the enemy had to be Hitler, not Stalin. It was not a choice between ideologies; it was a choice between degrees of expansion. Moreover, Stalin himself recognized the explosive force of fascism in Germany and shrank within his own borders; he withdrew factories to the Urals, he dispersed his units of force as far from the German border as he could. By doing so, he became the ideal ally of all those powers whom Hitler's expanding pressure was discommoding. The relatively static democratic nations of Europe, the shrinking semi-socialist states like France and Austria, were bruised by contact with Hitler; presently they were absorbed because the Nazi geography demanded a continent for a military base.

The destruction of America was a geographical necessity, for Hitler; and something more. Geographically, the United States lies between Hitler's enemies, England and Russia; we are not accustomed to the thought, but the fact is that we are a transatlantic base for England's fleet; so long as we are undefeated, the fleet remains a threat to Germany. Look at the other side: we are a potential transpacific base for Russia; our fleet can supply the Soviets and China; Russia can retreat toward Siberian ports and join us. So we dominate the two northern oceans, and with Russia, the Arctic as well. That is the geographic reason for Hitler's attack on us.

The moral reason is greater than the strategic reason: the history of the United States must be destroyed, its future must turn black and bitter; because fasci-feudalism, the new order, cannot rest firmly on its foundations until Democracy perishes from the earth.

So long as a Democracy (with a comparatively high standard of living) survives, the propaganda of fascism must fail; the essence of that propaganda is that democratic nations cannot combine liberty and security. In order to have security, says Hitler, you must give up will and want, freedom of action and utterance; you must be disciplined and ordered—because the modern world is too complex to allow for the will of the individual. The democracies insist that the rich complexity of the world was created by democratic freedom and that production, distribution, security and progress have not yet outstripped the capacity of man, so that there is room for the private life, the undisciplined, even the un-social. The essential democratic belief in "progress" is not a foolish optimism, it is basic belief in the desirability of change; and we, democratic people, believe that the critical unregimented individual must have some leeway so that progress will be made. The terror of change in which dictators live is shown in their constant appeal to permanence; we know that the only thing permanent in life is change; when change ceases, life ceases. It does not surprise us that the logic of fascism ends in death.

So long as the democratic nations achieve change without revolution, and prosperity without regimentation, the Nazi states are in danger. In a few generations they may indoctrinate their people to love poverty and ignorance, to fear independence; for fascism, the next twenty years are critical. Unless we, the democratic people, are destroyed now, the fascist adults of 1940 to 1960 will still know that freedom and wealth co-exist in this world and are better than slavery.

So much—which is enough—was true even before the declaration of war; since then the nazi-fascists must prove that democracies cannot defend themselves, cannot sacrifice comfort, cannot invent and produce engines of war, cannot win victories. And we are equally compelled, for our own safety, to destroy the principle which tries to destroy us. The alternative to victory over America is therefore not defeat—or an inconclusive truce. The alternative is annihilation for the fascist regime and death for hundreds of thousands of nazi party men. They will be liquidated because when they are defeated they will no longer have a function to perform; their only function is the organization of victory.

The fascist powers are expanding and are situated so that with their subordinates, they can control the world. And the purpose of their military expansion is to exclude certain nations from the markets of the world. Even for the "self sufficient" United States, this means that the standard of living must go down—drastically and for ever.

The policy is not entirely new. It develops from tariff barriers and subsidies; we have suffered from it at the hands of our best friends—under the Stevenson Act regulating rubber prices, for instance; we have profited by it, as when we refused to sell helium to Germany or when our tariff laws kept Britain and France out of our markets, so that they never were able to pay their war debts. This means only that we have been living in a capitalist world and have defended ourselves against other capitalists, as well as we could.

Revolution in Reverse

The new thing under nazi-fascism is the destruction of private business, buying and selling. As trade is the basic activity of our time, nazi-fascism is revolutionary; it is also reactionary; and there is nothing in the world more dangerous than a reactionary revolution. The Communist revolution was radical and whoever had any stake in the world—a house, a car, a job—shied away from the uncertainty of the future. But the reactionary revolution of Mussolini and Hitler instantly captivated the rich and well-born; to them, fascism was not a mere protection against the Reds, it was a positive return to the days of absolute authority; it was the annihilation of a hundred and fifty years of Democracy, it blotted out the French and American Revolutions, it erased the names of Napoleon and Garibaldi from Continental European history, leaving the name of Metternich all the more splendid in its isolation. The manufacturers of motor cars and munitions were terrified of Reds in the factories; the great bankers and landowners looked beyond the momentary danger, and they embraced fascism because they hoped it would destroy the power let loose by the World War—which was first political and then economic democracy.

This was, in theory, correct; fascism meant to destroy democracy, but it had to destroy capitalism with it. The idiots who ran the financial and industrial world in the 1920's proved their incompetence by the end of 1929; but their frivolous and irresponsible minds were exposed years earlier when they began to support the power which by its own confessed character had to destroy them. It is a pleasant irony that ten minutes with Karl Marx or Lenin or with a parlor pink could have shown the great tycoons that they were committing suicide.

Only an enemy can really appreciate Karl Marx. The faithful have to concentrate on the future coming of the Communists' Millenium; but the sceptic can admire the cool analysis of the past by which Marx arrived at his criticism of the Capitalist System. In that analysis Marx simplifies history so:

No economic system lives for ever.

Each system has in it the germ of its own successor.

The feudal system came to its end when Columbus broke through its geographical walls. (Gutenburg and Leonardo and a thousand others broke through its intellectual walls at about the same time, and Luther through the social and religious barriers.)

With these clues we can see that Democratic Capitalism is the successor to Feudalism.

From this point Marx had to go into prophecy and according to his followers he did rather well in predicting the next stages: he saw, in the 1860's, the kind of capitalism we enjoyed in 1914. He did not see all its results—the enormous increase in the number of prosperous families was not in his calculations and he might have been surprised to see the least, not the most,