434 A BRIEF SURVEY OF HUMAN HISTORY

crisis the National-Socialism of Herr Hitler (son of an
Austrian customs-collector) proved the most efficient. The
Nazi party in Germany, drawing its inspiration from the
Fascist party in Italy, launched another Dictatorship in Cen-
tral Europe (1933) which with its Teutonic thoroughness has
startled the world even more violently than any other coup
in history. In the course of these five years it has wrenched
Germany out of the rut into which the victorious Allies had
cast her at Versailles; it has defiantly rescued the Germans
from the paralysis of enforced disarmament; it has created
enormous employment in industry, agriculture, and arma-
ments ; it has reoccupied the forbidden districts of the Rhine-
land, repudiated the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of
Versailles, absorbed Austria into the Reich by a most as-
tounding stratagem, and threatened other neighbouring
states with German populations, like Czecko-Slovakia, with
a similar fate. Anti-French, anti-Communist, and above all
anti-Semitic, the Nazi Dictator has promulgated the new
doctrine of 'Nordic superiority7 which threatens to engulf
Europe—and the rest of the World—in a more cataclysmic
struggle than the Kaiser had found feasible. The tentacles
of the German eagle have already bound Italy and Japan
in the ominous grip of an Anti-Comintern Pact. Berlin,
Rome, and Tokyo, seem at present to enclose within a tri-
angle the peace of the World. The swastika adopted by the
neo-Aryans of Germany has become a truculent symbol of
war instead of * peace on earth and good-will among men/
Turkey, Italy, and Germany have not been the only coun-
tries to pass under Dictatorships in the post-War world.
The economic depression on the one hand, and the fear of
external aggression on the other, and the universal menace
of Communism in particular, have tended to drive country
after country into some form of authoritarian rule, either