THE PLANNED SOCIETY
an oligarchical party which dominates the entire country
and within which there is no freedom even for faithful
members. (Most ruling castes are democracies so far as
their own members are concerned. Not so the Russian
Communist Party, in which the Central Executive Com-
mittee, acting through the Political Department, can over-
ride or altogether liquidate any district organization what-
soever.) No opposition is permitted in Russia. .But
where opposition is made illegal, it automatically goes
underground and becomes conspiracy. Hence the treason
trials and purges of 1936 and 1937. Large-scale manipula-
tions of the social structure are pushed through against
the wishes of the people concerned and with the utmost
ruthlessness. (Several million peasants were deliberately
starved to death in 1933 by the Soviet planners.) Ruth-
lessness begets resentment; resentment must be kept down
by force. As usual the chief result of violence is the
necessity to use more violence. Such then is Soviet
planning—Lwell-intentioned, but making use of evil means
that are producing results utterly unlike those which the
original makers of the revolution intended to produce.
In the bourgeois democratic countries the need for using
Intrinsically good means to achieve desirable ends is more
clearly realized than in Russia. But even in these countries
enormous mistakes have been made in the past and still
greater, still more dangerous mistakes are in process of
being committed to-day. Most of these mistakes are due
to the fact that, though professing belief in our ideal
postulates, the rulers and people of .these countries are, to
some extent and quite incompatibly, also militarists and
nationalists. The English and the French, it is true, are
sated militarists whose chief desire is to live a quiet life,
holding fast to what they seized in their unregenerate days
of imperial highway-robbery. Confronted by rivals who
want to do now what they were doing from the beginning
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