SOCIAL REFORM AND VIOLENCE
reforms carried out under the stimulus of the fear of
violence from foreign neighbours and with the aim of
using violence more efficiently in future international wars
are just as likely to be self-stultifying in the long run as
reforms which cannot be enforced except by a domestic
terror. The dictators have made many large-scale changes
in the structure of the societies they govern without
having had to resort to terrorism. The population gave
consent to these changes because it had been persuaded
by means of intensive propaganda that they were necessary
to make the country safe against 'foreign aggression.'
Some of these changes have been in the nature of desirable
reforms; but in so far as they were calculated to make the
country more efficient as a war-machine, they tended to
provoke other countries to increase their military efficiency
and so to make the coming of war more probable. But
the nature of modern war is such that it is unlikely that
any desirable reform will survive the catastrophe. Thus
it will be seen that intrinsically desirable reforms, accepted
without opposition, may yet be self-stultifying if the
community is persuaded to accept them by means of
propaganda that plays upon its fear of future violence on
the part of others, or stresses the glory of future violence
when successfully used by itself.) Returning to our main
theme, which is the need for avoiding domestic violence
during the application of reforms, we see that a reform
may'be intrinsically desirable, but so irrelevant to the
existing historical circumstances as to be practically useless.
This does not mean that we should make the enonnous
mistake committed by Hegel and gleefully repeated by
every modern tyrant with crimes to justify and follies to
rationalize—the mistake that consists in affirming that the
real is the rational, that the historical is the same as the
ideal. The real is not the rational; and whatever is, is not
right. At any given moment of history, the real, as we
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