckless men who knew the needs of the masses and the uses of modern technique and were not afraid of riding the revolutionary broncho, they smiled and nodded and recognized, slyly offered non-intervention, gleefully took to their bosom enemy agents, provided their names were princely or baronial (“with him we can be sure he understands, you know”), or sent prudent old gentlemen to settle the Sudeten fuss under the hospitable supervision of Steffi Hohenlohe — and undaunted by failure and ridicule traveled around offering the policeman’s badge to Matsuoka, to Mussolini, to Franco, to Hitler himself. Under the gathering storm they assured each other on absolutely reliable inside information that Mussolini was going to play ball, that Franco was really a good chap, that Felix of Hapsburg could take care of Central Europe, that the Japanese were bound to know on which side their bread was buttered.
And today, after France and Singapore, the “spheres” over here still speculate on what Darlan or Badoglio would like to do if they could do what they liked; patiently fetch from the unwholesome past, in the holy names of Stability and Continuity, puppet kings and hierarchies which sold out to gangsters — men who took too many names in vain, or stale political hacks of the French Tammany variety, the very counselors who gave the casting vote for the Armistice — and put them forward engagingly as maybe a Good Thing.
4
As a European, and specifically as a European from the conservative classes, I submit that it would be a strikingly novel and creative idea to decide that all that world in Europe is now gone with the wind. I mean gone objectively, on the basis of such varied but concrete facts as the education of the Fascist youth, the decay and disrepute of enslaved officialdom, the undermining of religious institutions, hatred of the collaborating rich, the extortions and indemnities, the stoppage of business and traffic, the destruction of records in gutted cities, the confiscation of savings and bank boxes, the taking over of insurance and pension funds by the conquerors, German intrusion into great concerns, the systematic drainage of hidden assets, removal of plants to Central Europe, the burning and looting of whole countrysides, the transformation of paper money into mass-printed leaflets, the education of the masses to recklessness and disregard; not to mention the more of the same that is bound to come before the end. The classes and institutions which bore the intricate network of stability and legitimacy cannot be thought of as just smothered and impoverished. Everyone now is trying in the dark to carry on a spectral existence of make-believe, but on the lifting of the curtain they will be found to be simply not there.
In conqueror and conquered alike, the Hitler Revolution has planed away the whole top layer of European life, and a deeper layer of situations and causes is open for inspection.
If we accept the above as cold facts, we are bound to form another picture than the traditional one, and to try to find both the significant facts and the elements of continuity not where we should like them to be, but where they can be found. And we had better be as smart and realistic as we can about it, for Hitler on his part had an exceedingly clear idea of the forces at play; the only thing that he missed were certain sentiments, especially (and understandably) that people could not bring themselves to find him a likable person.
It is not so much a sense of the past that we need, as a sense of the break with the past. And how big a break.
I submit therefore that it would be valuable if both experts and we laymen would divest ourselves of any cultural, habitual, or traditional background and try to organize in our minds a different historical picture of Europe from that provided by the textbooks, Pertinax, or the Times; and to discern the important facts not in the glittering dates of foreign policies, but in the internal problems of the governments. All the strategy that Hitler is applying to us was worked out on the inner front. His was the first attempt (if we except Lenin’s) at a solution of the great problems due to the Industrial Revolution and the growing pressure of the masses.
But the problems were present everywhere, and the distinction between national and international, between my business and your business, was, and had been for a long while already, wholly irrelevant and picayune.
5
Let us draw our conclusions in terms of the realities as they now exist, in terms of political strategy, which is becoming fairly urgent after the failure of the Cripps plan in India, and in the face of the coming Eastern crisis. We cannot deal with the elemental forces let loose in the world today, we cannot bring them into our camp, unless we bring forward a mental picture as clear as Hitler’s — real solutions of our own instead of his fake solutions. We are in a good position to do that. For today belongs to Hitler. He is the realistic, consistent, frightful, totally senseless present. But the soul of man is such that it cannot face the present or comprehend life except in terms of an image of the future. To project such an image is more than a necessary integration of our military effort; it is what gives that effort its meaning and definition. Napoleon used to say: “I do not risk the first battle unless the whole campaign is already finished in my mind.” Today, Anno Hitler IX, the campaign includes the peace.
The actual shape of things to come is beyond us. But I feel it is a first essential to state convincingly that a new system of association and interdependence is going to be devised and that it is going to be established for the first time in the direct interest of the majority; by which no mechanical equalitarianism is meant, but the freedom, on assured foundations, to go forward to new orders and structures, in which people will be really able to choose their allegiance.
One way to show that we really mean a new start would be to state that whatever took place before does not concern us and that we will be concerned simply with the needs of the people as they are — in other words, in a democratic reconstruction from the ground up. This attitude, meant for all alike, might be more conducive to winning the war than warning the Germans that they are going to be crucified upside down and in all sorts of strange positions (including the Weimar one) for the sake of future peace.
If, on the other hand, we insist on processing the average man over there with a bewildering double-talk made up of caginess and provocation, of vague generalities and icy punctilio, of stale commonplaces and outdated tricks, we must expect to get not allies but enemies, for all we are doing at present is breaking their hearts.
It is easier today to work out resolutely a good international order than to resurrect a set of pretended national setups with the consequent old game of balance of power. It is more natural for Americans to be fearlessly themselves than to play the embarrassed or cynical outsider; it is sounder not to stand in awe of the tangled social and cultural traps that have become only instruments to make confusion worse confounded, and stand now shorn of the myth of eternity and necessity. The true culture and traditions of the peoples will only come out stronger if the dead superstructure goes to the junk heap.
There is one faith which has war potential today and peace potential tomorrow. It is the faith expressed in the words of Lincoln and Wilson and Roosevelt and Vi allace. Let us go on from there.