EPILOGUE 363
to help may wonder if the unscrupulousness of which the
proletarian party boasts as a virtue is not likely to be turned
against them to-morrow, and if, in the absence of some
common imperative, any agreement they make will not
become one-sided.
Much of the individual and collective demoralization that
has followed the victory of fascism in certain countries is
due to the so-called communist c realism ', which has
infected the very heart of resistance with doubt and feeble-
ness. No individual deed of heroism can make up for
this blow at the very source of anti-fascism ; especially as
fascism must, in order to win, succeed in destroying the
faith and the material aids that have made working-class
and popular conquests possible. It must break the frame-
work and the ties that give the masses power to unite and
resist, shattering them until each man is isolated and up-
rooted and can no longer stand out against the organization
that is forced upon him. All fascist methods have the same
aim ; they destroy workers' organizations, suppress demo-
cracy and political life itself, use and falsify socialist prin-
ciples, by stirring up hatred and passion they evoke the
maximum of blind mass reaction, they hold eternal
principles up to scorn. Their intention is to destroy the
hope, on which all great revolutions have been nourished,
of a truth in which men may recognize their common
safety and their highest destiny.1
Socialism, therefore, cannot be a form of c red fascism \
Though the possibility of its manoeuvring in the same way
is not excluded, it cannot use the fascist creed as the fascists
use the socialist creed. It cannot go far that way and avoid
the risk of going too far. To copy fascist tactics, either
deliberately or in panic, is to play the game which suits
both the nature and interests of fascism and in which it
excels. By suppressing conscience and free thought fascism
creates just the atmosphere and the weapons it wants, and
in these conditions it is bound to outclass its enemy. By
following it oa to its own ground socialism, without opening
1 Hence the sympathy of the various forms of fascism for ' philosophies^* of
power and instinct, their borrowings from pragmatism, relativism^vitalism,
their generous consumption of * dynamism* and * myth \ Fascism only
extols the irrational so as to substitute reasons of state for the human reason.